EVEN the least fogeyish of politicians have been flummoxed by the internet. Tony Blair, champion of all things modern, paid no end of lip service to the potential of new media as prime minister but was comically technophobic himself. Still, the internet plays a role in huge areas of British public life: party politics, punditry and government itself. But web aficionados lament a yawning gap with America, and with the most go-ahead corners of Europe.
I have been working on an assignment for the digital newsroom module this week and chose to cover the local elections in my ward of Newton Heath.As part of the project we had to write a critical analysis and here is part of my submission.
Digital society and thereon digital news is dependent on people, for the most part unpaid engaging with and using the technology at their disposal for dispersing and discussing information.........I continue and please excuse my ramblings
There are two fairly obvious points to be made at this juncture. Firstly because of the nature of the majority of the contributors to the medium, it has to be a popular subject. People are only going to contribute if they are interested. Secondly the medium has to be available.
I will return to the first point shortly but let us bear in mind the locality of the story. Read the feature part of my article and you will see that the area is considered one of the most run down areas of Manchester. An unnamed councillor described it as an area of depravity.
I have no figures to hand but I wouldn’t mind surmising that internet use is much lower than most other areas; educational skills are probably below standard. Thus the digital chatter will be and was considerably lower. The residents of an affluent suburb with a problem with their council will form action groups, set up forums, write blogs, join social network interest groups and bombard the comment section of their local online paper in an attempt to get their message across.
Now the first point, the issue itself.Local elections are rarely well reported unless there is a particular local issue or candidate that attracts coverage.The nationals leave well alone apart from high level analysis and speculation about its effect on the national parties.
Given the budgets that local councils are responsible for and the fact their decisions will impact far more on an individual than national politics. In Greater Manchester the balance of power will determine whether the city follows London in introducing a congestion charge. Yes you have guessed, there are many forums about that.
An issue for the local press perhaps but a search of the Manchester evening news revealed just two articles written up to the date of this piece. One of them incidentally about a father and son standing against each other.
As for loggers’ search of technocrati reveals just two people that blog about local politics in Manchester.One,Dave Ottewell for the Manchester evening news an the other Chris Paul ,an amateur blogger with leanings to the Labour party.
A quick search of the candidates revealed little more. Only the Lib Dem contender, Damien O’Connor has a blog of any description and that had not been updated for over one month and yet he is standing in a close race.
Yes all the parties have local sites, some have published their local manifestos and this helped in the research for the articles.
According to Internet World stats, 1.319 billion people use the Internet world wide according to Internet World Stats. Writing in the Harvard International Review, philosopher N.J. Slabbert, asserted that “the Internet is fast becoming a basic feature of global civilization, so that what has traditionally been called "civil society" is now becoming identical with information technology society as defined by Internet use”
Paul Bradshaw talks of a world where we have gone from information scarcity to information overload in a century and where the ordinary person, provided that he has the tools and technology to do so, (and that is an important qualification) has gone from needing
“The news industry for information, to one where they can access - and produce - it themselves”
However the interest has to be there.
In America, independent sites such as the Huffing ton post are armed with 1800 citizen journalists who are following the trail of the primary candidates. They are creating news. One, scooped dome remarks made by Democrat candidate Barack Obama as she filmed his speech in Pensylvania,his comments made the national networks.
However there is little doubt that the local elections in the UK are being afforded the same sort of coverage, bar the contest for the London mayor.
Again a technocrati search for Newton Heath reveals an array of trainspotters You Tube videos taken at the railway sheds and little else other than drunken youths playing up for the camera. One says that he is bored and supports Manchester United.
There is a temptation in an exercise like this to let the medium drive the story .
Mindy McAdams makes the point that
“The story is THE story. If it is strong then it will work, the fundamentals of journalism should not change.”
I couldn’t agree more. It would have been very easy to abandon this venture on the basis that there was little in the way of online resource. There has been minimal coverage of the local elections as mentioned.
So my blog can perhaps be seen as a torch bearer for reporting on the local elections in East Manchester.After all it is creating the digital content that is sadly missing from the broadband wires at present.
And that perhaps brings us around to Paul Bradshaw’s model and that my work will be the starting alert for developing news stories in the model for the digital news room.
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