Marc Cooper
Journalism, Photos, Tech, Writing.
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Tweets
- Two hours walking around London listening to Cloud Atlas audio book. Amazed I’m still here.
- @paul_pwilson nothing personal mate
- Yahoo wants to buy Tumblr. Will Facebook swoop in at the last minute? http://t.co/jinxgTpuP7 via @gigaom Please NO, NO, NO
- Hope no-one was sat on top deck of this double-decker bus, missing roof after crashing into bridge http://t.co/et7uKb7tH7May 16, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Idiots on wheels http://t.co/5x90ighRFY
- Google to launch music streaming service to take on Spotify? http://t.co/s0jmJhO0FB
- RT @scotthornsby10: BREAKING NEWS: Stuart Hazell jailed for life for the murder of Tia Sharp http://t.co/1WEOdiX92M
- RT @eoghanmcdermo: Justin Bieber got 100,000 retweets for tweeting "Live life full". That's just 3 random words. I'm going to try now. Ni…
- Man City players care sweet fa that they have lost the fa cup
- @Snapperlen I remember years ago it was your dream to meet him and take pix. Nice one. Got a gallery link?
- “@Snapperlen Just one more picture from my shoot with the great photojournalist #DonMcCullin #photography http://t.co/nPoIqw8fmv” great pic
- A Google Glass video which is useful, real and not corporate. Shows true potential http://t.co/RaoN1GbB2x
- “@lukelewis: 37 things you'll only find funny if you're British http://t.co/0opnXcXjVK” chortle
- @garethwm I’m using Feedly
- RT @AutoTrader_UK: We can confirm that we are focusing solely on our digital offering & closing our print titles in June. Read more at …May 07, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @CornishGuardian: UPDATE: two believed to have been killed and four seriously injured in Padstow speedboat incident http://t.co/ICFhd2Lt…
- May the fifth be with you. Oh, no wait, that’s not right
- Lots of Greeks out tonight http://t.co/pn43fSBfzH
- Dear Twitter, how can I sync Outlook calendar with Gmail calendar (not apps account) so Google Now works better for me on iPhone? thanks
- Fascinating day. Marathon week. And now wine in steamy Friday London http://t.co/AXLAOetLcU
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Posts
- Pebble watch
My Pebble watch finally arrived in the post, all the way from Singapore.
It was approx. six months ago that I backed the Pebble Kickstarter project. Out of the choice of colours, I went for black, which means I am apparently among the first wave of recipients.
(Stamped proudly on the back of the watch is ‘Kickstarter edition’ - will be a collectors’ item one day?)
Getting the Pebble watch up and running is easy. You attach the charger (not a universal charger, it’s a specially designed one - so I must try very hard not to lose it) click on go.getpebble.com on both the watch and your mobile phone (iPhones or selected Android phones only), download the Pebble app to the phone and, using bluetooth, connect the two devices together.
Boom. Within two minutes I was able to select from about eight watch faces; control music on my phone (you can play, pause and skip music using the Pebble watch) and choose whether to answer phone calls, without the need to take my iPhone out of my pocket.
The Pebble watch syncs to the time/date on your phone. You can also set an alarm.
Er, that’s it.
That’s it?
Yes, for now.
The Pebble promo video makes great plays about how it will sync with a variety of apps so that users can do such things as read tweets, access ‘health’ apps which measure your running or cycling, and (oddly) find your golf ball if a) You play golf, and b) Your ball is missing.
But none of these exist yet. A quick search of the forums will confirm that I am not the only customer who assumed that they were already available and out there for me to download and test.
Oh well. It’s a nice watch to wear - it’s comfortable, a good size, and (I think) quite stylish.
I will give it a try for a few days and see if the battery does indeed last as long as it’s supposed to.
Aside from the obvious need to get the cool apps out asap, the Pebble watch is going to be limited whatever happens. It’s only going to be an extension of what you can you on your phone. But then again, that’s the case with infamous Google Glass.
I think it’s safe to say that one day we’ll be wearing watches/glasses with their own operating systems, but that time is not now.
The Pebble watch is one of the first consumer devices which may be filed in the ‘wearable technology’ category, beating Glass by a matter of weeks and ahead of Apple’s much-rumoured iWatch.
It’s limited, the equivalent of the first iPhone launched in 2005 which came without 3G, or even apps or an App Store. But it was still a game changer.
The first move has been made.
Link: A few pics of the Pebble watch on Flickr
Update 10 May 2013: A matter of days after posting this, Pebble announced that the popular health app Runkeeper now works with the watch. It works for both iOS and Android. So I will give it another go, and maybe do another update.
Went to News Rewired the other day. Keynote speaker was Vadim Lavrusik, journalism programme manager at Facebook.
Dancers
Spent last weekend taking photos of dancers. It’s a tough life. Here’s a couple of favourites. They’re mostly not all this scary-looking. Hundreds at the official Majma dance festival photo website.
TS Eliot plaque two minutes from London office. I like his line “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”
Love this new HDR site from Trey Ratcliff. 2013 is the year of HDR photography for me.
- Join app.net for a few quid
How much would you give for Twitter or Facebook to be ad-free?
You know, whereby the company whose social media you use don’t sell your details to the highest bidders?
It’s been said before that if a service is free to use, then it’s the user who is being sold.
Which is why it’s a good idea to pledge a few quid to this project called app.net
As well as no ads, app.net won’t own your content. You will! (I know, I know. Crazy, yet apparently true).
Here is a SoundCloud of a podcast I took part in with Sarah Marshall of Journalism.co.uk
I talked about stuff like Bambuser, Newsflare and things.
Good fun.
- Creating a new Facebook account
The other day I did a strange thing. I deleted my Facebook account. Or rather, I deactivated it – Facebook won’t actually permit me to delete it yet. It has to remain unused for a month, then they’ll consider it. And if I glance at it even once, make any eyes at it in any way….. then BAM! it’s active again.
Deactivating a Facebook account is not easy. Oh sure, navigating to the ‘deactivate account’ option is easy enough to find. Home>Account Settings>Security.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Anyway, so I clicked on it.
Facebook seemed hurt. Are you sure? they asked, perplexed.
Yes.
Are you quite sure? they persisted.
Yes.
But, but…. just look at all your friends who will miss you.
And they proceeded to display lots of my Facebook friends who, they could confidently claim, were really really going to miss me. It made me feel bad. I felt I was letting them down.
But deactivate I did. After entering my password, twice, and being really very sure that, yes, I did indeed want out.
And it felt good, for a while anyway, to be free. Not to log in, not to update my status, or block somebody’s Farmville activity, or be tagged in a photo. It was almost like not having email, or being on a nice holiday abroad.
Eventually, of course, I succumbed. The problem is that pretty much every damn person I know is on Facebook and uses it to stay in contact. So either I’m in, or I’m out of touch with lots of people I like and/or care about.
And the other thing Facebook is brilliant at is sending people to other websites. As a broadcasting tool, it’s too useful to ignore.
So I started again, from scratch, by creating a new account. And doing so gave me the chance to observe how Facebook works in a way I just could not appreciate the first time I signed up, some five or so years ago, when we were young and naive and willing to give up everything.
Here’s what happened. I created my account, described myself as a man interested in women, in his 30s. Boom – up pops dating ads displaying available women in their 30s.
I change my status to married. I become Facebook friends with people I know who have recently had children. Those dating ads go away. Instead, I start seeing ads for family cars and children’s TV.
Then I befriend old school mates who are living abroad – Thailand, America, Europe. I see ads for airports, holidays.
And so on.
I know, I know. This is not news. Websites gather all the info they can about you to sell you their stuff. And you could argue that targeted ads are way more useful than random ones which mean nothing to you.
But with Facebook, what I see depends on what my friends do, not what I do. If a whole load of them all happen to ‘like’ Adele, then Facebook assumes that I must like Adele too, and shows me an ad for her album.
Facebook doesn’t give a damn what I like, or don’t. It gets all the information it needs on me from my friends. That’s why it is the relationships it gives to users, the ability for us to connect, which is the valuable information they hold which makes them piles of cash.
Facebook is free to use, right? Here’s a Golden Rule – if a product is not sold to you, then you are the one being sold.
- Are journalists committing social media suicide?
A few days ago I went along to the excellent News:Rewired annual conference in London. It was a gathering of journalists, photographers, CEOs, entrepenurs, bloggers, other content creators looking at the latest tools of the trade.
I decided straight away not to liveblog the event – there was already teams of others doing that – or to even tweet frantically (leave it to the youngsters, eh?), so giving myself the chance to listen a little closer to what was being said.
Now, a few days on, I can crack my knuckles and settle down to a bit o’ bloggage.
Much has already been written, and rightly so because a lot of ground was covered. Many good write-ups here.
A lot of the day was split into different sessions, so nobody could attend all and soak everything up. For me one of the most interesting aspects was the amount of time given to social media:
The keynote address was by Liz Heron, the New York Times’ social media editor. There was also a session in social media optimization; another session in ‘searching social media for news’; and a final debate on ‘setting social media standards’.
This is not surprising, given the rush to embrace Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and soon Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr and Instagram. Liz Heron talked of social media skills being a natural part of the journalist’s repertoire.
But during a session on exploring paid-content models, an interesting point came out, about social media.
Francois Nel, an academic, gave an interesting talk comparing the digital strategies of The Guardian and the Daily Mail [disclaimer, the company I work for, Northcliffe, is owned by DMGT, which also owns the Daily Mail and the Mail Online, although there is no crossover].
Mr Nel compared the newspapers’ two print products, their two websites’ growth, their iPad apps, and their social media strategies.
He argued that at the same time as Mail Online has become the world’s largest news website with a 60 per cent year-on-year growth, it has managed to steady the decline in print circulation of the Daily Mail. It has an iPad app which promises users their ‘favourite website’ in an app. It does have a Facebook page with just over 17,000 ‘likes’, and a Twitter account with 55,000 followers. DMGT is doing very nicely, financially speaking, Mr Nel told News:Rewired.
Then he turned to The Guardian, saying the print edition had fallen by 14 per cent, and the website had seen smaller growth than the Mail Online. It too has an iPad app, which promises ‘today’s paper, beautifully delivered’ (note, not the website, but the paper).
Where The Guardian does get bigger numbers is in social media - 300,000-plus Twitter followers (and that’s just one of many Twitter accounts it uses) and with more than 285,000 Facebook fans.
Mr Nel made two very interesting conclusions. First, he said The Guardian was wrong to use digital channels (web and iPad app) as a substitute for print - that is, giving people the same content in both formats. The Mail Online, he argues, got it right by separating print from digital, and offering a wholly different product. That’s very interesting to any journalist who will have heard the “newsroom convergence” mantra a few hundred times or so over the past five years.
Secondly, he argued that society needed to think about ‘reciprocation’ - which I think by which he meant that Guardian readers (and one would guess that there were many at News:Rewired) should be thinking more about what they were consuming for free, and choosing to pay for it. (I may have not interpreted the finer point he was making there).
But for me, there was a third question, surrounding the use of social media. The figures clearly show that The Guardian has far more reach on social media than the Mail Online. Indeed they have even made a Facebook app so users don’t even have to go to the Guardian website. (More on how that works here LINK] More social reach, but struggling as a business. So, what’s the point of getting the most Facebook likes and Twitter followers?
Of course social media serves a purpose. But I do wonder if the rush to embrace it may not one day be a Second Big Mistake made by the news media.
We did it once – the rush to put all our content online for free. Now it’s too late to turn back the clock. With Web 2.0 we’re not just making content free, but we’re putting it on other platforms.
Where’s the pot of gold going to come from?
- Best Tom Waits song, ever.
(No streaming audio available)0 plays - Leaving Amsterdam via train
(No streaming audio available)39 plays - Here is a SoundCloud of a podcast I took part in with Sarah Marshall of Journalism.co.uk I talked about stuff like Bambuser, Newsflare and things. Good fun.
(No streaming audio available)130 plays
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Info
- Head of digital publishing at Local World MediaOnline Media | Bristol, United Kingdom, GBSummary
Professional trained journalist, digital publisher, manager, audience-builder, content creator.
Experience- Jan 2013 - PresentHead of digital publishing / Local World Media
Head of Digital Publishing for city, county and hyperlocal news and sport websites and mobile platforms. Building audience growth, UGC, engagement, developing new content areas, growing online communities, creating new desktop and mobile tools, analysing digital performance, supporting commercial initiatives, building SEO, running social media campaigns. Managing journalists, moderators, data aggregators, developers.
- Jan 2011 - Jan 2013Head of Publishing, Northcliffe Digital / Northcliffe Media
Head of Publishing for local news and sports sites. Managing a team of dedicated digital journalists across the UK - staff and freelance team. Building audience, user generated content strategy, analytics, SEO, social media. Managing journalists, moderators, data specialists. Building content partnerships.
- Jan 2010 - Jan 2011Local People South West publisher manager / Associated Northcliffe Digital
Successfully launched and piloted series hyperlocal sites LocalPeople.co.uk then managed 50 sites in South West of UK building growth and engagement. Trained freelance contributors in web writing, SEO, social media, law and moderation.
- Jan 2008 - Jan 2010Web Editor / Bristol News & Media
Web editor in charge of http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk the online version of the Bristol Evening Post.
Led a small team of journalists writing for web, creating video, using breaking news and social media to grow site into largest in group. Worked alongside print staff, built audience and frequency. - Oct 2003 - Jan 2008Reporter / news editor / Bristol News & Media Ltd
As assistant news editor helped lead a team of reporters on daily city newspaper, sourcing and reporting news, driving ideas, commissioning features.
- Jun 2001 - Oct 2003Reporter / Western Gazette
Reporter on Western Gazette, weekly newspaper with dozen editions. Responsible for own weekly edition, graduated from in-house training scheme to become Senior.
Education-
1998 - 2001University of the Arts LondonBA Journalism in Journalism
Additional Information-
Interests:Adobe Ominiture analytics, Wordpress, Squarespace, Brightcove, shorthand 100wpm, proficient in content management /web publishing systems, basic html, css and understanding of web apps, social media, app and portal development, UX developing. Photography, technology, podcasts, running, walking and cycling, music and film, food, coffee, social media, literature, travel, mobile, Apple, Android, gadgets.
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Midsomer Norton, church
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