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"Why are we doing this? There are two main reasons, closely connected. One is, very simply, to do a little more to direct followers of the Guardian's already pretty extensive coverage of London issues to something extra and different. The other is to drive a little more traffic the way of those independent bloggers to help them continue to flourish and perhaps encourage others around London to follow their example."
links for 2010-02-09
February 9, 2010 by sarahhartleylinks for 2010-02-08
February 8, 2010 by sarahhartley-
Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010
We are pleased to announce that the Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010 will be held on Saturday 17 April at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Old Broadcasting House is an excellent venue in Central Leeds, in the Civic Quarter just off the Ring Road.We are delighted that this event will be in partnership with The Guardian’s Local initiative
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Key Areas Where Newspapers Retain Strength, and Where They Don't
Local topics, news, family events, and entertainment, remain the domain of local companies. National topics are going both profoundly digital and national.
And a summary of some of the findings in the study includes the following:
When readers want the briefing on the news, they turn in great numbers to online sites, reducing their use of traditional news sources, TV, newspapers, and radio. When news users wanted to know what was happening before they dashed off to work, they used to either switch on the TV or radio or fetch the paper at the door, and give a quick read. Now each of those behaviors has been reduced, and significantly so, in three years.
links for 2010-02-06
February 6, 2010 by sarahhartley-
Use Twitter Tim.es. This is a great tool for catching up when you’ve been away from the stream and using Twitter to help the important news find you. After you connect with some people in the business and in your community, go to twittertim.es and sign in using Twitter.
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Nsyght’s aim is “not replace social networks, but to enhance them”. As such, you aren’t required to re-friend people on Nysight as you would on FriendFeed or Cliqset. Instead it uses the APIs of the services to channel your comments and conversations between Nysght and the other services you use.
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Since December 2009, the News Leadership 3.0 blog has been publishing a special series of guest posts by Amy Gahran on civic engagement. This series explores how news organizations and other institutions can implement the findings of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. This joint project of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute Communications and Society program produced the 2009 report, “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.”
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Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.
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At the core of hyperlocal behavior is passion. It’s your reality, or at least a reality that is right outside your front door. The level of engagement and commitment hyperlocal news websites have are huge, compared to the average reporter, who is assigned for a story and educated to be detached. Hyperlocal reporters are involved in the story and they can afford to be critical and assertive close to the local authorities, and use their work to improve their community’s living standards and environment. It’s what matters to a few, that becomes really important.
links for 2010-02-02
February 2, 2010 by sarahhartley-
In addition to the standard smartphone equipment, such as a camera and social networking applications, we’ve compiled a list of five additional tools that can help a single journalist rival a fully-functional news team. With these tools, a mobile journalist can record data, edit clips, and broadcast polished stories as events unfold.
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So, I'm looking to gauge opinion and support. Going by the turnout at last week's Scottish Social Media Dinner there's clearly a lot of journalists and media professionals who are happy to get together over a drink and share ideas. This could be a solid step to bringing the news community together, regularly, across the country, and helping find and share ideas which could give the industry the leg-up it needs online here.
If enough folk register an interest, I'll happily get the ball rolling with set-up, and we'll see where it goes from there.
links for 2010-02-01
February 1, 2010 by sarahhartley-
It is not the enthusiasts’ fault that their projects are now being touted as media which will, depending on the commentator, either save or destroy journalism. They are not to blame. But there is a danger that unless journalists and media organisations start to take grass-roots projects seriously they will again be guilty of responding too late to a paradigm shift in the industry.
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One option for the long-awaited strategic review is for the BBC to make fewer programmes in-house, awarding more contracts to independent producers. The move could mean the loss of more than 1,000 production staff from a total head count of 23,000.
links for 2010-01-31
January 31, 2010 by sarahhartley-
"I recently asked for help from anyone interested in the future (actually that should probably be futures) of journalism to lend a hand with a mini survey on journalism skills.
In total 75 kind people volunteered their time and effort to answer the questions. I’m going to get to grips with it and add my two pence/cents worth on it over the next few days." -
News companies in general can benefit from using Twitter (although The Guardian does seem to be unable to write a story about it without attracting buckets of comment-scorn) but there are some rules to follow I'd say, with Follow being the operative word. If your newspaper Twitter account has 4000 followers and follows 2 people, even if whoever runs it responds to @ messages, the impression is that it's not engaging, it's broadcasting.
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Of course, bloggers are perfectly capable of quality journalism without holding an National Union of Journalists membership card, but as it turns out the three bloggers that have been hired all come from a journalism background.
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The crowd was as good value as the panel, with many of Journalism.co.uk’s favourite media bloggers: organiser Patrick Smith; Adam Tinworth from RBI; Kate Day, head of communities at the Telegraph; Martin Stabe, online editor at Retail Week; and Jon Slattery… of the Jon Slattery Blog.
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Tom Allan, Hannah Waldram and John Baron have been based at the Guardian's offices in Kings Place this week to undergo training and will be starting work on their beats of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds respectively from next week.
links for 2010-01-26
January 26, 2010 by sarahhartley-
The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has delivered a riposte to Rupert Murdoch's campaign to introduce paywalls to newspaper websites, claiming that it could lead the industry to a "sleepwalk into oblivion".
links for 2010-01-25
January 25, 2010 by sarahhartley-
Hyper-localism fits with the emerging trend of convergence, as consumers demand greater convenience for how they access and consume information. Existing technologies such as smart phones are already meeting this need, while the not-so-distant internet capable TVs of the near future will take it to another level. Just as satellite TV viewers pay for the packages that they want, internet users will become even more willing to pay for relevant content, which can be easily accessed via multiple-platforms.
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On two occasions, what I believe to be strong page leads were bumped down to filler status – money from Icelandic banks to be recovered by Bolton Council, and that Bolton schools are £2.6m in debt. Instead, snow was the favoured lead story, with at least four solid pages devoted to pictures of snowmen, igloos, snowbathers etc. over the four days.
links for 2010-01-23
January 23, 2010 by sarahhartley-
The mySociety chaps must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a double whammy election year.
And in preparation, they have already launched Democracy Club where they are calling on volunteers to make the forthcoming elections "the most transparent ever".
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I started this list when I spoke to students at a high school journalism conference on how it is possible to do everything you need as a journalist by using free products. Since then, this list continues to grow! It can be helpful for anyone trying to do good journalism on a tight budget.
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Strategic positioning of volunteering widgets. Where you display a volunteering widget can help make the connection between volunteering and civic engagement. On web pages where you cover local civic news (such as school board meetings or city council meetings), experiment with placing a volunteering widget in the sidebar, or in a box positioned mid-story. It’s easy to treat it as a kind of public service ad, since widget code often comes in (or can be customized to fit) standard online ad dimensions.
Positioning a volunteering widget alongside your explicitly civic content (not just near stories about local volunteer efforts) implies the “you can take action” connection.
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you can’t knock the collaborative effort behind Animal Finders, the service based out of Oxford that helps people to report lost and found animals. There’s even, of course, a Google Map.
links for 2010-01-22
January 22, 2010 by sarahhartley-
I am not defending the decision by local councils to publish their own newspapers. I think there are dangers in this, but only if they take over from local newspapers as a main source of local information – which they won’t do, of course. However, I fully understand why exasperated local councils might want to tell their own story in the face of the aggressively negative slant given by many local newspapers.
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If the Tories win the General Election, Hunt made clear they would scrap the current plans for eight consortia to run pilot schemes for Scotland, Wales and England, using money from the government.
