Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves says the paper’s new ‘m-site’ has surpassed expectations in its first week. The Post is one of twelve Trinity Mirror regional dailies launching mobile phone companion sites over the next two months.

Marc said: “We’ve set up specific feeds from our website, picking up the elements we want to go on the m-site. We’ll review as we go and add or take away feeds from more areas of the site.

“In terms of users, we’ve surpassed where we expected to be by now, but I want to be cautious before declaring it a massive success. “Once the marketing noise dies down, it’ll be interesting to see what levels the site achieves.”

Marc added that more services such as share tracking and geographical listings could be added after a review in January.

The National Union of Journalists has launched an ‘Equal Pay’ campaign to close what it calls the “gender pay gap” within the media industry.

The new campaign coincides with the Fawcett Society’s annual ‘No Pay Day’ – the day each year when the charity says women start working for free because of the 17pc pay gap between the sexes.

A resource page is now on the NUJ website with equal pay facts, previous NUJ successes and an interview with Fleur Cushman, for whom the union won £26,000 in back pay an extra £8,000 a year.

Journalist and broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell will deliver a lecture at a Scottish university later this month.

The talk by Dame Joan, an honorary professor at the University of Stirling, is entitled ‘ Credibility Crunch: The Media and Morality’.

The Stirling institute’s annual Hetherington Lecture is supported by the Scott Trust and named after former Guardian editor Alastair Hetherington.

Previous lectures have been given by broadcaster Jon Snow, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and former Mirror editor Roy Greenslade.

The lecture starts at 6pm on 19 November – for more information and to reserve a place e-mail [email protected] or call 01786 467055.

Herald Express editor Andy Phelan has collected an international award for the Torquay daily’s ‘Mod My Motor’ competition. Andy picked up the 2008 IFRA XMA Cross Media Award at a ceremony in Amsterdam.

The Northcliffe daily was awarded first prize for dailies with a circulation below 100,000 for its competition which gave the winning reader £5,500 worth of car modifications.

IFRA is the worldwide research and service organisation for the news publishing industry and has more than 3,000 members in 70 countries. The aim of this year’s awards was to highlight and celebrate cross-media advertising projects.

Comments

Not Impressed (03/11/2008 16:29:58)
Regarding the Birmingham Post ‘m-site’ report: here we go again. Yet another well-paid newspaper executive blathering on about some wonderful techno gizmo for spreading ‘content’ across more ‘platforms’ without any explanation as to how meaningful this ‘content’ (that’s ‘news’ to old-fashioned types who actually understand the meaning of journalism) is or how it is supposed to continue to appear – perhaps by magic – from a newsroom with fewer and fewer staff.