Hi all,
Apologies for today's slightly belated guest blog for Adam - the damn Budget has somewhat got in the way of me jotting down my thoughts. I'm Paul Norman by the way, news editor of EGi, commercial property magazine Estates Gazette's web site.
It's fair to say that the day-to-day work of journalists writing for Estates Gazette and EGi has significantly changed in the past year because of the escalation of social media work.
That's not to say we haven't been committed to online news for over a decade. There's a definite pride at EGi that the news desk for both the magazine and the site have basically been one and the same thing for several years - way before the mainstream newspapers embraced this work culture.
But 2009 has seen a desire to embrace new media platforms materialise into a real push towards getting our hands dirty.
All of this has been driven of course by a general understanding in the industry among journalists and more importantly their paymasters that there is a real danger of missing the boat if titles do not sign up to new media. Equally though it is clearly being driven by reader demand.
Property is often seen as a particular glacial industry in terms of waking up to new technology but there is no question that our readers expect to receive their news via the web and expect to be able to access podcasts, vodcasts and blogs as part of that experience.
MIPIM 2009 - the annual property event in Cannes - was a real watershed in this regard. The journalists that attended found an industry more than happy to be interviewed for new media articles and that was clearly liberating. The site was completely overwhelmed with copy for various new media platforms and our Twitter links were tweeted out.
Clearly in a year's time we will take stock but just now the policy really is to experiment as much as possible.
Along with many of EGi's journalists I recently launched a
blog focusing on a niche story area that I have covered for some time, in this case the development of the Olympics site in east London.
It's been a fortunate time to do this as there have been a lot of significant stories breaking about progress on the scheme recently and particularly fortunately we have been able to point out how often EGi breaks the big stories that make their way into the national press about the sites.
That's allowed me to shed some light on how we get to the stories and the different ways in which the media chooses to treat stories.
As suspected I've found the discipline of writing a daily blog post highly useful in terms of digging around into stories and that has paid dividends. I've already had a good response via email to the blog from some of the key figures in developing out the Olympics site, but as yet there are few people using the site to write public responses. I'm hoping that changes because the main aim is for it to become the meeting point online for those interested in this subject.
