Today’s links 05/11/2012
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How journalists and newsrooms can use Pinterest « The Buttry Diary
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Some of your efforts will generate strong engagement and some will fall flat. But when people are spending as much time with a social tool as they do with Pinterest, you should seek to have them spend some of that time with you.
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Today’s links 05/02/2012
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HypeYourLocal | Tell your hyperlocal successes to the World
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The idea for this came about in the lead up to #TAL12 in Birmingham in the weekend just gone. Inspired by the event, we registered the domain today and put this site up.
What’s it about? – Each of us doing Hyperlocal sites are, rightfully, focused on our own local areas. We thought a session at #TAL12 where those running independent hyperlocals highlighted stories that they’ve covered – ones that they were proud of and that helped the community – would give two benefits: A reminder to contributors of great work they’d done (often easy to forget) and generally encourage the hyperlocal scene.
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Today’s links 04/30/2012
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Storyful. » Storyful and Demotix join forces to create a unique real-time newswire
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Demotix will now deliver its content through a dedicated channel on the StoryfulPro platform, which is used by some of the world’s leading media organisations, including YouTube, ABC News and the New York Times. Clients will now have the ability to source from a comprehensive real-time feed of content, discovered and verified by Storyful alongside rights-cleared imagery from the Demotix network.
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On the other hand there are the hyperlocal community sites, these may not be WordPress sites but might be Ning’s, Facebook groups and more – but they don’t do ‘news’ as other people define it, they seek to pass on information and allow communities to comment and talk about their area.
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High hopes for hyperlocal media | Lily Canter
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Start a hyperlocal website. There is a market for it especially if local newspapers are failing to provide decent coverage for their area. There is a growing online audience and the overheads and start up costs are virtually nil. However you do need to be prepared to work for free in the beginning, you do have to have some business sense and you need to be able to think beyond display/classified adverting models.
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Hyperlocal news manifesto – Boing Boing
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community reporting requires more than cogs. It requires more than an academic familiarity of those it covers. What meaningful local reporting requires is a personal investment. If the reporter doesn’t stand to benefit from a healthy community, his coverage will serve to dramatize and exacerbate problems rather than solve them.
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PG research reveals 242 local press closures in 7 years – Press Gazette
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These news gaps include Port Talbot, a 50,000-strong community in South Wales which has been without a local newspaper since 2009 when the Port Tablot and Neath Guardians were both closed by Trinity Mirror.
While Port Talbot continues to be covered by regional daily – the South Wales Evening Post – it no longer has the in-depth coverage offered by its own title.
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Today’s links 04/20/2012
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Introducing the data journalism handbook | News | guardian.co.uk
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Edited by Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Gray and Lucy Chambers, the book will be made freely available online under a CC BY-SA license so anyone can read and share it.
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Today’s links 04/19/2012
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The BBC, Regional News and Sport, and Hyperlocal Blogs | Andy Mabbett, aka pigsonthewing
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Interested hyperlocal bloggers (in England only, for now, as that’s the extent of Robin’s remit) are therefore invited to submit details of their blog, with links to a couple of their recent news stories, including original content (no churnalism, please) in a comment below, for consideration by Robin. I must emphasise that, while he’s kindly agreed to consider including such links, no promises have been made.
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Talk About Local » “How my successful hyperlocal improved my job prospects”
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Which is why I’m cheekily changing the headline on this story. In the hyperlocal interconnected world, success can come in many shapes and isn’t necessarily measured in ad revenues.
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Today’s links 04/16/2012
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““Civic datasets tell stories, and when not properly contextualized, those stories can do more harm than good. Infographics and data visualizations can only serve the public good if they provide the proper context,” said Science, Tech and Civicsystems editor for Shareable, Paul Davis, in his e-book, “Hacking is a civic duty.” “
Making a collaborative map to crowdsource events and news
I’ve been experimenting with maps for storytelling, newsgathering and information for quite some time, aiming to best utilise the specific attributes of different available platforms.
For a few examples; I like the simplicity of using google maps to display information such as this map of northern food bloggers’ locations. The utter ease of reasonably large spreadsheet visualisation using fusion tables for this and the live data element of Zeemaps proved useful with this.
But the issue of involving the reader to crowdsource the map’s content always proves a bit trickier – I loved the possibilities the Leeds Cutswatch map offered using Usahidi for instance, but the backend management and integration it required probably put it out of reach for smaller operators such as bloggers and hyperlocals to replicate.
This weekend I’ve played around with the crowdsourcing mapping capabilities of n0tice.com. (Disclosure; this is a platform which I’m part of the team working on.)
The Guardian Travel website used this very effectively this weekend to crowdsource readers events and tips – basically the EasterWeekend.n0tice.com noticeboard feeds automatically onto the Travel website and a few design tweaks on their pages means everything appears in the Guardian’s house style for icons etc.
Inspired by this I came up with this simple hack to display the events of a noticeboard I run for The Northerner blog. Bearing in mind I know no code……it was a simple rehash of the embed code for the Travel one but now anyone who wants to add an event or news story from the north of England to this map simply log into n0tice.com and visit the northerner.n0tice.com board. What do you think?
View Larger Map
Fun to play around with yes, but there’s a few considerations for any publisher, whether you’re a blogger like myself or a mainstream news organisation, to take into account when crowdsourcing material like this so tools have been built into the n0tice.com backend;
- live updating. Be able to automate the display of data entered – from form to feed.
- moderate submissions. Ability to control exactly what content remains on a noticeboard (and therefore the map).
- measure the map’s effectiveness, or otherwise, with standard metrics eg. Page views, most viewed etc.
- promote. Easily integrate into the publishers established platforms such as blogs, twitter, facebook etc.
Soon the n0tice.com api will be available to any publishers small or large (sign up here if you are interested) so I’m hoping what I’ve fiddled around with here to demonstrate The Northerner might prompt some far greater ideas for where this particular open journalism adventure could lead.
Today’s links 04/07/2012
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Dear Newsroom Curmudgeon … « The Buttry Diary
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Digital journalists don’t just add new tasks to the work you’re already doing. We work differently. Liveblogging during an event you are covering doesn’t take more time than taking notes during the same event. It just uses the time differently (and may provide notes you can actually
needuse).
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News Nerd Jobs: A Site For Submitting And Finding Journalism-Programmer Gigs – 10,000 Words
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Ten ideas for news outlets using Pinterest | Online Journalism Features | Journalism.co.uk
Today’s links 04/04/2012
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AP agrees deal with livestreaming video platform Bambuser | Media news | Journalism.co.uk
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“What Bambuser has allowed us to do is contact the actual person generating the live stream so we can firstly verify it but also ask all sorts of other questions to find out more about the event. Bambuser’s got the technology and the people on the ground; we can add verification and context to aid understanding of the story.”
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BBC sets date for first Breakfast broadcast from the north | UK news | guardian.co.uk
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Hyperlocal – one every three minutes : daveharte.com
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- I looked at all the RSS feeds listed on Chris Taggart‘s Openly Local database of Hyperlocals.
- I corrected those that weren’t resolving and omitted those pointing to now-dead sites.
- I took out those that were feeds for a forum as they tend to include lots of ‘stuff for sale’ messages along with their replies (plus, I wasn’t really interested in ‘conversation’).
- I created an OPML file for the remaining 431 feeds.
- I created a Google Reader Bundle so that I would then have a single RSS feed.
- I used ifttt.com to push that feed to a new twitter account @AllHyperlocal
- I counted how many tweets that feed produced. I use a google spreadsheet created by Martin Hawksey (who also gave me the ‘bundle’ advice above) to produce pretty visuals and to archive the tweets.
news story published on a Hyperlocal website every 3 minutes.
Here’s what I did to try and find this out.
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