Trick or treat for community reporters

Calling all community reporters or those thinking of becoming one.

Fancy some Trick or Treat Tasty bites of New Media?

Well head along to the Central Manchester Friends’ Meeting House in Mount Street this Friday 30th Oct where People's Voice Media will be giving community reporters a chance to use some of the tools of the new media trade.

A variety of different audio and video equipment and audio and video editing software will be set up for you to try out and record onto and then edit.You will also be able to uploaded it to the internet and the best piece could be in line for a prize.

BBC’s Ranvir Singh the co-presenter of North West Tonight will be holding a questions and answer session from 2pm until 3pm.

There will also be a chance for you to have a go at pitching a new idea for a show or event or suggest a story that you feel needs covering.

The event runs from 11-4pm.

The secret ingredient which makes hyperlocal pay

Has someone found a hyper local model that generates revenue?

This guest post from Richard M. Anderson,over at Reflections of a Newsosaur suggests that this may indeed be the case.He

has found a way to generate as much as a fifth of his ad revenue through hyper local websites featuring, among other things, blogs that are sponsored and maintained by local merchants.

So what is the secret.Well Richard says that he has

stepped back and re-focused on hyper local population centers of 20,000 to 50,000 people in four communities in Maine. Why? Because it is in these places, whether urban neighborhoods, suburban villages or ex-urban towns, that citizens are most closely engaged in the practice of democracy at its root level.

The model consists of two products – branded web sites called VillageSoup and separately branded weekly newspapers.The secret ingredient is

sponsored postings that businesses can buy. The posts, which run right next to the ordinary editorial content, are not controlled by us. No fetters, no filters

Why print may still lead the way in community journalism

Some interesting thoughts on community journalism from Newspaper project.org

Speculation about the Internet replacing community newspapers is counter-intuitive. What are you going to do when you want to know what’s on sale this week at the Piggly Wiggly? Send out a Twitter message for Ricky McLeod? Google chicken quarters in Sumter? People who are engaged in a community read a local paper, and advertisers know this. You ignore the workings of your community at your own peril. Free speech and taxpayer representation are the most basic aspects of a democracy, and good community newspaper journalism is at the core of it all.

They make a good point.Often people wanting community information are of the generation that will prefer the older methods of communication.

However community is about everyone in that community,so methods of communicating to the younger generations must not be neglected .

10 ways to use social media in the printed word

Woody Lewis over at Mashable suggests 10 ways in which newspapers are using social media to save the industry.(ht-Sarah Hartley

1.Twitter headline feeds

2.by the acquisition of social media providers

3.creating more online events to attract more readers

4.the continued promotion of user generated content and the philosophy of getting the reader involved.

5.setting up story based communities

6.by using collaborative outsourced news services

7.customized delivery of content

8.use of branded community grouping around shared interests and needs

9.By publishing application programming interfaces, or APIs, for third-party software developers, to encouraged the creation of a new class of social media applications.

by maybe 10 is the most important-by turning their back on the delivery platform that got them there in the first place ie the printed word

how community and web can interact for the global good

Global voices online asked for proposals back in January for

activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities

areas which they believed were being neglected by the web.

Now they have a shortlist of five after receiving 270.

This is a prime example of how community and web can interact for the global good

You can read all about them on the site but here are the five shortlisted

1.Abidjan Blog Camps-series of “blog camps” around Abidjan in which current Ivorian bloggers can discuss the issues affecting them and show new bloggers how to join their ranks.

2.Ceasefire Liberia-where freelance journalist Ruthie Ackerman aims to help foster a transatlantic Liberian blogging community in a country torn apart by civil war.

3.Real Experience of the Digital Era - China where Education documentary filmmaker Wei Zhang will train male and female sex workers who use the AZYZ center how to maintain a blog and upload short video documentaries to share their experiences, opinions, and troubles in order to promote more understanding of the region's sex worker population.

4.Nomad Green - Mongolia which will train Mongolian citizens how to spread awareness - both at home and abroad - about their country's environmental crisis.

5.Empowerment of Women Activists in Media Techniques - Yemen.a new media training course for female politicians, activists, and human right workers in order to bring a new perspective to the Arabic-language blogosphere and to build an online network of Yemeni gender activists

Ht-Journalism.co.uk

Some pitfalls in setting up community

Boagworld's posting, seven harsh truths about running online communities is getting a fair amount of attention.

Given that this area is seen as major one for the new journalism and its potential is recognised by the authors,it may be suffering from a headlong rush into the area without the necessary thought behind it.

The seven points are all good.Here they are in brief but take a look at the full piece

1.Technology doesn't create community

2.Building up the network takes time and committment

3.You need to understand how to lead your users

4.The personlaity of the site will set the tone.

5.Allied to four is the ability to learn from mistakes and accept some humility

6.Don't try to control the message,let the community decide what they want to hear.

7.It is important to get a critical mass of users to get involved

Simon Owens on how bloggers are filling a gap

Over at Media Shift,Simon Owens takes a look at how bloggers are filling the gaps that are left in the media as local newspaper coverage recedes.

As city daily papers continue to strain under the pressure of massive reporter lay-offs, hundreds of knowledgeable and independent local bloggers are rising up and finding themselves with small, niche audiences that sometimes provide massive political sway. And as these local bloggers continue to carve out their beats, local politicians and reporters are increasingly courting them in attempts to steer media coverage.

It was a point I made on Friday when looking at the writings of Jon Slattery after he left the Press Gazette.

It is surely part of the trend that is going to continue as more and more journalists work independently of media organisations.The question though is who will pay for this journalism?

Another move towards hyper local

The online journalism review gives a new example of the hyper local concept.

A site called Our Town has been launched over in the States.According to the blurb

Unlike other community websites, you and anyone in your neighborhood contribute to the news and information that is important to you. What is the most important part of any town? It is the people who live there and make it a community. OurTown lets those people share, learn, and meet with each other on a regular basis. OurTown has sites that cover every ZIP code and community in the United States. We’re publishing basic news, national ads and information to your Local OurTown sites….and we need to find Local Editors for each community who to gather and upload Local content to OurTown’s easy-to-use templates.

Ojr says

the site claims 70,000 hyperlocal websites across the country, seeded with content partnerships, and an interesting business model. Local editors, who oversee the content of their sites, keep almost all of their local ad revenue (which they will sell) and a 40 percent cut of the national haul.

Interesting concept-will it work?