{"id":32574,"date":"2013-05-21T09:56:58","date_gmt":"2013-05-21T09:56:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=32574"},"modified":"2017-11-02T12:17:50","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T12:17:50","slug":"media-spotlight-soglos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/media-spotlight-soglos\/","title":{"rendered":"Media Spotlight: SoGlos"},"content":{"rendered":"

SoGlos<\/a> is an award-winning<\/a> online magazine covering entertainment and the arts in Gloucestershire.<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"AnRecently nominated in the<\/span> Online Media Awards<\/a> for Best Local\/Regional News Site, the website is run by publisher James Fyrne and his partner Michelle Fyrne, who is the editor. James talked to Vuelio about SoGlos\u2019 new internship programme, working online and being successful on social media.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

After completing a postgraduate degree in journalism (specialising in PR), James worked at a number of PR agencies in London including Ketchum, Rainier and Harrison Cowley. Believing he was on the \u2018wrong side of the fence\u2019, James started freelancing before moving with Michelle to Dubai. The couple worked on two competing arts and entertainment magazines \u2013 What\u2019s On and Time Out Dubai \u2013 before returning to their home county of Gloucestershire.<\/p>\n

Why did you decide to create SoGlos?<\/b><\/span>
\nWe spotted a niche for something arts and entertainment in the county, and everything was moving online at the time we set up SoGlos.com. It took about a year of research and development before the site went live, six years ago this month. Michelle and I self-funded it, did all the project management and launched it. We used an agency to do all the website design and back office work, including the bespoke CMS which we still use today.<\/p>\n

\"SoGlos

Publisher (and Olly Murs lookalike) James Fyrne<\/p><\/div>\n

How has the team grown?<\/span>
\n<\/b>There are seven of us in total: three editorial, two sales, one design and one development. We have grown by about one person each year. My title used to be deputy editor but as I manage sales, design and development, I recently changed my title to reflect that.<\/p>\n

Do you work with external contributors?<\/span>
\n<\/b>We do occasionally use freelancers but we have an in-house staff writer which works better because managing freelancers can take time. We have just launched an internship scheme and received 250 applicants, which we were staggered by.<\/p>\n

How will the internship work?<\/b><\/span>
\nWe\u2019re about to take on two editorial interns. They will be given training and guidance as part of a structured placement to make it a useful process for them. The prerequisite for the application is that they had to have some journalism training and ideally some published work, so most of the applicants are from the University of Gloucestershire or the University of West England.<\/p>\n

The internship programme is going to be ongoing, we\u2019ve specified interns have to commit to 3-6 months but when one intern finishes we\u2019ll probably take on another. Partly because there\u2019s so much demand, but also if we can build the interns into the team and make it really useful for both parties then it makes sense.<\/p>\n

Why did you decide to make SoGlos an online publication?<\/span>
\n<\/b>When we were looking at the market, things were only just starting to move online and we were almost ahead of our time. But online was the obvious choice because that\u2019s where arts and entertainment readers tend to look for the latest up-to-date information. Obviously there\u2019s a certain level of prestige associated with print, but the advantages of digital over print include interactivity, with content such as photo galleries and videos, as well as being able to publish fresh content quickly.<\/p>\n

What is your target audience?<\/span>
\n<\/b>Gloucestershire locals and tourists who are interested in making the most of their free time and disposable income. Some people have described us as Gloucestershire\u2019s answer to Time Out London<\/a>. We don\u2019t have a particular target age, our style is informative and entertaining not young or stuffy. Our music section seems to be more popular with young readers and our culture section, which covers things like open gardens and National Trust properties, is more popular with everyone up to silver surfers.<\/p>\n

How do you use social media?<\/span>
\n<\/b>Twitter<\/a> and YouTube<\/a> are two of our big successes and we\u2019re in the midst of improving our Facebook following. When we publish full editorial features, they get tweeted automatically via our RSS, which has worked really well. Also, when we\u2019re out and about at a Gloucestershire restaurant, attraction or event, for example, we\u2019ll often take a picture, tweet information, \u2018@\u2019 local businesses and interact with them. Twitter is a particularly strong social resource for the arts and entertainment sector.<\/p>\n

As for YouTube, we\u2019ve got about 8.5m views across our channel, we think it\u2019s the most popular channel in the south west. We only make one video per quarter and we\u2019ve focused on filming quirky local events like the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling, the World Shin Kicking Championships, Bourton-on-the-Water Football in the River, and a Christmas Day Swim. A few of them have gone viral \u2013 I think our most successful is one of our cheese rolling videos<\/a> which has about 3.6m video views. It has been seen all over the world and we\u2019ve licensed it to a lot of companies.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got a brand new Facebook page<\/a> and we have literally only just started a campaign to increase our engagement \u2013 and we\u2019re already just shy of a thousand likes. For our reach and readership we should have a lot more likes, but it is an area we\u2019ve neglected a bit and one we\u2019re now keen to improve.<\/p>\n

How do you work with PRs?<\/span>
\n<\/b>Most of the local PR agencies and in-house PRs have us on their radar and they send us press releases about anything and everything they\u2019re promoting locally. We have an inbox for PRs, which we look through to identify what\u2019s newsworthy and interesting. We have strict rules about not copying and pasting from releases because we write everything to a house style for our readers.<\/p>\n

We also work with some national PRs, for film and music releases as well as national restaurant or bar chains for example, but we\u2019re predominantly focused on Gloucestershire.<\/p>\n

We see relationships with PRs as a two-way process, we don\u2019t just wait for something to land in our inbox, if we hear about something juicy then we\u2019ll contact PRs directly to see if there\u2019s an angle for a story.<\/p>\n

How do you like to be contacted?<\/span>
\n<\/b>Preferably by email because we can quickly have a look rather than PRs having to do their pitch by phone, which can sometimes be a drawn out process. As an online publica
\ntion so we\u2019re checking our email every few minutes and it\u2019s as quick as picking up the phone.<\/p>\n

Do you accept images?<\/span>
\n<\/b>Sending images always helps because everything we publish has a picture with it. If they do send an image, 10MB is unnecessary (even for print it\u2019s probably too much), a couple of hundred KB is fine. Some of the images we get look like they\u2019ve been taken RAW straight off the camera which is a little frustrating. Also, we only use landscape pictures because of the way our CMS is built.<\/p>\n

What do PRs do that\u2019s bad?<\/span>
\n<\/b>The frustrating ones for us are when the PRs haven\u2019t looked at SoGlos \u2013 we\u2019re online, it only takes 30 seconds to have a quick look. If they say, \u2018This will be of interest to your culture section\u2019, or: \u2018I see you did a readers competition, we can offer one too,\u2019 then that\u2019s great. If PRs ring and say: \u2018We have an event\u2026 it\u2019s in Edinburgh and it\u2019s about OAP retirement homes,\u2019 they obviously haven\u2019t looked at our website and they\u2019re wasting both our time. It\u2019s not brain surgery.<\/p>\n

Another thing is to avoid coming at it from the angle of: \u2018Could you do me a favour? My client would like it if you could put this on your website.\u2019 Good PRs should be saying: \u2018I think your readers would be interested in this.\u2019 Our readers are our number one concern and PRs should always keep that in mind.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>Take Five<\/b><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/b>What\u2019s your favourite restaurant in Gloucestershire?<\/b><\/span>
\nThe Daffodil<\/a> in Cheltenham. It\u2019s an art deco restaurant which used to be a cinema and the Josper Grill-cooked steaks are particularly good.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s your favourite place in Gloucestershire?<\/b><\/span>
\nOur new office! Two months ago we moved into a beautiful Regency office overlooking Cheltenham Town Hall<\/a>, which is one of Cheltenham\u2019s most iconic buildings. The sun is shining and people are having picnics in the gardens, it\u2019s glorious.<\/span><\/p>\n

What would your super power be?<\/b><\/span>
\nTo travel back in time, probably just so I could enter the lottery and become a millionaire the easy way!<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/b>Who would play you in a film?<\/b><\/span>
\nPeople I say I look like Olly Murs, the singer. So, erm, if he did a bit of acting \u2013 him.<\/span><\/p>\n

What one thing could not live without?<\/b>\u00a0<\/span>
\nMy little boy Elijah, he\u2019s 20 months old and my favourite thing in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Editorial information on James Fyrne, Michelle Fyrne, SoGlos and thousands of other media contacts and outlets, can be found in the Vuelio\u00a0<\/span>Media Database<\/span><\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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