


	Ifra XMA Cross Media Awards Projects





	Company: Telegraph Media Group Limited
	Project name: My Telegraph

	General information about the publication

	The Telegraph Media Group (TMG) publishes The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, Telegraph.co.uk and The Weekly Telegraph. TMG is based in state-of-the-art offices in Central London. The Telegraph’s current owners, Sir Frederick and Sir David Barclay, purchased the Telegraph Group in 2004. Since then, the owners have invested substantially not just in new offices but also in printing processes. This investment has resulted in an improvement in the quality of the newspapers, has allowed for an increased use of colour and has enabled the exciting and dynamic development of content and services on Telegraph.co.uk. As the UK’s best-selling quality daily newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, sells on average 900,000 copies per day – outselling its nearest rival, The Times, by just under 300,000. The first Daily Telegraph was published in 1855 and by 1947 the newspaper was selling over one million copies per day. The Sunday Telegraph launched in 1961, and The Daily Telegraph was the first British newspaper to go online – with The Electronic Telegraph - in 1994. In 2005 The Daily Telegraph was the first UK newspaper to offer a downloadable news Podcast. Its other “On the Go” products – such as TelegraphPM, email and text news alerts - allow Telegraph readers and users to access its quality news and journalism in whichever format they choose. In 2006 the newly re-branded Telegraph Media Group embarked upon a momentous shift in the way news is gathered and reported. Where previously stories were broken in the newspaper and subsequently published online, the newsroom has now adopted a multimedia publishing approach, using several platforms and allowing the latest stories to be reported as they happen. The Daily and Sunday newspapers and Telegraph.co.uk are now produced from an editorial floor which is one of the biggest open office spaces in Europe, covering 68,000 square feet and accommodating the new “hub and spoke” system.

	Project description

	My Telegraph [SEE LINK 1] offers personalisation, blogging and community tools to Telegraph readers. Registered users can create their own blog, comment on blogs by other readers and save articles to their own page to read later. Readers can form networks, adding other members to their "blogs I read" list with one click. My Telegraph also contains an RSS feed reader, My News, which collates news from various sources around the world and delivers them directly to the reader's page. Community development is encouraged through a comprehensive Most Popular page that draws attention to active members and blog posts. Engagement is encouraged through the Agreement Index on each post. Votes are aggregated to provide an overall agreement index for each blogger.

	The basic idea of our project

	The idea of the project is to cultivate deeper links between the Telegraph and its readers by offering personalisation and community tools. We wanted to offer an easy way for Telegraph readers to join the frequently complex and forbidding world of blogging. We sought to bring more print readers online and to allow online readers to become more engaged with the brand. The site will be used to strengthen the ties between print and online mediums. This process has already begun, as you will see from the Results section. The service launched with integrated sponsorship from Cisco, who felt the proposition tied in very well with their 'Human Network' campaign.

	Used Media Channels


	Newspaper		Event(s)

	Online

The Implementation

The project was set up by Communities Editor Shane Richmond in conjunction with an external agency, Interesource. The initial phase of the project, which delivered all of the functionality except the My News RSS reader, was completed in 17 working days using an "agile development" methodology. The My News RSS reader followed five weeks after the initial launch.
Before launch the Telegraph held a blogging 'open evening' at its London offices. Similar events - linked to in-paper promotion and My Telegraph blogs are planned for the autumn. Some 70 readers took up the open invitation to attend the event and from this group we took around 15 people to act as 'beta testers' for My Telegraph. The speedy development process was made possible by the live feedback we received from this group, who were largely inexperienced in blogging and online community services.
The team also blogged about the development phase. The project was announced for the first time publicly on Shane Richmond's blog [SEE LINK 2] and he posted work-in-progress designs as the site was being built. Meanwhile, technical director James Higgs [SEE LINK 3] blogged about the process behind the scenes.
At the end of the development phase, we commenced a comprehensive series of in-paper promotions introducing readers to the key aspects of My Telegraph. This involved puffs on the front of the newspaper and, on several occasions, the use of the whole of page 2 to provide a step-by-step guide to My Telegraph [SEE PDFs 1-6]. This in-paper support for a web product is unprecedented for the Daily Telegraph.

Image(s)

EUROPE.pdf (270 KB)

ISLAM.pdf (1258 KB)

OBIT 1.pdf (1402 KB)

OBIT 2.pdf (1808 KB)

OBIT 3.pdf (2162 KB)

PDF 1.pdf (611 KB)

PDF 2.pdf (841 KB)

PDF 3.pdf (1366 KB)

PDF 4.pdf (682 KB)

PDF 5.pdf (787 KB)

PDF 6.pdf (1228 KB)

STOD.pdf (4603 KB)

Links

http://my.telegraph.co.uk
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichm ...
http://staff.interesource.com/james/Default.htm/My ...
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/phil_stod/
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/damian_collins/
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/shermeen/june_2007/pleas ...
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/default.htm/Obits
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph_campaigns/june ...
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/malbonster/may_2007/what ...
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/default.htm/Announcement ...

Project results

The service has been a tremendous success. The site has generated stories. A father whose two daughters were killed in a car accident in July 2006 has been blogging about how his religion helped him through his grief [SEE LINK 4 and PDF STOD]. He said that a television interview he had done about the accident had left out what he felt was the most important part. My Telegraph gave him the space to express himself fully and his blog was used as the basis for an article in the newspaper.
A future parliamentary candidate has been engaging with readers [SEE LINK 5] about his stance on major issues.
Following the attempted bombings in London on June 29, a My Telegraph blogger, Shermeen, wrote of her disgust that fellow Muslims were killing in the name of her religion [SEE LINK 6 and PDF
ISLAM]. Excerpts from her blog and its comments appeared in the Daily Telegraph and, at the time of writing, Shermeen has been commissioned to write a full opinion article for the newspaper at a later date.
The newspaper has used the site for 'crowdsourcing' projects. When Telegraph journalists wrote their own premature obituaries, these were published in print alongside a call for My Telegraph members to do the same [SEE LINK 7 and PDFs OBIT 1-3]. The best reader obituaries contributed on My Telegraph were then published in the newspaper. The site has also been used to generate support for a petition calling for a referendum on the European Union [SEE LINK 8 and PDF EUROPE].
My Telegraph has succeeded in bringing newspaper readers online. Many of the most active contributors to the site are in the 60s, 70s and even 80s, representing a demographic that was thought by many to be outside the scope of blogging and social websites [SEE LINK 9]. The overwhelmingly positive response is best seen on Announcements [SEE LINK 10] where readers are able to converse with the technical team.