Weekly Comms News Round Up 26/09/2013

New research from Ofcom states that the BBC is the nation’s favourite source of news. Do you agree? Here’s my weekly selection of comms news, including the Ofcom report, Twitter Alerts and one of the world’s oldest newspapers going digital. Stories curated via @CisionUK.

Twitter launches emergency alert system via ITV News
Twitter has announced a new system that enables public institutions and other organisations to send emergency alerts via text message and push notifications during times of crisis.

Users can sign up to receive Twitter Alerts from specific accounts and then notifications are sent directly to their phones whenever an account marks a tweet as an alert. The emergency alerts will feature an orange bell on users’ home timelines to identify them from normal messages.

BBC rated UK’s top source for news by @johnplunkett149 via the Guardian
More than half of people in the UK regard the BBC as their single most important source of news, according to new figures released by media regulator Ofcom. The report said television remained by far the most important platform for news, used by 78% of adults against 40% who read newspapers, 35% who turn to the radio and 32% who look to the internet.

The BBC website remains the most popular online destination, used by 52% of people who go online, against 19% of people who use Facebook and 10% who turned to Twitter for online news updates.

Lloyd’s List, the world’s oldest newspaper, to give up on print by @GreensladeR via the Guardian  
Lloyd’s List, which lays claim to be the world’s oldest continuously published newspaper, is to become a totally digital entity by the end of this year.

The paper, founded in 1734, is regarded as the leading news, analysis and data source for the global shipping industry. So the decision by its owning company, Informa, to stop printing is rightly viewed as a landmark moment.

‘The press release is dead,’ declares the Government’s comms chief by @katemagee via PR Week
The executive director of government comms Alex Aiken said the press release was dead during a speech at the PRCA’s National Conference on Friday.

He said the “cosy” process of writing a press release and sending it out to journalists was “just telesales”. Instead, he argued press officers should be content producers: “You should not start with three pages of A4, but a tweet, an infographic or a video. If you are writing more than 200 words on any subject, you’re probably in the wrong place.”

Is there more to hidden traffic than ‘dark social’ by @SarahMarshall3 via Journalism.co.uk. 
In the keynote presentation at news:rewired on Friday (20 September), Jay Lauf, publisher of business news site Quartz, said an important question that publishers do not ask often enough is “where does our audience come from?”.

He shared traffic source stats for Quartz, which is a year old this week and is averaging around 3.3 million unique users a month. Between 10 and 15 per cent of traffic is from people coming directly to the homepage, and search engines provide around 20 per cent of traffic. Social provides the majority of traffic to qz.com but Lauf divided this in to two categories: ‘light social’ and ‘dark social’.