Sky blogs go mainstream

One of the upshots of Sky News revamping its website at the end of last month is that its journalists have also had their own blog pages refreshed. The point is they are no longer referred to as blogs. Take City Editor Mark Kleinman’s blog for example. It is now just a page branded with his name and assimilating all his written and Twitter output. The presumption is that what was blog output has now been assimilated into the mainstream of Sky News’ output. Nine out of twelve of the articles on Mark’s page are marked up as ‘Exclusive’ so the scoop focused element of his work has not changed, just the way it is presented.

Sky explains their raison d’être as follows: “The site, powered by a new bespoke content management system that will power all of Sky News’ digital platforms, allows for more flexible story-telling, to give users a more immersive experience, providing background information that helps put breaking news into context.” Jeff Randall Live also gets a page for highlights but it doesn’t seem there is a replay facility yet for previous episodes. But overall it is a very slick redesign, with Sky’s live streaming still especially good.

Posted July 17, 2012 12:11 pm by Michael under Uncategorized.

Josh Lyman

I also noticed that the change of CMS had the effect of stopping the RSS feed. I do a fair bit of monitoring via a RSS reader – it’s normally a quick, painless set up and it’s a very efficient way of scanning what’s being said, particularly if your reader has a good search functionality. While the likes of the FT have limited RSS feeds (a couple lines – so basically pointless) and I hate it, but have to live with it, others like the BBC’s Peston blog did cut their feed at one point but seem to have reinstated the full feed. I’m sure in the short term the Sky change will help drive up pageviews – and no doubt ad sales-types at Sky will be pleased – but isn’t the move going to make Kleinman less relevant? The FT behind a paywall can – sort of – get away with restricted feeds, but can a free news site whose all raison d’etre is to grow its influence (particularly in the biz/finance area) really achieve its aim by cutting itself from the conversation?
Or maybe I am too old fashioned in that I like to read full pieces to understand the whole picture and Sky is betting that the twitterisation of news, that is to say a world where headlines and nothing else matter, will keep on devaluing well researched and sourced news stories. I suppose that would explain the long list of three weeks-old “I have learned” so-called exclusives: drive traffic.