A weekly newspaper website which offers readers the chance to buy photos of murder victims and crashed cars via automated links has been criticised by a digital publishing expert.
David Higgerson, digital publishing director for Trinity Mirror’s regional titles, wrote on his personal blog about the consequences of overusing automation citing examples from the Leamington Observer website.
The site contains an automatic ‘Buy photo’ link under every picture – including those used in stories about sex offences, car crashes and a man who died after being stabbed on Mother’s Day, pictured below.
While acknowledging that the Bullivant Media-owned Observer was only seeking to drive picture sales revenue, David said it showed automation was not always a good thing.
He wrote: “Digitally, it’s easy to automate things. These images perhaps prove that automation isn’t always a good thing, and it’s essential that journalists have the ability to manage every aspect of their stories online to ensure that things don’t look odd, and more importantly, offence isn’t inadvertently caused.
“Just because we can pull in tweets automatically based on a search term doesn’t mean we should – where’s the value in that to the user? And in a world where programmatic advertising is so often contextual to a story, we need to make sure we have the ability to remove things which inadvertently cause offence.
“Those stories about funeral director adverts appearing alongside print coverage of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997? It’s exactly the same now. Same problem, different platform – and with the lure of automation thrown in for good measure.
“In a world where anyone can be a publisher, the presentation of content to a certain standard has never been so important. The idea of automation appeals to anyone who is pressed for time, but the very real danger is that it alienates readers.
“We might know why Google ads for self esteem classes appear next to a story about a man threatening to commit suicide the reader, rightly, doesn’t expect it, and won’t understand it.
“The argument ‘It’s automatic’ doesn’t cut much ice with readers, I suspect.”
The Observer has yet to respond to HTFP’s request for a comment.
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Another widespread example of this, especially on JP sites, is the google Ad Sense which picks up key words in web stories and links to an advert.
This is not controlled by journalists and as it its worse on fatal car crash stories as if the make of the car is named there is a 50 per cent chance Google Ad will make it a link to a showroom.
These include pop up adds but cannot be switched off.
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Why worry. Hits. Hits.Hits. that is all that counts in the brave new world .
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As all reasonable, sensible people know, it should be the senior managers of these newspaper companies who must take the flak when this kind of automation causes serious offence – not the frontline editorial staff who have no control over it.
But as well all know, the senior managers will hide away in their smart offices many miles away, and won’t have to deal with understandably angry members of the public. Some wretched, overworked reporter on £19,000 a year and at risk of redundancy will have to do that.
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The example used is a ‘collect’ so the paper won’t even hold any rights to sell the image on, even if it was in good taste.
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@hitsman. I think we all know that what counts in today’s digital world is an anagram of hits, hits, hits.
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Most papers are heading this way, using submitted content and passing it off as original. It would be quite easy to include a keyword in the metadata to block its path to the sales site. Low staff resources will contribute to this not always being the case.
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The Bullivants have two photographers covering three counties. With this ultimately low output is it worth having print sales at all?
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JP has the same thing. The inappropriately named Ad Sense mentioned above has attached BUPA cancer care ads to tragic stories and an ad for a divorce lawyer to a Gov minister’s name, for no apparent reason. Then we’ve got the ads we can’t stop that get put in front of videos, which have also been unfortunate.
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