-
I partly see this as yet another aspect of the industry which is pushing the concept of fair payment as far as it will go while wannabe writers are happy to sit back and take it. If increasing amounts of people are happy to write for nothing, what happens to those who aren’t, and, even more worryingly, those who haven’t been throughout their careers? Furthermore, if we become a generation happy to remain unpaid (which we are, if you hadn’t noticed), then what happens when we start to demand payment? And to the next crop of new journalists?
-
Each week, Quirky’s community votes on the hundreds of submitted ideas to narrow them down to 10, two of which are then selected by an internal team of designers, engineers, researchers, and marketers. Anyone can consult on details throughout the development process, such as color, fabrication, and logo design; contributing to ideas makes users “Influencers” in Quirky parlance, who eventually earn a percentage of the finished products’ eventual revenue.
Archive for June, 2011
links for 2011-06-30
links for 2011-06-29
-
Besides being wildly expensive to create, hyperlocal news doesn't seem to appeal to a broad audience. Or, to argue on safer grounds, the current wave of hyperlocal news has yet to summon huge audiences. Hyperlocal proponents say users crave engagement, which is true. But users seem to be voting with mouse clicks to engage the world through Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, and other forms of social media instead of sites like Patch. And even old-school mediums such as email, listservs, and texts often convey information more hyper than your average hyperlocal site.
-
The social layer doesn’t replace social networks, of course. We’ll still continue to use Facebook, Twitter, and the things that come after them to keep up with friends, find new ones and discover information. The social layer is built on top of the networks, made possible by the fact that the networks themselves are no longer a novelty.
links for 2011-06-27
-
Newspapers have dropped the ball to a degree. Many people read local papers and they’re not getting the news they want. They read their paper or watch their local TV news and they’re spending time covering national stories. I don’t know that people want the whole experience of the news covered there. They need some place to go to know just what is going on on the local level. It doesn’t necessarily have to be professionally produced.
-
All this means that enterprises have to shift from a mindset and organisational systems of Fordist/Taylorist control to a mindset and systems of autonomous networked individuals. For that, we can learn a number of things from games:
-
Bespoke is already creating a legacy for the area. Community radio station Preston FM, CSV Preston and hyperlocal news start up Blog Preston have joined forces with funding from NESTA to keep the work going and to take advantage of the local knowledge and insight. Community reporters trained by Bespoke got their first story published in the Lancashire Evening Post.
links for 2011-06-26
-
We’ve created some new training videos for getting started with WordPress and Facebook
-
NOVEMBER: Patch had 68 sites in SoCal which attracted 330,000 unique visitors
links for 2011-06-23
-
Moving stories to the web was a copy-and-paste affair, but that’s not where the trouble started. If you begin with a print-directed front-end system, as we did, how does that system accommodate a story being updated from the field? Or how would the full possibility of story assets land online, to be chosen among for print? Even simpler: When do reporters add links? The answers, as countless journalists know, are: It can’t; they won’t; they don’t. From there, it’s all production, not creation.
-
Steps to retaining the copyright of your content
First, determine whether sharing an image is a bad thing. Sometimes, an image being viewed many times can be good for your personal and professional brand image. However, if you want to protect yourself:
-
Google have launched a ‘Search by Image’ service which allows you to find images by uploading, dragging over, or pasting the URL of an existing image.
The service should be particularly useful to journalists seeking to verify or debunk images they’re not sure about.
-
1 Keep content civic-minded, varied Types of stories publishers said have generated heavy comments: Transportation, local breaking news (especially if it impacts road traffic), civic controversies, development, politics, and direct impact of local government budget cuts.
-
More than 20 per cent of grandparents over 60 has a social media presence, an internet survey suggests – and most of those who do are on Facebook
-
We’re very much in the news business but on a very small scale. We wanted to get away from deadlines and pressures that cause papers and news bulletins to churn out the same press releases across the day.
-
Heard the one about the comms team's response to snow? Instand updates via facebook or Twitter? Nope. Book a half page advert in the local paper?
Oh, how we laughed. As a comms person myself it was more a case of nervous laughter.
Hyperlocal first for The Met and other Local Gov Camp media stories
Yesterday I was fortunate to attend the Local Government Camp in Birmingham – an unconference for people working in councils across the UK. It was a thoughtful and idea-provoking event which covered issues which I shall be taking a closer look at for The Guardian’s Local Government Network in the near future.
But there were also a few stories which came out of the day which had more of a journalism/media/hyperlocal bent which I’ll share here;
* Interesting to discover that The Met has just held it’s first webchat on a hyperlocal website. Talk About Local’s William Perrin told the session on hyperlocal publishing how he’d been approached to host the chat via his own website www.kingscrossenvironment.com.
On the site he explains:
“My site based in a once crime-ridden area is firmly pro police (two of our contributors have been on the Safer Neighbourhood Panel) and our commenters are of the non rabid variety. So for the police it was very much a carefully managed innovation risk.”
Conversations included discussion about the enforcement of 20mph zones, support for rough sleepers and youth provision.
Fostering a close working relationship between police forces and bloggers/independent publishers is something that I’ve seen in other towns and cities across the country not least in Manchester where @AmandaComms is often leading the agenda so it’s good to see the capital’s law enforcers also giving some validity to the importance of the hyperlocal/local/community sites. If your local Force is doing something similar, please feel free to share details via the comments below.
* Filming in council meetings. Following hot on the heels of the case of the blogger arrested for filming in the council chamber, Philip John of LichfieldLive hosted a debate on the for and against of such activity and has produced this interesting visualisation.
The subject of council newspapers also arose and it was interesting to hear viewpoints from the other side of the fence. From what I heard, the idea us journos have that the main benefit of these has more to do with propaganda and attempting to control the message than finance seems to hold true……you can listen to the discussion on John Popham’s video here.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a8oqA0qY54&w=560&h=349] At the risk of opening up a hornet’s nest of a debate here, I am still left wondering if the time is right for a wider discussion about the issue of value-for-money advertising spending by councils and the cost-effectiveness of how that spending on important public information, for example public notices, is distributed in light of all the new tools and technologies available?
Away from #localgovcamp
For those that subscribe to it, it will be apparent that I have ceased publishing on The MancunianWay blog. I’ve left it a few months before taking the final deletion step to see whether it was the right thing to do and will be switching it off fully in a week or so. There’s two reasons for this decision – 1. now I’m a regular writer for The Northerner blog, the sort of stuff I used to post about Manchester and the city’s digital community (and now about MediaCityUK) will hopefully reach more people interested in those topics posted via The Guardian blog and 2. I’ve imported all the archive material into this blog so it’s easily retrievable here via the tag cloud.
And on that subject….I shall be blogging (for The Northerner) from The Impact of Media City conference tomorrow, the hashtag is #mediacityuk and the full agenda can be found here.
links for 2011-06-17
-
Almost everything else we buy is of far higher quality than it was twenty years ago. The worst car you could buy then was a Yugo… clearly we've raised the bar at the bottom. Is the same thing true of your news?
-
Yet drammatically changed levels of economic and social mobility present a drammatically changed scenario from the traditional dense, geographically confined, small-scale communities of old. One in which the mutual obligation and close-knit relationships that characterise such societies have been replaced by fragmented and distributed social networks and sub groups – pockets of friends from where we grew up, went to college, the variety of jobs we've had, who are unlikely to know each other and geographically dispersed
-
In light of this, we have reviewed the people that our press releases are being distributed to and, with the availability of RSS feeds, we are now reducing this list to cover mainstream newspapers, radio and TV only, in line with our new approach. As a result, we will be shortly removing you from the press release mailing list.
In future all requests for information from bloggers to Thanet District Council will be dealt with by the Freedom of Information team:
links for 2011-06-14
-
"Now it is beginning to be a realistic possibility to use iPhones and other devices for live reporting, and in the end if you've got someone on the scene then you want to be able to use them.
"That capability is a really important one."
-
“As a rough rule of thumb, we are thinking in terms of one local publisher for every 5,000 people. Rather than one person to cover a town, or a handful to cover a city, we’re aiming for 50 or 100.
“The challenge for us is making sure we have enough skilled people working with us. If we get it right, then we’ll be looking at 12,000 local publishers helping us cover street level news across the country. Our aim is to deliver a hyperlocal service on a national scale.”
links for 2011-06-13
-
Have Carmarthenshire Council and Dyfed Powys Police acted illiberally?
-
A round up of news and views from MediaCityUK
-
"If you have been on the receiving end of a Local Authority trying to obscure the democratic process then fill in this form and let’s see what we can do with the data. To start with just plotting the Local Authorities on a map will be a starting point but as (or if) we get more data then we can do more with it. If you think there is a question or some information I have missed asking for leave me a comment below and I’ll update the sheet."
-
He first conducted a survey, leaving paper forms in the local library and cafes and inviting online responses via his website. Almost two hundred people responded, and the findings were then supplemented by a longitudinal study, conducted in February this year, of the ways in which people use Virtual Norwood and the community website for the neighbouring area Sydenham Town.
The key findings suggest that people see hyperlocal media as one small part of the information sources available to them about what is going on locally. ‘Users interact wtih hyperlocal media primarily for their information needs – they’re not looking for entertainment, or community interaction,’ says Thomas.
-
This project is very deliberately part of our strategy to explore how to help local people to establish and embed neighbourhood networks in low income areas. For that reason we will be ensuring there is plenty of shared learning with the group of three ‘Big Localities’ where we have recently begun work for the Big Lottery Fund.
-
They will continue to feature news but have moved beyond display ad formats to offer a range of commercial features including business profiles, user reviews, daily deals vouchers and events listings. More than 2,000 advertisers have migrated to the new platform.
-
Turned out pro-am – at least in the context of this conference – was a Jay Rosen term and given that he is an influential voice in the world of journalism (someone I read and follow on Twitter, for a start) I guess I'll be hearing the phrase a lot more. But, frankly, I'm sick of determinations.
-
At the heart of the issue is the council’s objection to VB moderating its user-generated comments after, rather than before, publication.
links for 2011-06-10
-
But it’s so contrary to common sense to stop someone unobtrusively, but not secretly, recording a public meeting of democratically elected members.
-
If you have work to do today, don’t click on this link. No really. This — Newspaper Map — is quite possibly the coolest way to visually surf newspapers online that I’ve ever seen. It’s my new favorite use of Google Maps and one of the most original and ambitious uses I’ve seen: Practically every newspaper in the world — 10,000+ spanning every continent and many languages — is represented.
-
The Federal Communications Commission released today the 300+ page report “The Information Needs of Communities: The changing media landscape in a broadband age”.
The report is an exhaustive overview of modern American media in traditional and emerging formats. The term “hyperlocal” is mentioned 63 times. Here is a sample of “hyperlocal” mentions:
