Sarah Hartley

What's driving Seattle's hyperlocal scene is the commitment of talented journalists eager not just to leverage online platform strengths (and social media), but to live the niche level of interest of their readers. In each case, there's the distinct feel of an entrepreneurial passion project, not all that different from the usual start-up M.O. In time, this has resulted in the kind of readership that advertisers can be talked into paying for the chance to reach, even though online advertising remains in a larval stage.

Hyperlocal isn’t easy. Very few people have the necessary skills, required enthusiasm and precious time all available at once.

I’m concentrating on money journalism now. Who knows, I might even get the odd commission for further travel pieces. In this difficult economy (that’s about to become much more austere), writing about money issues in a way that’s relevant to ordinary people is my hope.

Too rarely do we return to stories that have "faded away" and ask, what happened next?

There are currently 25 courses offered on the site, and the company expects to launch more after a new version of the Exmainer.com website goes live soon. (Examiner University is also home to a video guide to the new website.) The core courses are delivered using a combination of audio, video and text. Other course topics include "grammar considerations," "plagiarism," "finding photos online," "proofreading," "writing locally," and "SEO considerations," to name just a few. The "finding photos" and "writing locally" courses are among the most popular.

Hyperlocal has become a buzzword as familiar to news junkies as eat local is to foodies. The idea is to get residents involved in the reporting not just by sending in tips but by writing content about important local issues such as school boards and transportation. In professional newsrooms, "we spend too much time on craft and not enough time on community," says Michele McLellan, a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri who spent the past year studying nearly 70 of the best hyperlocal sites.

I’ll say at the outset: A journalist is not distinguished by the medium of his or her publication.

What, then, are the tell-tale signs of a professional journalist?

Data journalism is a phrase that will become as familiar in journalism colleges as Teeline shorthand

I still don't quite understand how we got from that point to where we are now, where we're reaching 30,000 readers monthly and writing stories that are making a difference in how Downtown develops. We just kept writing.

Clearly, Fwix wants to be a destination that you go to not only for news, but for all contextual information around a given locality. The new search portal makes it much easier for consumers to sort through this flux of information.

One of the strengths of the vision put forward by the Big Society Network is mutualism. It's what created the Co-op and building societies – the idea of people investing in and supporting themselves and their communities. The first co-ops were founded by poor people with far fewer resources than we have now. Their strength was that they were owned by their members, and so independent of government and able to compete commercially.

I think one of the most useful things we can do in the north of England is to find ways to rediscover that ethos and recreate it for different times – to create entities that can be accountable to the people, not to government directives or the vagaries of funding decisions.

#1: editorial workforce. If adding journalists has proven unable to reverse the trend in reader depletion, in any given market, the more numerous the journalists are, the better the newspaper industry holds. The chart below covers seven countries, with two superimposed data sets. First, in blue, the number of journalists per 100,000 daily copies sold; second, in red, paid circulation per 1000 inhabitants.

A welcome departure from fear-based journalism, these hyperlocal sections are looking for inspiring human interest stories about ordinary people positively affecting our neighborhoods and communities, like news of a recent block party in honor of a retiring postman. Hargro agrees: "I don't want you to be scared. I want you to be informed and empowered."

Since major events can now become "old news" within hours, it's of utmost importance for journalists to stay on top of breaking news via social networks, news feeds, and email alerts; explore personal slants to straight news stories; and look for offbeat stories that's directly relevant or indirectly relatable to readers' lives. But that's not all.

Public relations practitioners are already talking about ‘breaking’ news of an event (staged for commercial benefit) via Twitter. According to the earlier-mentioned info graphic, they would position themselves to serve as ‘witnesses,’ in order for their ‘news’ to be happily retweeted by the rest of us, and effectively bypassing any editorial scrutiny.

Journalists and media organisations should update their professional codes of conduct to take cognisance of the fact that the way we are reporting news is changing.

Simon Rogers, editor the Guardian's Datablog and Datastore, says: "It's a logical extension of our work as journalists: behind our stories and graphics are often key sets of statistics, which traditionally live for the moment of the publication and then disappear back onto a reporter's hard drive. We wanted to give those numbers a longer life."

Using Google Spreadsheets, we have published over 500 sets of data covering everything from carbon emissions by country, through east European immigration figures to the UK, to plastic surgery statistics. The site has been used to publish raw Guardian information too: the executive pay survey data and the background full spreadsheets behind Felicity Lawrence's supermarket scoops, for instance. If it's a story based on numbers, you will find those numbers on the Datablog.

Ten principles of mutualisation

The plan is to create an open and standardised format for anyone to use, re-publish and "mash up" without charge. Furthermore, the coalition plans to work with local government to put information on spending, tenders and contracts over £500 online.

There will be no public sector monopoly – the jobs data can be used by anyone, from commercial recruitment, newspapers to pressure groups.

This Google Gadget enables you to look for stories not only there, but across the network of Press Gazette-authored blogs. It should be particularly handy for searching back through The Wire, our news aggregation blog which so far consists of more than 6,700 posts linking to interesting journalism related stuff across the web.

A recent story of critical importance to Scotland was the UN’s recent report on Scotland being the number one consumer of cocaine in the entire globe. It was covered by Lewis Smith at The Independent and Mark McGivern at the Scottish Daily Record and STV with a straight bat; while the BBC reported it with an emphasis on the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) doing a sterling job. The story is now a week old and yet only 4 media outlets have covered it and worse, covered in a totally cursory manner.

Many US newspapers have simply become pale, quivering shadows of what they once were.
"Once, they aggressively scrutinised the powerful and exposed secrets, but they have — with some exceptions — become mouthpieces for the powerful, enablers of propaganda and prim schoolmarms when it comes to telling people what they want to know.