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before you get too outraged about the Internet blackout and mobile phone shutdown in Egypt, consider this: arguably the legal tools are all available for the UK Government to do exactly the same in the UK right now.
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Fix-it callout
In addition to a general call-out for news tips, many sites also ask readers to identify problems in the city or region that need to be fixed. This can range from relatively small issues like potholes and broken parking meters to larger problems like government inefficiencies.
Archive for January, 2011
links for 2011-01-31
links for 2011-01-29
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Stop paying lip-service to local
Newspapers have to genuinely get things done, organise events, become community leaders, be central to the economic fabric and get their reporters out. -
According to NMA's Top 100 Interactive Agencies 2010 guide (registration required), display ad spend will grow by 9.3 percent in 2011. But many publishers report that yields for display advertising have been falling faster than 10 percent year on year. IPA/BDO's quarterly Bellwether report found that 22 percent of companies lowered their marketing spend in Q4 last year.
links for 2011-01-27
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The following is a three-level approach to verification: starting with the content itself, moving on to the context surrounding it; and finishing with the technical information underlying it. Most of the techniques outlined take very little time at all but the key thing is to look for warning signs and follow those up.
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"We found that there is little hard evidence to support the view of the commercial newspaper industry that council publications are, to any significant extent, competing unfairly with independent newspapers at present, though there is concern that such competition may escalate in future."
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Don’t copy the professionals. If you want to make a different you’re going to have to do something special to get noticed. Pumping out the same formats as the big guys is not going to cut it, especially when you’re competing with trained and experienced professionals. If you’re reporting on local news with video you don’t want people to be thinking “this isn’t as good as the BBC.”
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Offer a service that local businesses can easily compare and visualize against magazines and newspapers. Price ad banners based on duration, not impression, and stay away from banner rotation.
Cannibals, manure and mongrels: Thoughts on local media
Jeremy Hunt’s BIG IDEA of local TV across the UK doesn’t seen to have many fans does it?
Of those groups who might be expected to relish the chance to produce local, even hyperlocal, television content there appears to be a universal ‘no thanks’ in evidence.
On the one hand there’s community publishers and independents who want some support to produce local content – but primarily on cheap to produce web tv and rather than via the transmitter infrastructure proposed.
Then there’s the other world where mainstream media is being offered the ‘opportunity’ for multi-platform publishing but is struggling financially, risk averse and still seemingly licking the wounds of digital disruption.
Who is going to do this local TV?
One member of the audience at today’s Westminster Media Forum described the proposal as: “Channel 5 meets regional newspaper mutant half-breed” at an event where, as Robert Andrews posted on PaidContent earlier, ”panelists lined up to unload their scepticism”
The debate around this issue dealt mostly with the big media end of the experience by giving a trot through of what Hunt’s proposal, the Shott report and Claire Enders have previously concluded on the issue.
But also represented at the forum were some men from the financial world and I listened carefully to what they had to say……which can be briefly summed up as, there’s no money in it.
Is there a sustainable business model without subsidy? No-one seemed to think so and one of the biggest regional publishers Johnson Press’ chief executive John Fry, even suggested that ‘subsidy’ was something of a dirty word, somehow devaluing any proposition by being “out of tune with current mood music” .
Is there revenue opportunity from advertising? Yes, but only if media orgs cannibalise their existing advertising to the new platforms. The money men didn’t seem to think there was enough new revenue to be pulled in – no shiny pony to ride after digging through the manure to use the most memorable metaphor of the day.
So, who is going to do this local TV?
links for 2011-01-25
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The problem? It’s still not enough. Instead, I – like TechCrunch and the forthcoming ‘AppleDoch‘ collaboration – see a more digital future built around relevancy to the individual. Flipboard, RockMelt, My6sense, Brizzly, Pearltrees, Qwiki, Navigaya and the forthcoming Orbit are all nods to a digital future that is about sheer information, minus real brand allegiance. It’s not about you anymore… if it ever was.
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The mainstream media is slowly catching up with the idea, that if you are to have a sustained existence in an ever-changing world, you need to know your single point of focus rather than be carried away on a tide of ball-licking possibilites. Doing it because you can, is still, and has always been, a terrible editorial idea. Doing it because you must is a much better manifesto.
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Revenue from individual and corporate donors and from MinnRoast increased a more modest 5 percent, to $482,190. But in a sign of strong community support, 631 new donors joined the MinnPost family, an increase of 37 percent, bringing the total donor base to 2,338. And 170 donors gave more in 2010 than they had in 2009.
1,000 patients sign up to access their medical data
Campaigning GP, Dr Amir Hannan’s been in touch to let me know how the pioneering project to put patients in control of their medical records is progressing.
As I’ve blogged before, Dr Hannan has been working since 2006 towards an online patient system in a bid to build trust between the doctor and patient.
Now, Haughton Thornley Medical Centres (HTMC) in the north west has reached a landmark of 1,000 patients who can manage their own records through a secure web portal.
Dr Forida Abdullah, a partner who recently joined the practice explained in the press release how it was working: “As with anything that’s worth doing, once patients obtain online access to their medical records they realise that a little bit of effort reaps many rewards.
“This means that patients are able to benefit from up-to-date information and advice, take ownership of their own healthcare and be involved in the way medicine moves forward”. As Yvonne Bennett, a patient at the practice says ‘It helps to build a partnership of trust’ between patient and health care worker”.
Registered patients can log in their own home, work or anywhere with an internet connection, to manage their records by:
* Requesting appointments.
* Requesting repeat prescriptions.
* Accessing test results.
* Viewing previous GP consultation notes, as well as any correspondence between hospital consultants and the GP.
Currently there are around 50 practices in the country offering patients access to records in this way.
Proposals to make patient’s care records routinely available to them were recently part of a public consultation on the Government white paper Liberating the NHS: An Information Revolution.
Hannan said he hoped more GP surgeries could benefit from the experience: “”Passing this landmark of 1000 patients accessing their records is a special moment and I want to thank all those who have contributed to making it happen, in particular our very special patients and staff – many of whom have travelled the length and breadth of the country with me to share their own experiences with others – this has been a four year journey so far and we hope to be able to pass on what we have learned wherever we can.”
There’s more information about the project online here.
links for 2011-01-20
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Customer Segmentation – Hyperlocal deal offerings, with near limitless demand: The holy grail to localized offerings is the ability to target by geography and psychography.
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It gives you a foothold toward establishing a relationship with every business in town. And it creates value for your readers, who will find information they’re looking for, all in one place.
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Data point number one: Patch, which has 750-plus locations across the country and has provided jobs to countless numbers of journalists, is too much like a “digital Yellow Pages” and not enough like, well, journalism. It also, says PaidContent, summarizing Auletta’s piece, is likely too expensive to be sustainable, at $30 million a quarter.
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Jones foresees a mix of paywalls and subscriptions to monetize in the future and believes people will pay for something specific, such as a tool that helps them do their job better. He also said that new, aggregated ways of consuming content, like Flipboard, will be “the model of the future.”
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Media Street, the start up online publishing company with a network of hyper local sites in London, has announced it will be integrating reviews from Yelp.
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As a blogger focusing on social entrepreneurship and technology, I run across a plethora of resources for funding — one thing that most social ventures can’t get enough of. After some contemplation, I decided if I could get all, or at least most, of these websites, organizations and other funding avenues listed in one place, it would be an invaluable resource, capable of helping thousands of socially focused organizations. Below, I have tried to capture some of the best opportunities for big-thinking changemakers to put capital behind their world-shaking ideas.
links for 2011-01-18
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The two Mail titles made 80 million from retail advertising in 2009, half of it from supermarket brands, and it may have made in the region of 100 million from the same people in 2010, as TheMediaBriefing contributor Peter Kirwan pointed out. And that's not all of it: Associated Newspaper Loading… industries newspaper s made 850 million in 2010, with ad revenue up 7 percent at 374 million. These are Big Numbers.
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And so, let’s talk about Hunt’s interest in spreading media access – specifically intensely local television news production – to centres outside London. He suggests, the “London broadcast intelligentsia” is out of step with the rest of the country on whether local TV could be successful.
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Thanks to the massive interest in hyperlocal blogs a lot of journalism courses are either asking their students to create hyperlocal websites, or finding their students are creating them anyway. This post is to ask what your own experiences are on these lines?
links for 2011-01-17
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Well here’s another gap in the data journalism process ever-so-slightly plugged: Tony Hirst blogs about a new Q&A site that Rufus Pollock has built. Get the Data allows you to “ask your data related questions, including, but not limited to, the following:
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The RSS feed is a Yahoo Pipe of the following job feeds:
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Takeaway: Journalism is still looking for ways to exploit geo-located content; how can you as an individual or your newsroom use mo-bloggers to your advantage? Could you turn your reporters into mo-bloggers?
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Maps are part of the very idea of hyperlocal – but when is it best to use them to help illustrate a story – and when is merely adding the name of the road or postcade area enough for residents to get a geolocal grip on the content?
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The Patch network also has a business and services directory that now contains more than 630,000 listings, 5 percent of which are real estate-related, Webster said. Real estate business owners can claim their office listings and include information about their brokers and agents, how many property listings they carry, the type of real estate they handle, and add photos and videos for no charge.
"There's nothing more local than real estate," Webster said.
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An initial investor in Patch, Mr. Armstrong, who is 40 and lives in Connecticut, has plowed $4.5 million into the site. A few months after becoming AOL’s chief executive in 2009, he led AOL’s $7 million acquisition of the nascent service.
A failed effort to find online information about volunteer opportunities for his family in their hometown gave Mr. Armstrong the idea for Patch. He began researching local news and at one point called his local paper to encourage it to create a Patch-like site.
links for 2011-01-14
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* rigtmoveplaces is only intended to be light touch , to give a flavour, linking out to others with more detail
* rightmove want a rounded picture of an area, warts and all
* there’s no intention to have ads on the rightmoveplaces site – people will be referred there from rightmove.co.uk
* rightmove is genuinely interested in feedback from hyperlocals and wants to engage
* would hyperlocals be interested in having an RSS feed into the places site?
* rightmove has vast amounts of detailed data about local property markets that could be of interest to hyperlocals -
These days, one of the best ways to ‘fight back’ against negative stereotyping of an area is to do what Pauline Sargent has done for Drimnagh – create and develop a simple hyperlocal website that presents a more balanced picture to the world and watch it rise up the Google rankings.
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The meeting also agreed to develop a set of seminars around what I termed ‘the social economy of place’. The idea is to explore in more depth the nature of key aspects of community capacity. At the neighbourhood level what are the components of what David Halpern calls ‘Hidden Wealth’; those things beyond state and market which shape resilience and well-being? The RSA Projects team is doing some more thinking about this but the key dimensions are:
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1. Don’t do engagement for engagement’s sake. Consider what real resources and actions you can take after you ‘engage’. If it is just ticking the consultation box, you might be re-enforcing ’participation fatigue’. Many migrant and refugee organisations feel burnt from endless consultation and no action.
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On Tickles merchants offer discounts on a product or service, in return for a guaranteed minimum number of sales over a limited time period. The service is free to users, who sign up to receive local offers. They can then purchase a voucher online which they can redeem with the merchant, but only if a minimum number of people required have signed up for the offer.
