‘Iran trains female ninjas as potential assassins’. Catchy headline, you must admit, especially on a website as reputable as Telegraph.co.uk. The accompanying video shows a roomful of black-suited women doing summersaults over swords and performing impressive splits. See for yourself.

I watched the video. I read the five-paragraph story (two of which are taken up with Iran’s potential to spark a new Cold War over its development of nuclear weapons). And I wondered why on earth The Telegraph had run this bizarre story with more holes in it than a string vest.

Who says these women are being trained as assassins? No-one. The ages of women are said to be between 5 and 56. Can you see any young children in the video? I can’t. There are said to be 3,000 women being trained as “lethal warriors” in Iran. Who says? The women “say they will use their martial arts skills to defend the country if necessary.” Not in this story they don’t.

If The Telegraph was not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, they were not alone.

India Today’s ninja story pushed the Cold War angle further: “As Israel steps up pressure on Iran over fears that the latter has been building nuclear weapons, these lethal kunoichis could be called upon to represent their country if relations turn ugly leading to a war.”

Spot the striking similarity with the Mail Online’s story a full two weeks before: “As Israel steps up pressure on Iran over fears the country is building nuclear weapons, these lethal ninjas could be called upon to represent their country if relations descend into military conflict.”

There are dozens of versions of the ninja story floating around. Several point to a story at The Atlantic on February 3, headlined: ‘Why Thousands of Iranian Women Are Training to Be Ninjas’.

So why are women training to be ninjas? According to The Atlantic, not – as you might by now expect – to prepare for war with Israel, but to assert themselves within a regime notorious for suppressing women’s rights.

Says The Atlantic: “The Iranian regime’s 33-year quest to make Iranian women weak and helpless, to force them into child-like subservience, has failed … and one of the places where their failure becomes clear is in the surprisingly vibrant arena of women’s sports.”

It goes on to highlight the creation of an Iranian women’s rugby league, the Olympic record of the country’s female athletes (in martial arts) and the triumph of a dentist and graphic designer from Iran, who became the first two Muslim women to reach the summit of Everest. The post reports there are 3,500 women in Iran officially registered as training to become ninjas. Happily, it attributes the source … Iran’s Press TV.

That’s Press TV, the 24-hour English language news network owned by the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. So it’s propaganda? Hardly.

Press TV’s report on the rising popularity of ninjutsu is laden with Crouching Tiger cliches and shot with tongue firmly in cheek. The sequences are similar to those used by The Telegraph, but the angle bears no relation. It was uploaded to Press TV’s YouTube channel a few days before The Atlantic story.

In the Press TV package, one trainee ninja explains: “The most important lesson is respect and humility.” Hardly the confession of an assassin. Here’s the video …

The Telegraph story hangs on a single quote by trainer Akbar Faraji who says (in a subtitle): “We have to do everything to protect our homeland,” which seems curiously out of context and doesn’t appear in the Press TV story.

It’s easy to dismiss the ninja women story as just too ludicrous to be taken seriously. But surely that doesn’t excuse such sloppy reporting by The Telegraph, especially at a time when relations with Iran are anything but ludicrous.

But after one has been travelling all day by foot, car, plane, train, bus and tube (then forgotten one’s son’s London house number and he’s not answering his phone), sometimes one is not at one’s solution-focused best. So there I am at St Pancras, too late to get home to the Midlands and looking for a modest bug-free couchette to rest my bones for a few hours.

Aha … I recall there’s a Premier Inn round the corner from King’s Cross (you know, the chain that advertises: ‘Rooms from just £29 a night at over 600 great UK locations.’) How much? £105 for bed only. Crikey. I cringe … and pay.

So it’s a good moment to mention Hotels.com, who I use quite regularly at home and overseas and rate highly. Through them I stayed on the way out at the Ibis Heathrow for £48 B+B. Good value, friendly, with a decent bar and restaurant, and only a couple of minutes walk from the free bus zone around Heathrow. (Pay through the nose for a Hoppa airport bus, if you prefer).

Hotels.com has a free app, of course. Which turns out to be a nice little number and simple enough to operate even if you’ve left your brain in Kurdistan. A single touch brings up hotel deals around your current location or anywhere else … like St Pancras, for instance. Another couple of clicks, and you’ve booked.

If Hotels.com isn’t your cup of tea, then try these free apps for iPhone and iPad. Just don’t leave home without one …

TripAdvisor

What it does: ‘Plan and have your perfect trip with TripAdvisor. With over 60 million reviews and opinions by real travelers, you’ll find the best places to eat, sleep, and play, wherever you travel.’

Hotels near me

What it does: ‘Hotels near me’ for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch lists 100000+ hotels in 89 countries for highly competitive rates based on your current location or keyword search.

Booking.com

What it does: ‘The Booking.com app offers a quick, easy and secure way to find and book hotels on your iPhone/iPad. More than 180,000 hotels in great locations all over the world. Over 1 million downloads.’

HotelPal

What it does: ‘Download HotelPal for FREE to browse and book from over 100,000 hotels worldwide. It’s the best way to find and book the perfect hotel on the go’

TagesWoche ... daily online, weekly in print. Picture: TagesWoche

There are several good reasons to pay close attention to TagesWoche, a new daily online news site and weekly newspaper launched in Basel last autumn.

It was launched by a group of journalists after the city’s liberal Basler Zeitung ran into financial problems and was sold to investors said to be, well, less liberal. Many of TagesWoche’s 30 or so launch journalists had worked on the Basler Zeitung, and their mission was to create an open-source newsroom, with transparency at its heart.

They achieved the former with the help of one of the media’s most exciting non-profit organisations, Sourcefabric, whose open-source content management systems are providing golden opportunities for a new wave of independent print and broadcast operations around the world.

The latter offered scope for fresh thinking.

Like other newsrooms, TagesWoche face the challenge of managing evolving stories online, with multiple versions and sources. It’s worth shining a spotlight on their solution.

All stories on TageWoche have a Front Page and a Back Page. Clicking the page icon literally flips the story to display links to sources, related stories, tags, an option to follow the topic for future updates and timestamped version history (these are not  viewable, but you can see the potential).

There’s also author details and a neat ‘Reward TagesWoche’ micropayment option. Clicking the handshake icon launches a pop-up that reads: ‘All editorial content on TagesWoche is freely available. If you like it, then consider making a small donation – you decide how much to pay. Thank you for helping us make TagesWoche better.’

The Back Page. Great idea.

TagesWoche ... The Front Page

TagesWoche ... The Back Page

In the words of editor Dominic Mohan at the Leveson Inquiry, Page 3 has become an “innocuous British institution.” Really? To me it has never been anything else than pornography. Mild, maybe, but still porn. Perhaps I’m missing something, but isn’t that the only reason it has ever had any appeal whatsoever?

But there’s something almost as questionable as Mohan claiming that Page 3 “celebrates natural beauty”, and that’s the campaign to ban it.

Campaigning against it is one thing. Banning it is another.

As an editor, I can imagine occasions when I might want to publish a picture of a topless woman in a newspaper. But the story would have to justify it, and its positive impact among responsible citizens of the community outweigh the fact that it would attract criticism from others.

More to the point, the same Obscene Publications Act that banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover may now be on its last legs, but that’s no excuse for singling out The Sun, or newspapers, as a scapegoat. If the law is wrong, fix it. But apply it fairly.

Mohan is spot on to say he’s more concerned, as a parent, with what can be freely found online. But so what? There might be bomb-making tutorials online, but that doesn’t justify daily newspaper tips for pickpockets. And he trots out the old editors’ escape clause that “the ultimate sanction lies with the reader.” Not quite. As long Page 3 stays the right side of the law and there isn’t a wholesale boycott by readers, the ultimate sanction lies with … him.

Make no mistake, The Sun has done some great journalism, especially under the likes of Kelvin MacKenzie. But isn’t Page 3 now just an outdated symbol of a seedy, prurient, selfish approach to flogging papers? It’s time to let it go.

What’s sad is that, after 42 years, The Sun still can’t find a better idea.

The mission:

The ideal theme has custom page layouts and post types; admin options such as colours and fonts; maybe shortcodes; inclusion of secondary content (author info, related posts, ads) within posts; custom widgets and sidebars; good display options for galleries, video, featured posts, RSS, author profiles, comments, related posts, archives, social sharing, advertisements and forms; strong navigation; localisation support. In addition, the design team is passionate about keeping themes updated and providing good support.

A tall order and, yes, these features can be handled by plugins and CSS tweaking. But just how joined-up can the  thinking can get?

Here are a few themes that have caught my eye so far – from so-so to tip top. Please feel free to chip in with more suggestions.

WP Zoom

WP Zoom has several strong magazine themes. Zenko looks promising, as does Yamidoo (although I couldn’t see how Tribune, on first glance a  contender, lived up to it’s promise as a “revolutionary theme.”)

WP Zoom does include a good range of options with its admin panel, but the benefits add up to solid rather than spectacular, given our search criteria. Price: $69 for a standard theme licence. Not the cheapest of the bunch, but their service is highly regarded.

Zenko theme, by WP Zoom

Solostream

Solostream is another agency with a good reputation for customer service and they have a couple of elegant magazine themes: MediaMag and WPChatter. Unfotunately, there isn’t enough information to judge the extent of their theme options, but from what I see, think power blog rather than breaking news. Special offer price is attractive though: $59 for a single theme or $79 for all 23 (plus there’s currently a $20 New Year discount).

WPChatter by Solostream

Gabfire Themes

I’m grateful to Beth Perkins Peterson for pointing me to Gabfire Themes. On their home page, they say: ‘Our themes are built for serious publishers who need powerful themes that are easy to manage.’ They are not kidding.

City Desk is one of the team’s 19 themes on offer. I won’t try to list all its benefits because A. It would take too long and B. You can register for a free Gabfire account, sign into WordPress in the usual way and road test all the themes before you buy, including uploading content and exploring all admin options. Now that’s a great idea.

Apart from strong advertising, multimedia, widget, post and page options, there are a couple of touches I particularly like:

• The option for different-sized sliders
• A column of home page ‘quick read’ tasters, that preview the page in a Lightbox effect.
• Five different header layouts
• A panel with author bio, social links and Twitter stream on posts.
• The addition of recent posts to ‘smart’ navigation dropdowns

Neat touch: City Desk's dropdown menus also display most recent posts from that category

What’s more, the Gabfire Theme Options panel within WordPress is one of the best I’ve seen.

Given the thought that has clearly gone into this theme (launched this month), I do find the layout a tad cramped (look at those narrow margins) and typography slightly unbalanced. It would have been nice to see font size and style options in the admin panel. (Correction: The control panel features font style, size and colour options. Thanks to Mehmet for putting me straight).

At $59 (or $179 for four themes) plus the promise of regular updates and great service, City Desk is well worth the money. Gabfire’s corporate and blog themes look good, too – check out Journey. Very smart.

City Desk by Gabfire Themes features five header layouts and slider size options

Deluxe Themes

NewsWorld, boasts Deluxe Themes, is “the kind theme that allows you to run an advanced news portal in minutes.” Quite a promise.

Well, the demo site layout looks, frankly, a bit of a jumble at first sight. But some outstanding features leap out, like …

• Mini-icons on home-page links to denote video or photo galleries (linking to multimedia gallery pages)
• Classy display of single posts, including other stories by the same author, good display of related posts and neat sharing and rating buttons.
• Excellent display of recent posts on the home page, including a ‘+’ icon that expands headlines into an mini-excerpt

Click the expand icon on home page headlines to show mini-excerpts

But the stand-out feature of NewsWorld for me is its brilliant handling of archive pages. Click a category link and you are taken to a page with choice of standard (with thumbnail), headline or text views, plus a dropdown with 13 result filters, such as most commented, most viewed and highest rated.

Category archive filters are a stand-out feature of NewsWorld

Additionally, NewsWorld comes with an Ajax-powered archive template, that allows for easy search of all content via a series of checkboxes. So it’s easy, for example, to search for all videos posted in the last 60 days tagged ‘Angela Merkel’.

On the downside, the home-page slider looks weak. But perhaps there are options.

NewsWorld’s feature list includes an ad management module with scheduling and rotation of ads, and custom widgets including weather. It’s difficult to judge how much customising can be done under the bonnet without looking, though to be fair Deluxe do say “beautiful screencasts” are on the way. Meanwhile, this screencast of the Deluxe Framework admin panel doesn’t look exactly bursting with options.

NewsWorld costs $49 – with two extra themes of your choice thrown in free! (Max is a good-looking magazine theme, Red Carpet goes for a Mail Online feel and – for a different approach – try Comfy‘s drag-and-drop, widgetised home page. Deluxe has five themes in total). The price is a snip, and hopefully there is no compromise on service.

An announcement caught my eye on the Deluxe blog that says Deluxe is now under new management. Somehow it manages to tell the story without mentioning who now owns the business. Why so coy, Deluxe?

• Thanks Drew Harding for the Deluxe Themes tip.

PressJunkie

PressJunkie offer their three Global collection themes for $99 (unbranded) – that’s the Global News theme, Global Gamer, and Global Sport. The three-column layout of Global News looks well disciplined, but that’s about as much as I can say. There’s no obvious showcase for galleries or multimedia, or evidence of custom post types or layouts. There’s mention of a control panel and fully-widgetised homepage, but we’re not invited to peek through the keyhole. Shame.

Disciplined layout ... but what lies behind it?

Argo Project

At a very slight tangent … if you are considering building a news site or niche blog, then take time to make the acquaintance of the Argo Project, a collaboration between NPR and 12 member stations, which saw 12 WordPress-based blogs developed and launched.

As part of the project, the team has made freely available the Argo WordPress theme framework and three child themes, as well as WordPress plugins designed to enhance the Argo (or non-Argo) themes. Browse through the 12 Argo sites to see what can be achieved. And read how the team approached the online blogging project and the valuable lessons they learned during Project Argo.

• Thanks to Yael Miller for the Argo Project  tip.

One of the Argo Project's 12 niche blogs ... The Empire focuses on New York politics

In my view, City Desk and NewsWorld are in the lead. Unless you have a better idea …

Here’s a couple of useful resources:

• 90 Best WordPress Newspaper Themes (Thanks Matej Latin for the tip)
• The Ultimate List of WordPress Theme Marketplaces

There are hundreds of Google Analytics tips and tutorials online. But if you are looking for a comprehensive, step-by-step guide, that takes account of new developments and even prepares you for an Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ), then a great place to start is … Google.

The Google Analytics Learning Centre has a structured list of over 20 lessons,  covering everything from basic Analytics interpretation and goal setting, to e-commerce tracking and advanced segmentation. Each lessons lasts around five minutes, most with audio soundtrack and accompanying notes.

At the Google Testing Centre, by the way, you can take the 90-minute, 70-question test to become a certificated Analytics practitioner. Cost: $50. Well worth the effort, but it will really help if you have an active Analytics account, connected with Google Adwords, to practice on.

]]> http://pointnewpar.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/where-to-go-for-a-free-course-in-google-analytics/feed/ 0 Dan Mason Google Analytics http://pointnewpar.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/speakpipe-adds-voicemail-to-your-site/ http://pointnewpar.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/speakpipe-adds-voicemail-to-your-site/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:10:20 +0000 Dan http://pointnewpar.wordpress.com/?p=1507 ]]> News organisations are (or should be) always looking for more ways to connect with their communities. So the invitation to leave a voice message via your  website feels like an opportunity waiting to happen. Think radio show requests, audio comments or instant vox pops.

A few web voicemail services have come and gone. Drop.io, if I remember correctly, had a go before it’s Facebook takeover and demise. And Google Voice boasts a Voicemail Widget … presumably if you live in the US (Poirot would have a job working out what Google Voice functions work where).

But a new service called SpeakPipe has stepped into what looks like a tidy niche. And simplicity is its second name. Installing it is a piece of cake, with code snippets ready for WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Joomla. I used the generic code inserted into my WordPress footer and voila: A neat tab at the edge of my page, that opens a pop-up over greyed-out page.

Record, review and leave a message, add name and email, and send. I receive an email and can view and download the message in my account dashboard.

The service is free during its public beta phase and the obvious question is: How much will it cost? It might be nice to see other embed options (like within a post), and the chance to customise the pop-up wording (premium feature?) Meanwhile, it’s worth jumping in and giving it a whirl.

First, a word of caution. Crafting a Tweet or Facebook update that makes the most of your content, in language to suit to the conversation, and that engages your audience is going to be more effective than throwing a one-size-fits-all message at friends and followers. However, for a busy newsroom without available resources, automation can be a lot better than nothing.

The first thing you’ll need is your site’s RSS feed address. It will probably look something like … http://mydomain/feed.

How do I find my site’s RSS feed?

1. If you see an RSS icon like the one on the left somewhere on your site, you’re home and dry. Simply right click on the icon and copy the link location. (In Firefox, you’ll also see the RSS address pop up in the bottom right of your screen).

If you can’t see an RSS icon, your site might still have a feed (if it’s not clearly visible and you want to share your content … why hide it?). Here’s how to find it:

Firefox. Firefox has a built-in RSS button, but it’s not activated by default. Go to View > Toolbars > Customize. Scroll down the window until you see the grey RSS icon. Drag it up and drop it anywhere on your toolbar. Now when you visit a page with an RSS feed that Firefox can detect, the RSS button will turn black. Click on the button and you’ll be taken to the feed page, with the feed URL appearing in the address bar.

Safari. When Safari detects an RSS feed on a site you visit, it will automatically display a blue RSS button in the address bar. Click on it and you’ll see the feed address to the left.

Chrome doesn’t automatically display RSS feeds. But if you use Google Reader, install the RSS Subscription Extension by Google (Chrome > Preferences > Extensions and use the search). The extension auto-detects RSS feeds on the page you are reading and displays an RSS icon in the Omnibox. Click on the RSS icon and you’ll see the address to the left (you want the last part with your domain name, not the Google bit). At this point you can also, of course, add the feed to Google Reader.

So you have your RSS feed. Now for the tools to automatically push new content to Twitter and Facebook (or even LinkedIn, although people who connect their Twitter feeds to LinkedIn drive me nuts. LinkedIn is NOT Twitter).

Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed creates your feed in three easy steps, and I suggest you set up separate feeds for Facebook and Twitter.

First, give your feed a name, then paste in your RSS address and test it. While on step one, click on the Advanced Settings. You’ll want to select Title Only for Twitter. Tell Twitterfeed how often to check for new posts (from 30 minutes to every day). When creating a  Facebook feed, choose Title & Description and check the ‘Include Automatic Thumbnail’ box. Now decide how many updates you want to go out each time (probably one) and, finally, which URL shortener to use (if you don’t fancy the default bit.ly).

Step two is where you link Twitterfeed to your Twitter (and Facebook) accounts. Step three is … you’re done!

Ifttt

‘If This Then That’ is a wonderfully intuitive tool for automating all sorts of online tasks. First you choose your ‘trigger’ channel (an RSS feed) then your ‘action’ channel … in this case, Twitter or Facebook. Iffft checks for updates every 15 minutes, but you don’t get quite as many options as Twitterfeed.

By the way, you can also explore ‘recipes’ created by other users, with tasks ranging from sending an email when a new title is added to the Kindle Top 100, to automatically thanking people who mention you on Twitter.

Hootsuite

If you use Hootsuite, start here. It’s a great option if you want to keep social media management under one umbrella.

Go to Settings > RSS/Atom in your Hootsuite dashboard and click Add new Feed. Add your feed title,  choose how often you want the feed to be checked for updates, and how many tweets to send at a time. Check the box if you want to include text from your post (if there’s room). Tick for Facebook; don’t tick it for Twitter. Again, I suggest you set up a separate feeds for Facebook and Twitter.

Another really neat trick with Hootsuite is that you can turn the feed on and off at the click of a button. Good if you want to manually take over sharing to Twitter and Facebook during, for example, a breaking story.

Click the button in Hootsuite to turn a feed on and off

What if my site doesn’t have an RSS feed?

There’s still hope. Here is a list of free online tools for creating an RSS feed from a domain or page address. (The post is couple of years old now, but Feedity and WebRSS, to name but two, are still going strong). You can also combine several RSS feeds into one – excellent for creating aggregated content feeds. Here’s a list of tools for mixing multiple RSS feeds.

Since Facebook’s new Timeline is now standard for everyone, you’ll want to make the most of that big cover picture.

The easiest way, of course, is select a favourite image and crop it to a suggested 850px wide by 315px (in fact, as Facebook says, it can be any image over 720px, and Facebook will do the rest). Not sure of the easiest way to crop your image? Now that Picnik is heading for closure, use iPiccy – a free, online image editor that is just as easy to use (and faster to load).

If you are looking for a cover with a little more zing, but are not a dab hand at Photoshop, here’s a link to some of the best free online tools for creating cover photos:

Seven free tools for creating free Facebook Timeline covers.

19 best Facebook Timeline cover creators

Online tools to create a Facebook Timeline Cover

Easy enough for an average Sun reader, maybe? Or would it, perish the thought, suit a middle-ground Express reader? Or did your detailed discourse demand the maturity of a discerning Guardian or Telegraph reader? No need to guess. Take the SMOG test.

The SMOG Readability Formula was invented by Harry McLaughlin in 1969 to estimate the years of education a person needs to understand a piece of writing. SMOG is an acronym for Simple Measure of Gobbledygook.

How does it work? After counting the words with more than three syllables in a chunk of text (ideally around 30 sentences), you apply a formula featuring polysyllable counts and square roots, to produce an index number.

Luckily, you can also copy your text, paste it in a box on the The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) website, and collect your SMOG grade.

Compare your scores with these average grades for articles from The Sun, Express, Telegraph and Guardian:

The Sun 9 – 10
Express 11 – 12
Telegraph and Guardian 14 – 15

What sort of person, I wonder, would be so obsessed with language and readability that he’d come up with a formula and give it such a snappy, headline-friendly title?

Just had to be, didn’t it? Turns out Harry McLaughlin was a sub on the Daily Mirror – a stickler for style, I have every confidence – who left the paper to pursue a doctorate in psycholinguistics at the University of London. As you do.

He wrote a thesis on What Makes Prose Understandable and, after a spell teaching communications at City University, moved to Toronto. He ended up at the University of Syracuse, where the SMOG formula was born.

• Average SMOG rating for my recent posts? A fraction above Daily Express. Phew.