Wonderful incisive post from Jeff Jarvis which pulls together his thinking on the future of local news, including the hyperlocal and ultralocal. Excerpts include:

‘The next generation of local (news) won’t be about news organizations but about their communities. News is just one of the community’s needs. It also needs elegant organization. News companies and networks can help provide that. The bigger goal is to provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together. News will become a product of the community as much as it is a service to it.’

‘The heart of the work of local news organizations will be beats. Dogging a beat with reporting is the unique value a news organization can contribute to the press-sphere. Those beats will surely include local government but likely should not include areas that are not local, like science or movies. Beat reporters will not just be producing stories. They will open the process of news in blogs. They will work collaboratively with experts, bloggers, and people in the community (see: Jay Rosen’s beatblogging).’

We are doing a lot of this in Kings Cross, although we are volunteer driven and have no background in trad. media production, so it always seems odd to see someone writing about this as if it were revelatory.

Amidst all the hyperlocal froth people often forget that Facebook has a strong local neighbourhood component – not really by design, despite its origins in campus networks but more because people seem to love forming local area affinity groups.  People define their own communities on the ground that reflect human rather than administrative geography.  Anecdotal observation suggests that once people have their friends in th group the next thing they do is search out local ‘shout’ groups in Facebook and join them.

These Facebook groups can work powerfully with hyper or ultra local sites to cross over content and messages. I set up I Love Kings Cross as an experimental sideline to my Kings Cross community site.  The 160 odd people in the Facebook group are about 75% different to the 140-odd people who sign up to my Feedburner emails from the community site.

You can see examples everywhere – even in a town as proud of its old world traditions as Barnsley in Yorkshire has several thousand people in local groups

Some good local campaigns run in Facebook too, despite its many limitations.  In Birmingham’s Sandwell a local mum has set up a Facebook campaign to stop people dogging in a local beauty spot:

‘Reports of Dogging, Drug Dealing and Networking Homosexuals abusing the area for their antisocial behaviour. If I can get enough people to join this group I will use it to the local Councillor to help clean the place up and drive these animals away so that children and families can start reusing the area for it’s proper purpose’

In Scarborough in Yorkshire a local woman has set up a Facebook campaign about the proliferation of new traffic lights in the town centre.

‘… after dark .. .when everyone is asleep … the traffic lights in Scarborough have been getting together and mating .. resulting in EVEN MORE traffic lights. Surely this is the reason for the growing traffic light community, and surely the Council can’t be blamed for tearing up every roundabout and replacing it with yet more traffic slowing lights! I’m sure that if all the traffic lights in town are counted, and then divided by the towns population, we’ll have three each !!!!’

This group, now 1,900 strong crossed over into a local newspaper and an 800 signature petition to the council.  Google doesn’t turn up much hyperlocal community activity online outside Facebook in Scarborough. There are also a range of affinity groups for Scarborough – the biggest with 16,000 members.

Facebook simply reduces the sunstantial communication and time barriers to forming local groups.  Of course, Facebook is so yesterday for many of the digerati as they tweet away to each other and build new hyperlocal platforms.  But they could do well to follow Terry Leahy’s old axiom and follow the customer.  In real communities on the ground, people without the skills to build a better online pesence continue to vote with their feet for Facebook to find their ultra or hyperlocal voice.

Two good posts emerged recently from commentators on the traditional press and new media on new business processes and models.  Rather than those inherited from the industrial publishing process.

Jo Geary in Birmingham writes about the thorny subject of whether you need to be a journalist to write publicly about stuff that is happening in your patch:

‘The world does not need journalists to communicate the vast majority of information that is defined as news.’

‘Most of the news that comes out of media organisations on a daily basis is information that others either WANT people to know or HAVE to admit to. It is just re-written or re-presented in a format that fits that platform.’

“So, instead of journos, the world needs the generators of this information to communicate it better and to allow for redress to what they say.”

Jeff Jarvies in New York writes about an exercise he ran at a conference to scale a news organisation purely for the web, without the hangover of industrial era production systems:

‘So I proposed a problem to solve: What if a city, say Philadelphia, loses its paper tomorrow. What would you build in its place to serve the community? The group went to town. Rather than trying to hack at the old, they build something new.’

‘They calculated the likely revenue Philadelphia could support online and then figured out what they could afford in staffing. Instead of the 200-300-person newsroom that has existed in print, they decided they could afford 35 and they broke that down to include a new job description: “community managers who do outreach, mediation, social media evangelism.” They settled on three of those plus 20 content creators, two programmers, three designers, five producers (I think they were a bit heavy on those two), and — get this — only three editors. ‘

These are the realities for people who publish volunteer community sites, but it’s nice to see some wider recognition.

Bill has written a couple of interesting posts here and here

‘In many respects, I find some worry to be based on an overly romantic image of the history of journalism. As many at the conference pointed out: ‘When has there not be concern over the quality of journalistic coverage?’ Looking a the history of journalism, people more often focus on the prize winning journalists, than on the partisan press, or the checkered past of world wide news coverage. Transformation in the work of the journalist, and the new skills that might be required, might also fuel this concern quality.’

‘Our OxIS research has found Internet users to be as trusting in online content as they are with broadcasting, and more trusting in what they can find online than in newspapers.’

‘Journalistic coverage has always been limited by the so-called ‘news hole’ – the restrictions tied to a limited number of column inches in the newspaper. The Internet erases this limitation, but has raised concerns over the reader (and the journalist, I suspect) being confronted with too much information, too rapidly. Is this simply a holdover a top-down culture of managing the reader, or is information overload truly disabling the reader?’

‘Are reporters spending more time behind their computer screens, and less in the field, observing, conducting interviews, and gaining first-hand impressions of developments? Are bloggers filling some demand for reporting from the field, or are they simply rewriting other press coverage?’

Ultra local sites clearly fill in demand for reporting from the field – a demand that will be all the more acute as ‘local’ news retreats to a regional level. Good ultra local sites also counter the romanticism that only journalists can write decent content.

The BBC has some curious plans to invest £tens of millions in what appear to be regional news websites with a strong video content.  Roy Greenslade is hoovering up comments on this here over at the Guardian.  Roy is starting to get the ultra or hyperlocal debate but is coming at it from a trad. media angle rather than a digital native.  He hasn’t quite got the hang of the role of volunteers and human news geographies in all this yet though.