"While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I've been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground."
The successful candidate will be a confident blogger, know their yelps from their tweets, have a passion for local news and understand how to build relationships with the local community. A journalism qualification is desirable but not essential.
Quite correctly the report touches on different levels of localness, suggesting that audiences generally percieve a hierarchy that looks like this: UK -> My Nation -> My Region -> My Local Area -> My Community.
I like this, although I might be tempted to take out 'Local Area' and replace with My City/Town or something more specific. The word 'local' is far too ambiguous to be a useful definition.
At least this hierarchy removes the awful terms 'hyperlocal' or 'ultra-local' - 'community is a term that is much easier to relate to my surroundings.
Apparently the research showed that there are 69 media websites covering the Salford and Greater Manchester area... wow!
When it comes to the crunch, declining revenues from the traditional advertising model, there are some overdue numbers on how specialist online sites are taking all important audience away from traditional newspaper earners - think rightmove for property, Auto Trader for cars and totaljobs for recruitment.
Then a statement that "Local journalism is important because it underpins democratic participation in the UK" and it does this using four key methods: Informing, representing, campaigning and interrogating.
Next up, a panel debate on the proposal for independently funded news consortia to take over ITV's public service provision of regional news.
The basic story is that ITV are no longer required to provide regional news programmes from the point of digital switchover in 2012 and have said that, due to the cost, they will not continue.
Alex Connock, Chief Executive, Ten Alps - "We would take advertising slots on Northern Irish TV tomorrow if possible... without any news subsidy".
Ruth Spratt, Managing Director, MEN Media, unconvincingly tried to explain why additional public money is required to supply a regional news programme on channel three given that their Channel m is currently fully operational on existing funding.
John Angeli, Head of Content, Press Association - "It's not just about nightly news programmes, it's about content on all platforms".
The Press Association want to be suppliers of text, audio and video content for everyone to use across all platforms.
Michael Jermey, Director of News, Current Affairs and Sport at ITV then explained how ITV are intending to end their provision of regional news across the UK, thus saving them an estimated £68 million in production costs, but are intending to keep some ownership of the branding and look and feel of any regional news programme that takes that slot.
The current regional news time slot is estimated to be worth around £30 million in potential advertising revenue (totalled across all of the UK) which could be an incentive for independent consortia to come forward and produce a regional news programme for the channel 3 slot.
Oh, but Michael says ITV are intent on keeping any potential advertising revenue, saying that allowing independent news consortia to advertise in the slot and earn revenue would be the equivalent of top slicing ITV and this will not happen.
Michael Jermey, "We consider it our airtime, we keep the revenue".
Thankfully lunch arrived to save us from a discussion that, frankly, belongs in the past and should not be a part of the future.
Taking stock over lunch there was one thought on my mind... this is supposed to be a conference on the future of local media, not a debate on how to maintain regional television for another 15 years.
The afternoon began in much brighter spirit with Will Perrin, founder of Talk About Local, finally turning the conversation around to the subject of local and the future.
Kings Cross Environment is where it all started for Will, 800 stories in an area about 1 x 1.5 miles allowing local people to campaign, interrogate, inform and represent their small part of the UK.
The Kington Blackboard demonstrates where Talk About Local is going, aiming to train 3,000 people across the UK in the next few years in the tools, methods and techniques to set up websites for their own local areas.
Pits 'n' Pots, a website for Stoke On Trent, was hailed by Will as a perfect example of holding local democracy to account.
Want a local TV station on the Internet... try local.me, a simple model that Will and others have set up to quickly demonstrate how easy, and cheap, it can be.
So onto another panel discussion.
Robert Hardie, Content Strategy Director at Northcliffe Media said that "The Internet provides a mechanism for those people that have a story and want it published. We need to find a business model to fund journalism that can dig out the stories that people don't want published."
Neil Benson, Editorial Director, Regionals, Trinity Mirror followed that by saying that Trinity Mirror wants to expand their websites from the core business of news and sport journalism into local hubs with a much broader range of information.
Why? Because, he said, "we are hard to work with".
So, Steve Barnett from the University of Westminster asked from the back of the room, do we need professional journalists working for newspapers and broadcasters to reveal the local equivalent of the mp expenses scandal, to uncover police corruption, find the dirty hospital wards, and so on.. or can very local community sites do this?
Those that provided an answer could see a future that is already starting to exist now, where sites like Birmingham: It's Not Shit are starting to contribute to democracy in the UK, to inform, represent, campaign and interrogate.
Those that stayed silent were still trying to work out where they can find new sources of funding to prop up decades old business models that are about to die out.
There is a good list of the advantages in using maps:
They provide an easy way to grasp a story at a glance
They allow users to drill down to relevant information local to them very quickly
Maps can be created very easily, and added to relatively easily by non-journalists
Maps draw on structured data, making them a very useful way to present data such as schools tables, crime statistics or petrol prices
They can be automated, updating in response to real-time information
However, the post doesn't really get stuck into the difficulties and disadvantages of this approach. I've outlined a couple of points below which I believe are major barriers to a successful map-based news website.
User Experience / Usability User research suggests that most of the audience still see a map as a route-finding device, a answer to "show me how to get from A to B" or "tell me where this building is", whereas news has long been consumed in a linear fashion, "Give me the big story of the day, what's the second most important item, and so on".
Mapping functionality is also quite complicated for a lot of web users and you cannot rely on the audience easily understanding how to pan, zoom, scroll a map, or cope with the differences in graphical pin-points, hover panels, embedded audio/video content.
Web users generally want to get at information quickly, particularly time-sensitive journalism content, and any design or interface barriers that prevent this can be quite a turn-off.
Geo-tagging or "Where do i put this story?" It would be simply fantastic to be able to assign a latitude/longitude tag to every piece of content we create so that it can appear at the correct location on a map.
The reality is that this is simply not possible and even if it were possible, further difficulties emerge.
For example, imagine a bunch of stories appearing this week on transfer deadline day relating to one football club making several new player signings, whilst also being in the news for other financial or business reasons. We can easily tag all stories with the lat/long relating to the football club's home stadium, but how do users easily find and navigate between a cluster of stories located at the same point on the map?
Often there is more than one relevant location that can be associated with a news story. For example, a person from location A, in partnership with another person from location B, is arrested for an armed robbery in location C, and the forthcoming trial will take place at location D.
Can we geo-tag this story with all relevant locations? Does the technology understand the difference between each location? Does it matter?
Importantly, whatever the technology or editorial strategy delivers, how do we communicate this to our audience within the mapping interface? An interface which is already quite complicated and overcrowded with the standard set of mapping tools, place labels, and options for different graphical layers.
Then we have the regional story. For example, House prices in Devon have fallen by X.
Devon is generally not a point on a map (it might be if the map displayed all of Europe in a small enough image size on screen and it was not possible to zoom in!) and yet we have a potentially important news story that needs to be geo-tagged.
Postcodes introduce a similar problem as they are also polygonal areas rather than specific points. Tagging content with postcode does not provide a dot on the map for that content to be assigned to, it provides a region boundary similar to county, borough, electoral ward, and the many other areas of this type.
News stories can relate to other shape patterns. A news story about a river or a train journey needs a line on the map.
Some of these examples can be solved by providing a single point approximation to represent the story, although this can also be dangerous.
The BNP membership map from 2008 provided several lessons in this area. At one point, whilst trying not to pinpoint exact houses, postcodes where used to make the information less specific. Unfortunately the mapping tool, in trying to be clever with the data, plotted the information at a specific point in the centre of the postcode, thereby seeming to be an accurate house-by-house set of data - but unfortunately pointing at all the wrong points on the map.
What's the big story? As I mentioned under the usability heading above, audiences have become very familiar with consuming news in a certain way that is very different to the map based approach.
A map is perfect for showing me something that is happening near to me, especially if it's a story that wouldn't normally make the top headlines, but I still want someone to tell me the big news, even if it is a little further away.
And that, I think, is the key target right now. Not simply solving these challenges and aiming to get as much of our content as possible onto a map, but finding the right way to include mapping as part of the consumption of news content.
Speaking at Where2.0 in 2008Adrian Holovaty stated that 'One question i like to ask myself is, would my site succeed without maps?'.
Microsoft, through their MSN Local portal, are hoping to provide local news on a map, in partnership with local newspapers across the UK.
Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN, said: “We are hoping to take feeds from local newspapers and tag every piece of information to a map. Hyper-local news online has never been more important and we think this is a really interesting growth area.”
Very interested to see how this compares with Trinity Mirror's beta news map in Merseyside which has improved since it's launch last year but still does not feel very user friendly.
Geo-tagging news content is a really complex task and presenting this on a map defies the usual logic of consuming news in order of importance, can't wait to see how Microsoft tackle this.
Robin Hamman (@cybersoc) and I spent many an hour talking through this type of aggregation during his time at the BBC, primarily as method for BBC Local journalists across the UK to work more effectively with the local bloggers and active websites within their patch.
Sadly we never got past the talking part which is why it's really great to see something like this finally come alive, hooray!
Northcliffe and its digital arm Associated Northcliffe Digital have begun the roll-out of its ambitious plans for a network of hyperlocal websites.
The new platforms will be evenly distributed between areas with existing Northcliffe titles and those which are not served.
The sites are intended as platform for the local community and not as a traditional community news site, said Bryan, who said the network would be complimentary to the existing thisis network of regional news sites.
"What we are trying to do is to deliver a network of local sites that are aimed at providing local people in quite small communities a place and a space online to debate local issues," he added.
The sites look nice enough (See Exmouth as an example) and tick all the cliched boxes of current web design... a homepage segmented by round-cornered components, the ability to create a user profile, a twitter/facebook-esque status update, plus the standard newspaper diet of motors, properties, jobs and classifieds.
My concern is that the site already feels very busy and driven editorially by the desires of Northcliffe. There also seems to be very little recognition or attempt to integrate these sites with the existing blogs, websites, profiles of web active people already in the area - surely a key element of getting a foothold in any local community.
If you want to help local people in small communities get involved in their local space on the web then my hunch is that the Talk About Local approach has a better model.
The Guardian has today launched Open Platform with the hope of freeing up their data and allowing users to build other tools and services using Guardian content.
Of particular interest is the work on a crowd-sourced solution to geo-tagging.
"Stamen and OpenStreetMap developed a service that they hope will encourage Guardian readers to "geo-tag" the newspaper's content, positioning every article, video and picture on a map so users can find news, commentary, video and other content related to their area.
The Guardian experimented with geo-location during last year's US presidential election, and hopes the project will help add location information to its vast archive of content."
A 'digital kitemark' to differentiate quality journalism from 'the noise of the web' should be introduced, according to a new report published this week.
“A digital kitemark… would identify and differentiate professional journalism amidst the noise of the web,” the report says.
In my experience websites are already pretty good at providing this differentiation already.
As for suggesting that the "noise of the web" is inferior, that somebody enthusiastically producing content because they are interested in the subject matter is somehow not as useful or interesting as somebody who has been paid money and told by their boss to write some words on this subject.... huge generalisations I know, but I think somebody might have missed the point somewhere along the line.
The website, www.wiki-north-east.co.uk, is aiming to be "a collaboration of editorial articles and user generated content for and about the people, places and events of the North East."
Chief Executive Sly Bailey said that the service was a follow-up to the development of a series of hyper-local websites across the group.
"As a next step we're launching a map-based news service across our regional sites with our editorial content geo-tagged and pinpointed to postcode level bringing our brands ever closer to our users and this is live in a public beta today on the Liverpool Echo."
A few smaller examples of this approach have been around for a while - most notably the SE1 News Map - but this is the first major news publisher to try this map based approach.
A quick look at the story tags suggests there are 541 geo-tagged stories on the Liverpool site from the last two and a half months - and that presents something of a design and usability challenge to present this volume of content within a single map window on the web.
The Ofcom website is today announcing that the BBC Trust's Public Value Assessment (into the BBC's proposals for a new Local Video service) and provisional conclusions will now be published by the 27 November 2008.
Ofcom will submit the Market Impact Assessment to the Trust so that it can be published on the same day.
Noooooo!!!! I've already mentioned my aversion to the use of 'hyper' and 'ultra' as supposedly valid prefixes to the word local when it comes to defining interactive services or content propositions.
Apparently, suitable candidates must have "an interest in community journalism and a passion for the hyper-local".
If the successful candidate should ever happen to read this post then please, please do let me know how you managed to demonstrate your passion for the hyper-local, as opposed to the rest of us who merely have a passion for local.
More activity from websites looking to improve their coverage of local crime information.
This time it's ITV who are launching a crime section on ITV.com, tying crime data and related news to the eleven regions in the ITV Local network.
ITV is working with the charity Crimestoppers to add crime information to the site in the form of 'most wanted' posters, an archive of crime video reports and a user-generated crime reporting feature - so if you spot anyone vandalising something (or worse) you could post the evidence to the site. (Wouldn't it be better to send it to the police?)
ITV Local, which offers news, weather and entertainment content to different regions, recorded four million video views in May.
The four ITV regions where video has taken off the most are Meridian, which accounted for 16% of views, Central at15%, Anglia with 11% and London at 11%.
ITV's London region saw the biggest month-on-month growth for May recording a 50% boost in video views.
These numbers in the context of "12 million views of programmes or clips on ITV.com in May" - although it's not clear whether the 4 million to ITV Local are included in the overall 12 million or not.
If this is the case then it would seem a solid endorsement of the value of local content on the web, particularly given that the overall figures for ITV.com are led by such high-profile output as Coronation Street, Britain's Got Talent and Euro 2008 football.
The Huffington Post is planning to expand into local news across the US, founder Arianna Huffington said last night, beginning with a site edited for the community of Chicago.
Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in "dozens of US cities". The Chicago site will initially be curated by just one editor.
Maybe it's a reflection of the popular discussion topics in Chicago but I found it interesting, and slightly amusing, that the proposed content is listed as "news, sport, crime, ..."
"...I thought the two biggest problems with LoudounExtra.com were poor integration of the site with washingtonpost.com and not enough outreach into the community … ala basically me speaking with every community group that would have me."
Northcliffe Media have begun geo-coding stories produced on their "thisis" websites as the group prepares to introduce geographical targeting on the "next generation" of local news websites.
The 10 remodeled sites, including thisiscornwall.co.uk, are part of the plans to re-vamp the 55 existing sites and to add 35 new regional websites under Northcliffe's 'thisis' brand, by September this year.
Unfortunately the localisation functions are not currently visible, but should be available in a few months when there are enough geo-coded stories available to support the service.
This is a shame, and potentially missing a trick, as enabling users to watch the service develop from the ground up might have provided the opportunity for useful feedback on how the stories are being tagged.
Robert Hardie (Northcliffe content strategy director) has highlighted the difficulty in knowing how to tag an individual story with suitable location data - seemingly postcodes in this case - to ensure it is found in the right place by the right people.
In my mind the success of the service will depend on two key areas, neither of which is easy to get right:
1\ How flexible can a journalist be in tagging a story? Can multiple postcodes be associated with the same story if it affects multiple areas? Can a group of postcodes be used to illustrate a story is relevant across a whole region? How much granularity does the postcode tagging allow - postcode area/district/sector/unit?
2\ How will the visual design of the site allow users to access this content? The same questions apply as in the point above, but this time relating to the user. Can I search for stories purely on my street? Or across a wider area? And how will the editorial prioritisation of a big news story be reflected if I am searching by location rather than by size of story or time of publication?
I guess we'll have to wait a couple of months to find out!
The new sites' geographical targeting functionality will allow users to enter a postcode to find all the stories on the site that affect them. The localisation functions will remain hidden until journalists have built up enough stories with postcode data.
“It should only take month or two until we’ve built up that bulk of stories with postcode data attached to them,” said Hardie.
Because not all stories affect only one specific point, the company is finding geocoding challenging, Hardie said.
He said that while a traffic accident might affect only one location, a story about bed-blocking in hospitals would affect people over a wide area.
“On the one hand it’s opening up a major opportunity for us, but it also means we’re going have to learn new skills and make value judgements about how we tag stories with postcodes,” Hardie said.
“It’s a new skill that we’re going to have to get used to doing very cleverly,” he added.
The main inspiration for getting this blog up and running was the O'Reilly Where2.0 Conference which took place in Burlingame, CA, from 12th-14th May this year.
I've been meaning to write up some overall thoughts of the event but have been waiting to get the site live first.
So, full review to come along shortly, but in the meantime here are my postings from the conference (on my personal site).
Links
