Saddleworth hyperlocal site launches

I came across a great new hyperlocal venture in the North West yesterday.

Saddleworth News has been launched by Richard Jones covering a much neglected but exciting and vibrant area of the region.

Richard explains the concept on his site

This is a new website giving news and information about Saddleworth and the surrounding area. It’s for people who live in Saddleworth as well as those who like to visit. To use a trendy piece of jargon, it’s a ‘hyperlocal’ website, which basically means it contains information about what’s going on in a particular local area. Sites like this one are starting all around the UK, as local people fill the void left by cutbacks and closures in the traditional media.

Northcliffe launches community app

Northcliffe's community of hyper local sites now have an I-Phone app to provide communities with the ability to plug into local news whilst on the move.

The company launched its network of the community websites last summer and now has 70 local websites covering the South and South West of England.

They cover areas with between 10,000 and 50,000 inhabitants that typically do not have a dedicated local online proposition.

Source-New Media age

Guardian's beatbloggers announced

The first of the Guardian's beat bloggers have been appointed.

Media Guardian has announced that

as part of our experimental Guardian Local initiative. The Local project is a small-scale community approach to local newsgathering, and will focus on the three politically engaged cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds.
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. The Local blogs will be launched during the first half of this year although no dates have been confirmed.

A call to arms-get off that chair

A call to journalism's arms from Mark Luckie over at 10,000 words.

Get out of the newsroom and into the community he says reminding us journalists that

Now that e-mail, Google, and other internet technologies are a permanent fixture in newsrooms, many more journalists are doing their work from the comfort of their chairs.

As he says

California Watch, the investigative reporting team for which I serve as a multimedia producer, announced the "Open Newsroom." For one day, the California Watch team is hitting the streets in neighborhoods around the state and inviting readers to come chat with us, share ideas, or just share a cup of coffee.

Hyerlocal hits India

Editor and Publisher report on the the Siasat Daily

The family-owned newspaper was founded exactly 60 years ago, and presents itself as "the most techno savvy Urdu newspaper" in the country. "Muslims are lagging in jobs, in education. We have to help our readers to feel more powerful, to be self-confident, as the illiteracy rate in our constituency is particularly high," comments news editor Amer Ali Khan

adding that

The most original endeavors, however, are Siasat's numerous extra-journalistic social activities, which encompass education (including computing, cooking classes and exam coaching) to health support, like the "Abid Ali Khan Eye Hospital", based in the old part of Hyderabad City. The publication was several times awarded - by Unesco among other - for its services to the community and in favor of girls education in particular.

Local people getting angry in local papers

Thanks to the Indy's John Rentoul who found this website which he says continues to provide a top-quality running commentary on the state of rage against modern life.

It is called Angry people in local newspapers and takes the news from the local papers from people who are literally angry with the way things are happening in their community.

Today's anger comes from the Norwich Evening news where

Almost 200 people have added their names to a petition calling for refurbishment work to be carried out on a pub which would enable a keen couple to re-open it.

Or this from the Bournmouth Echo where

Christmas lights have been banned from sale at Bournemouth’s Christmas market after council contractors branded them “not relevant.”
Now businessman Daryl Self, who bought in £200,000 worth of Blachere fairy lights in the hope of selling half his stock at the Christmas market, has been left with stacks of unopened boxes in a Christchurch warehouse.

Needless to say I have subscribed to the site on by RSS reader.

You can also follow them on twitter

Why ecosystems and not conglomerates are the future

The future of news lies in ecosystems according to Jeff Jarvis.

In his latest blog post,he argues that in an ecosystem-based economy, companies benefit,they find efficiency and growth,by working collaboratively.

This will be achieved through

1. Platforms. There’s tremendous benefit in building a platform and the more people use to succeed, the more the platform succeeds. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay – you know all the examples.

2. Entrepreneurial enterprises. Thanks to the platforms, it’s incredibly inexpensive to start new companies. It’s also a helluva lot cheaper to fail (and try again). This is why I believe that the future of news – and many other industries – is entrepreneurial: because it can be. It’s not just media and its bits. It’s manufacturing (because you can use others’ factories and distribution channels and your own customers as your platforms).

3. Networks. It is still necessary to gather the smalls together into bigs: audience brought together so advertisers can buy access to them more easily; purchasing brought together to get better prices. So there is business in creating and serving these networks.

10 ways to kill an online community

Some very good points made here



Ht-Adam Tinworth

Spot.us funds NYTs story

Yesterday's New York Times carried a story about the every expanding pollution in the Pacific ocean.

It's a great story and you can read it here.

One is really interesting is that it was part funded by Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists.

The story was written by Lindsey Hoshaw and Spot.Us, helped Hoshaw raise $10,000 from more than 100 people so she could report the story.

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.

Tools and tips to build an online community

JD Lasica gives a good presentation here at an ethnic media publishers at San Francisco State University the other week.

His strategy?

1. Be first with breaking news
2. Leverage Twitter
3. Enable conversations
4. Community video
5. Online petitions & causes
6. Geocoding & citizen photography
7. Google map mashups
8. Facebook communities

Tools to Build an Engaged Online Community

View more documents from JD Lasica.

A complete community connection-maybe I have seen the future

I have been reading a fascinating piece (Ht Sarah Hartley) from Steve Buttry which he describes as a

vision for transformation of our media company and of media companies in general.

Strong words indeed and Steve wants his company to become the " Complete Community Connection."

How well it will

1. provide an interactive, well-organized, easily searched, ever-growing, always updated wealth of community news, information and opportunities on multiple platforms. We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa.

2.For businesses, we will be their essential connection to customers, often making the sale and collecting the money.

The C3,as he dubs the project will retain news as being essential to mission and identity,but acknowledges that it

needs to be a portal through which you can easily reach any information or activities in the community. We need to provide a conveniently organized, easily searchable treasure chest of information that feeds multiple products that consumers reach in a variety of ways:

The important point is that the content will be driven by the marketplace and will reach some people who never read the paper

by doing important jobs such as connecting them with people of common interests or helping them find the products and services that help them live their lives.

I fully recommend a complete read of the article-it may well be the future

Some thoughts on the online community

A couple of posts on community took my eye.

This from jeremiah Owyang (ht-Dom Rodwell) who lists what he believes to be the 9 ways to kick start your community

1. Create compelling content on a recurring basis.
2. Reward users who fill out their profile.
3. Invite community influencers and advocates to the community first
4. Encourage interaction through conversations.
5. Reward top contributors:
6. Centralize your community around your real world events.
7. Use virtual events tp integrate community:
8. Integrate with your website –and other customer touchpoints.
9. Encourage employees to get active.

Stuart Glendinning Hall looks at the various tools that a community manager has to bring an online community together.

One thing that he does advocate is the 90/9/1 rule

every 90 readers the remaining ten per cent will contribute to a lesser or greater extent, of that the top 1 per cent the most active.

which despite having come in for

criticism recently, and been described as a myth rather than reality, but I believe it still has value for community managers, especially when used as a heuristic 'rule of thumb'.

Social community can be money but it needs to be private and socially exclusive

Is this the magical formula for making an online community pay its way?

The Huffington Post reports that ASMALLWORLD

has reported an 11% increase in ad revenue from Q1 to Q2 and plans to be profitable by Q4. This remarkable turnaround — the site laid off 40% of its staff last fall — is all the more surprising given the downturn in the advertising market and the debate lingering over the profitably of social networking sites as a whole.

But before we all rush out and copy the model,one thing to bear it mind,

It describes itself as a private international community of culturally influential people who are connected by three degrees

Whatever happened to citizen journalism

When I started this blog,it was one of the main topics of conversation back in 2006.The July 7th bombing,the Buncefield refinery fire,all were signs of a growing shift towards user generated connect.

But we here those phrases less and less in today's media talk

The trouble with citizen journalism on the Internet - and the reason newspapers will survive this onslaught, just as they did the predictions of doom and disaster meted out by radio and television - is threefold: quantity, quality and regularity, each intertwined with the others.

writes Bob Groeneveld,

Too much information,a lack of quality and frequency were all cited at the time as being a reason why the phenomena wouldn't last.

And yet with hyper local and community it may be that citizen journalism with some help from the professionals may be the saviour of content

If a journalist turned up at the door of your local site?

Will Perrin asks what would you do with a journalist?

He tells us that

some hyperlocal sites are doing so well that I am now getting queries about how journalists can ‘help’ hyperlocal sites from folk who are journalists or manage papers.

Will is a champion of hyperlocal,being the brains behind Talk About Local,a project to give people in their communities a powerful online voice.

It's an interesting question and he suggests examples of where you wake up

one day to find a nice shiny shrink-wrapped journalist on your doorstep with passable modern media skills and all the classic attributes a journalist should have

and his solution?

Use them to add capacity,to do legal and council reporting,to add a bit more bite and to transfer skills.

Any others you can think of?

A 21st century innovation plan for newspapers

Nichepapers aren’t a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution. They’re a living example of the institutional innovation that is the key to 21st century business. They’re not the same old newspaper, sold a different way. They are 21st century newspapers, built on new rules, that are letting radical innovators reinvent what “news” is.

The words of Umair Hague writing in the Harvard Business review as he puts forward a 21st century manifesto for the newspaper.

According to Umair there are eight essential innovations that must happen

1.They must impart knowledge and not news

2.that they should no longer dictate to their readers what their opinion should be.Instead co-create knowledge through "commentage.

3.Develop topics instead of articles

4.Strive for scarcity instead of circulation

5.Give the knowledge now and not the news then

6.Instead of seeking perfection through perfect grammar, perfect ledes, perfect headlines they should seek provocation instead.

7.pitch topics and stories to the community, and let the best ones snowball — through contributions like tips, criticisms, and corrections.

8.that they should be tech-neutral, using whatever works best for a given task.

Ht-Cyberjournalist

Increase in local ads on social networking sites

More evidence on the rise of social media and social networking sites comes from Borrell Associates.

They report that nearly 20 per cent of advertising on social networking sites comes from local business in the United States

Our assumption going into this research was that commercials on social networks were almost purely national. We’re estimating that local advertisers will account for about $641 million of nearly $3.3 billion this year trying to reach consumers via these sites.

The figures for the UK would be particularly interesting

Ht-Nieman Lab

The criteria needed for community to take off

What has happened to the deluge of community and local sites taking the place of traditional media?

Paid Content's Patrick Smith writes that

the usual uncoordinated rag bag of amateur and semi-pro bloggers is still persevering around the country, start-ups are even still trying to make a business out of the hyperlocal dream. But there are no such successes in my area, and chances are there aren’t in yours either.

For Patrick things need to be in place for the revolution to occur which include:

1.more partnerships between local amateurs and big-brand newspaper proprietors, who have the platform, technology and commercial clout to create editorial products communities will embrace.

2.The proper rewarding of community contributors by the media groups.

3.The big city papers should stop competing with the nationals.

4.That local contributors should get together instead of competing

5.that they should offer unique content

Memo to community sites-put out the welcome mat

Food for thought for those of us looking to expand into community and local sites.

Dan Mason writes that

We all know how social media has changed the goalposts. We all know that good journalism harnesses the power of conversation.
So, what’s the first thing you’d expect to see when you arrive on the doorstep of a local website? A Welcome mat. Right? Come on in. Pleased to meet you. Join the conversation. We’re human.

and takes a look at some sites and how welcoming or not they are?

Ht-Andy Dickinson