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"Local people run local news sites best and our strategy is to seek out independent publishers who have the local contacts and knowledge but who lack the digital expertise and know how to monetise a credible web presence – expertise and know how that Rochdale Online has over a decade of experience in providing.”
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Milo recently visited the region and started a series of interviews with digital start-ups, investors and advisors responding to the initial Daily Telegraph piece, many of whom provided their comments to camera captured in this short video.
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"I don’t believe untrained or unpaid volunteers alone can produce the kind of journalism on which democracy depends. I believe most people want and value good filters to separate signal from noise – and the best way we’ve ever found to do that is with professional journalists."
Archive for July, 2009
links for 2009-07-31
links for 2009-07-30
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So if you run or contribute to a hyperlocal website, forum etc imagine waking up one day to find a nice shiny shrink-wrapped journalist on your doorstep with passable modern media skills and all the classic attributes a journalist should have (I said ‘imagine’ not all journalists are NOWesque in the same way not all hyperlocal bloggers are foaming mad Sid Nutters). And imagine that journalist is yours for say a day a week or can work with a herd of local blogs over the week. What would you do with them?
links for 2009-07-29
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It’s almost like there’s mass delusion going on in the industry—They’re saying we really really need it, that we didn’t put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let’s do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn’t work that way.
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Commentage, not commentary. Newspapers dictate to their reader what news and opinion are. Nichepapers co-create knowledge through "commentage." Commentage is the kid sister of reportage: it is the art of curating comments to have a dialogue with the audience — because the audience can fill gaps, plug holes, and thicken the foundations of knowledge. Many newspapers have comments — so what? Almost none are having a dialogue with commenters — who are mostly stuck in a twilight zone where they can only talk to one another. Nichepapers, in contrast, are always having deep dialogues with readers.
links for 2009-07-28
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What’s Social Journalism? It’s what you do when you gather information in social media channels and then report it to your readers. Watching a Twitter #hashtag for posts related to a critical local issue or big event, then publishing them in a roundup or sidebar on your news site? That’s Social Journalism. Scanning YouTube for the latest video from a protest, county fair, or city council meeting? That’s Social Journalism.
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We remember when having a telephone meant that mum used her special phone voice and said our own telephone number when she picked up the receiver. Calling after 6pm was cheaper and calling abroad was prohibitively expensive. We used to phone up other people’s houses and just hope they were in. Yes, really.
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The BBC is providing a limited range of video news content to Mail Online, guardian.co.uk, Telegraph.co.uk and Independent.co.uk, which will supplement the newspaper websites’ own material, in four areas – UK politics, business, health and science and technology.
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You might think a 20-page strategy a bit over the top for a tool like Twitter.
After all, microblogging is a low-barrier to entry, low-risk and low-resource channel relative to other corporate communications overheads like a blog or printed newsletter. And the pioneers in corporate use of Twitter by central government (see No 10, CLG and FCO) all started as low-profile experiments and grew organically into what they are today.
Here is the news (but only if it’s not too controversial)
News of another newspaper launch which promises nothing but “good news” appeared on my radar this morning.
According to HTFP, the 6-page free colour tabloid now being distributed to 20,000 homes and businesses in the borough of Redcar and Cleveland will concentrate on “enterprise, activity, events and good news stories”.
Of course there’s nothing new in seeking out positivity – for years editors of local and regional newspapers have wrestled with different ways of answering their readers’ oft-stated complaint that the local paper is full of grim bad news with tales from the courtroom and crime releases given undue prominence.
I even have a hazy memory of an editor who wanted to signify positive stories with the use of a smiley face motif, and it’s become commonplace for plenty to regularly reserve front of paper positions for the fluffy animal or “…..and finally” option.
While “good news” is always a completely subjective matter (one woman’s economic development boost is the next man’s environmental catastrophe) it seems there’s a trend towards this type of publication at the moment.
In the North West, Big Spark publishing is busy getting it’s Independent offerings onto the streets promising “all local news, all soft news” with three recent title launches.
Perhaps these publishers are genuinely picking up on a reader appetite for something other than the never-ending gloom and doom of the economy and war or maybe, as their critics suggest, they will prove to be short-lived and perceived as being full of “puff”.
Just look at some of the comments already received at HTFP: “No-one is interested in council puff stories – that’s why council newspapers don’t work”, “Not all interesting stories are negative, but most of them are, and to act any differently is just ignoring what journalism is all about and arrogantly trying to prove a non-existent point.”
I haven’t had the opportunity to actually read any of these new titles (I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has) so I’m not in a position to comment on the specifics, it’s the stated aspiration which concerns me.
News, as most people comprehend it, can never just be “good” – there will always be uncomfortable truths to be told and any publication which prides itself on reflecting some semblance of reality surely needs to contain light and dark, sunshine and shadows.
links for 2009-07-27
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The way we read the news is changing, so it only makes sense that the way we follow the news should change as well. Even relatively new news aggregators like Google News seem antiquated compared to these game-changing tools.
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They use Noded Working techniques to find collaborators for different digital projects; picking the most talented people from around the world. There are no office politics or long meetings. They market their work well enough to get chosen to take part in other projects.
Manchester entrepreneurs display their wares
If you find yourself slumping in front of a screen, hour after hour or wondering why you’ve got neck and shoulder pain after a day tapping away at a laptop, then an invention from a North West entrepreneur could be what you’re looking for.
Using an avatar which helps to reminds the computer user to stop slumping and sit with better posture emerged as one of the new ideas presented at the latest North West Startup 2.0 event.
The pitch by PostureMinder.com was one of four made to the panel of experts during the evening at the University of Manchester Incubator Company last week.
The company’s Dr Phil Worthington explained how his system could help reduce absenteeism through back problems caused by poor posture while working at computers and laptops.
A webcam observes the user and sends a reminder on the screen if they sit in a damaging position for a while.
See the video below for an example.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuTPvvZg0i4]
Other ideas presented on the night were a system which provides for easy distribution of documents (Edocr.com), a system for making voice calls direct from a wesite (PhoneFromHere.com) and a web marketing tool which assists companies in making viral video presentations (Web.vm).
Experts consider their verdicts
To re-cap on the night’s presentations, my live blog from the night is viewable on my FriendFeed here and here.
The evening was one of the regular events organised by Start Up 2.0 more information is avilable at the website www.nwstartup20.co.uk.
links for 2009-07-24
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We all talk about syndication and dissemination of content but without really knowing where the best places are for our content to go – or, more importantly, the tools that most people use to circulate out content. No more.
Add to any, the people behind one of the most successful (and easy to implement) bookmarking buttons have released the chart below, detailing just what services most people post to.
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Other than that, it’s an app worth trying out; it has a slick interface, it’s simple and it works. What more could you ask for? Excuse me while I find good fishing spots on the Adriatic coast.
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“The foundation degree will appeal to people already working in marketing but who want to learn how to get the most from new technologies such as social media and blogs.
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“What I like about idea of mutualised news is it gets over the concept of us versus them. It is us and them. It blurs the line between journalists and reader. It is much more diverse and plural than a conventional newspaper. It gives us a huge extensive resource.”
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The latest blog post on any of Shiny Media’s blogs is dated July 19. I’m surprised no-one noticed sooner, but that does indicate how low the network had sunk since the heady days when it landed $4.5 million in 2007 from Brightstation Ventures, which acts closer to an incubator that a VC.
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FriendBoo is a super simple audio blogging application built for the users of Friendfeed. All you need is a Friendfeed account and a regular phone.
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Sound unlikely and a little crass…? Well here’s the ad, published this afternoon on Gorkana:
Daily Mail – Young Journalist of the Year Award
The Daily Mail is looking for talented writers in print or broadcast, under 30 and from a visible ethnic minority to enter the Young Journalist of the Year Award and stand a chance to win £500 or an internship with the Daily Mail. -
“WikiCity nurtures a free, collaborative resource about every town it serves. The site is a collection of local facts, figures, businesses, and opinions that will continue to grow in size and usefulness with each edit,” says WikiCity co-founder Pat Lazure. “The decentralized model gives users a unique opportunity to contribute in a way that suits them best, albeit promoting their favorite local business, sharing an opinion, recapping last night’s big game, or chronicling historical landmarks and traditions within their community.”
links for 2009-07-22
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Parker told How-Do that he and his partners have far from satiated their ambitions in the newspaper sector, and are now targeting fresh locations for further Independent roll outs.
"Our target is eight by the end of 2009," he imparted.
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in an attempt to place a line in the sand for many of you out there (clients and friends) who ask me how many people make up this huge social network, I spent a bit of time in the facebook ad centre splitting the UK Facebook population by gender and age – so haters, blame the peculiarities of people not putting gender or their ages correctly if some of the numbers don’t stack up!
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By foregoing paper and ink, the readers are saving newspaper publishers more money than it would cost to produce and deliver the paper the old-fashioned way. Newspapers' financial troubles cannot be blamed on the readers.
links for 2009-07-20
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The Sun is a right-wing, reactionary, flag-waving, nationalist newspaper (”support our boys” at war in Iraq). It is also populist and demagogical. So of course, it would be a sexy Brit not a sexy Arab.
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Some journalism could become a kind of volunteer work, performed by eyewitnesses, passionate amateurs or professionals in other fields who use journalism as a loss leader to sell their books or build their brands.
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They then tweet stuff from the unmissable #xmklwfdf09 conference every five minutes for six hours, AS THOUGH THEY ARE WITNESSING THE BLOODY OBAMA INAUGURATION. Clearly, they aren’t.
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Now it is the turn of Stockport to get the Independent's 50/50 mix of local 'soft' news and advertising in a monthly free-to-pick-up format.
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The site also leverages an array of publicly available information like census data and hospital ratings. For example, there are options to see a map with an overlay of the highest concentration of ‘Yuppies’ (young professionals who make $100,000 or more) or ‘Cougars’ (defined by the site as women aged 35-50 who are single or divorced). Obviously some of these are mostly for fun, but they can definitely come in handy, especially when you’re trying to price out different neighborhoods.
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Professor Neil Blain told us that someone had calculated that if the New York Times wanted to have an online business model as successful as its print-based model then its website would have to be one of the half dozen most popular websites on the internet
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Assuming those tech hurdles can be overcome in the next few years, many geo-app makers envision physical space marked up with interesting information that actively pops up when you walk past a particular location.
In the long run, we could find ourselves living in a world where long, threaded discussions and conversations occur not only on blog postings or Facebook status updates but in specific cafes, public buildings, or rooms. -
"An offering by Material PR (who, as always, played a blinder for most of the weekend) that was either out and out genius or the 21st Century Faustian bargain. In short, it was this: “unable to cover all the acts you need/want to cover? Tell us, the T in the Park PR company and we’ll arrange for words and pics for you.”
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Thanks to the wonderful caching qualities of Twitter Search, the offensive tweets live on long enough to capture the evidence, but regardless of whether deleted or not, the damage to the brand has been done. The response tweets and the retweets will live on long after their offensive hashtag spam effort.
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“This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world,” said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.”
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The following grid includes opinions from industry leaders who answered questions about everything from defining multimedia to ethics to contests to the future. Click on their faces to read a short biography and listen to a three-minute summary of their full interview.
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twitdone is one of those applications that has the potential to really catch on with a lot of Twitter users. I can see it being used as a to-do tool as well as a way to bookmark interesting posts and URLs. Who knows, maybe twitdone will become the Twitter verison of Remember the Milk.
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Talk About Local will help support that innovation here in Hyperlocal Labs – even if the Lab is just a web page with some bright ideas on it. If you have a clever idea you want to feature drop me a line via info@talkaboutlocal.org – even if you can’t build it yourself but want some help or support.
Hyperlocal news wire
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Perhaps the best thing that could come out of Matthew Robson’s pithy note could be that people like Morgan Stanley commission some serious and longitudinal research – ideally involving teenagers as researchers as well as subjects.
