JCC London

It's scoop city out there

Here's a real-time example of website benefits for a newspaper.

A little earlier this afternoon we picked up rumours that the two biggest welfare charities in the Manchester area were to merge.  That's a big story for anyone with a family member or friend being cared for by The Fed and Heathlands Village - ie pretty much everyone in town. When we called to check, it seemed that the charities were planning to keep the announcement secret until the end of the week, when it was due to be covered by a low-grade local Jewish rag... can't remember its name. But a few more calls of our own, and we had a story live on our own site, dated 4:17pm on Tuesday. And with an 'Exclusive' tag. And with an end-line encouraging people to read the full story in our 184-page New Year special JC edition this Friday.

Now, is it childish of me to enjoy these little media games?   

Newspaper, schewspaper! Video is where it's at

Been a busy few days reinventing the JC as an online publication, while also putting to bed a 184-page print edition (credit crunch? not when there are hundreds of New Year advertisements to fit in among our editorial columns...).  So the team here has been busy looking for creative ways in which TheJC.com can complement what we can do once-a-week in print. Prime example: we sent one of our two star web producers, Jessica Ware, to film the London march in honour of Gilad Shalit over the weekend. The result: a two-and-a-half-minute video clip that combines atmosphere and interviews in a way we could never achieve in print. And if you think the filming is professional, here's a secret: Jessica happened to be at the march with her father, the accomplished BBC television journalist John Ware, and is clearly picking up expert tips. (Though, to avoid creating an office broigus, I should stress that the work was largely Jessica's own...)

There has been some unwelcome breaking news to update on the website front page - such as this morning's attack in Jerusalem when an East Jerusalem Palestinian drove into a crowd of Israeli soldiers. Pretty quickly our Foreign editor was blogging to set the story in context.  You don't know how refreshing this new freedom is for a team of hacks who normally get just one shot a week at telling their community what the story is - and often four or five days after the event. Having worked at other newspapers where staff felt threatened by the publications' websites, I have to say that our own transition to multimedia is going remarkably smoothly, with pretty widespread enthusiasm from participating staff. Why, they'll even let you see what they look like. Ah, the eternal lure of the picture byline...

Still, at risk of provoking more broigus, the most powerful blog of the week belongs to a guest contributor, Gideon Schneider, who wrote a piece for us and is now blogging about his unwelcome journey into the world of Hodgkin's lymphoma. Gideon writes elegantly and with wit and self-knowledge, and I'm told is already attracting pledges of charitable donations. He is also helping others who have experience of this and similar illnesses, as you can tell from the moving comment posts.

Now, isn't that just the sort of online conversation that gives real value to a community like ours? So go sign up for yourself. You don't need us to tell you what matters.

Taking a 167-year-old paper online

OK, so some of you may have clicked on the Jewish Chronicle website in the distant past. A relatively early participant in the digital age, www.thejc.com won some awards before the shutters went down on anyone who wasn't a paying subscriber. That - in the age of Google, blogs and iPhone RSS feeds - just isn't acceptable: if you're not linked to, you just don't exist. So when I arrived at the JC two-and-a-half years ago, having previously been editor of The Guardian's internet sites, I knew the newspaper had to rethink. Yes, a free-to-access website would be a risk to our print business model - as with every other paper that has confronted the digital challenge. But in a world where media consumption is changing radically, we simply couldn't afford to rely only on what had previously worked.

The first battle was to lift the subscription wall. It took time, and for commercial reasons a few sections, such as the archive and Social & Personal pages, remained accessible only to paying subscribers. But then we thought about what the website could do. Obviously there would be things that would add a new dimension to what the newspaper is doing - such as video reports; staff blogs; and all the detailed community news that fights for space in our limited pages. Yet there was also an opportunity to create something that, despite looking pretty hard, we never managed to find: a credible British-Jewish meeting point online, that not only told people what was going on, but invited their participation and gave them the tools to create their own content while networking with other users.

Our new baby was finally born last week - weighing in at a few thousand web pages and video feeds, and bringing much naches to the 270,000 or so close relatives. TheJC.com is still in Beta, which means we're still correcting and improving as we go, but what is very exciting for us is to see organisations and individuals starting to build their own blogs and home pages, adding picture galleries or simchah pages, and (always an editor's favourite), arguing back at us in their comments alongside our own articles. From Jewish Care to the boxer Roman Greenberg - and notably our friends at the JCC - are starting to build a presence. We're calling the site "The Jewish Community Online" rather than the Jewish Chronicle website - as the intention is to make us, the mere journalists, just a tiny part of an online community dominated by you, the wider Jewish world - however you define your Jewishness.

Now, you may have noticed that our Jewish world contains many opinions, generally strongly expressed. And as you might guess, a prominent publicly accessible "Jewish" website may attract less-than-friendly outsiders who wish to spoil the party. Opinions - they're great, as long as they're not offensive or unlawful, as our terms and conditions dutifully set out. But how on earth are we going to manage this project - which is, by any standards, a pretty bold experiment in community media?

Stay with this blog, and I'll give you some answers as the project develops.

And don't just follow the project - join in. We'd love to have you register as a user of TheJC.com. It should only take a minute, and of course is free. And then give me your thoughts (by email here) on how we can improve the site. We have the next 167 years to think of, after all.