For the first time in the UK the government has acknowledged the role of hyperlocal sites in the future news environment.  The Digital Britain report singles out Talk About Local as part of a ‘new possibly disruptive wave of local news’.  Full extract from Chapter 5 para 61:

’61.  Local websites of all shapes and sizes are providing community news and information to hundreds of thousands of people. Most of these sites are volunteer run, using free publishing platforms like www.wordpress.com with no hard costs. They show that grass roots media can provide an accurate, reliable,popular sources of news and information without regulation or subsidy. Their news values and thresholds are new, reflecting grass roots interests and priorities.
62. Community sites with no costs can serve very small, human news geographies of a single ward or a few streets. Community websites with no old media legacy are able to discriminate between types of media production to suit local needs. The written word and photos predominate, sound and video are in a minority. In some communities with established local sites the readership within the community appears comparable to that of traditional news media.
63. Digital Britain is at the beginning of a new and possibly disruptive wave of local news, generated by communities for communities using free online media. Over the medium term this has the potential to be good for local pluralism and expression as commercial funding for traditional media diminishes. 4IP and Screen West Midlands are making a major investment in Talk About Local to create hundreds of new community websites by giving community activists the simple skills. Digital Mentors are taking a similar approach on a smaller scale.

Talk About Local is a unique empowerment project to help people find a voice online in their communities.   You can read a little about the project here in the Guardian and more on the website here.    I am William Perrin the founder and am looking for someone to help me run the project over the next two years.

The successful candidate will have some or all of the following attributes:

• experience of local community publishing on the web
• proven ability to work with people at a grass roots level in communities or neighbourhoods
• ability to get things done through others
• personally identifies with and is passionate about the aims of the project
• able to talk with an IT crowd but also with people who barely use the web
• ability to write confidently and spontaneously on the web
• familiarity with basic web publishing tools such as wordpress.com, typepad.com etc
• ability to stay rooted in what works and not get carried away by technology for its own sake
• enterprising, self starting spirit, but able also to work in teams
• happy to roll up their sleeves and engage in the day to day tasks of running a small business
• well organised, with a good eye for detail even when managing multiple strands of work
• good project managing, administrative,  and money managing ability, including managing freelancers

The project will largely be delivered in partnership between Talk About Local and UK online centres.  This partnership gives the reach and capacity to take the project to over 100 places in England.  A critical role for the successful applicant will be managing the day to day delivery relationship with UK online centres and producing content for the Talk About Local website.  The site will support people who publish about their places online by assembling and creating ‘how-to’ or exemplar material as well as networking people together to help each other.

This is an innovative project – if you aren’t the person above, but are convinced you can add something then get in touch making your case.

The project is backed by Screen West Midlands, Advantage West Midlands and 4IP, the web venturing arm of Channel 4.  The role will be based in Birmingham, working out of Fazeley Studios in Digbeth but with some travel around challenging areas of England.  Salary is negotiable and will be related to skills and experience.  Talk About Local believes in equality of opportunity in the workplace.

To apply please drop me a line via william@talkaboutlocal.org with appropriate details about yourself, including weblinks to your work, contact details and when you will become available/notice period.   Please put the word ‘job’ in the subject line of your email.

Deadline for receipt of applications is 17 June 2009, which will be followed rapidly by interview.  If you are not available for interview around that time please say so in your application.

Look forward to hearing from you.

As advertising revenue trickles away, a revenue model for newspapers online is elusive.  Rupert Murdoch has apparently suggested that his prime properties move towards a pay model.

“That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal’s experience,” he said.

Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.” Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

In the traditional newspaper market people buy papers one at a time in payments of a few pence.  The best brains of the internet world have puzzled over micropayments. Micropayments just haven’t taken off on the web – the overhead is too high for vendors and people show little appetite for making small payments for things on a daily basis.  Subscriptions haven’t gone too well either, only the FT holding out in the UK.

I haven’t followed the debate very closely, so someone may already have suggested this, but is the internet the right place to look for a payment model?  Does that old chestnut, convergence have the answer?  Rupert Murdoch has a payments engine and an installed base of tens of millions of users all of whom pay him some £20 or more a month.  But this payment engine isn’t ‘online’ – it is the Sky TV platform, DirecTV in the USA.

Is it possible for Murdoch to leverage this installed base by bundling News International premium content with a TV subscription?

If Sky say puts the basic charge for Sky TV up by £1 a month over a year for  nine million subscribers in the UK then the numbers start to get interesting. For this extra pound, Sky subscribers could have access to premium content in the whole NI suite of newspapers – the News of the World, The Times, the Sunday Times etc.  Bundling is well established in the TV market, but less common in print media. The BSkyB platform is a large scale, robust billing system.  Web technologies could easily tie it up with a federated identity management solution across the NI estate.  The Sky contact centres etc must have spare capacity as the recession limits new subscribers to TV.

Making a connection between buying TV and internet news services will be tricky in some people’s minds.  There is premium news content out there that could persuade people to make the leap between media – in this case root around for your Sky account number or identity and enter it into a News International website.  At least once every couple of months there are pics of something so scandalous in the News of the World that I buy it against all my middle class prejudices (last time it was Max Moseley – who is innocent BTW).  Every now and then I even buy The Times for its front page.

A Sky subscription model means you would only have to do it once and they quietly bill you for ever, relying on inertia to stop you un-subscribing -  it’s only a quid and there is a lot of News International stuff out there worth having.  This reduces the overhead of small payments.

Murdoch has used his media assets to relentlessly promote across platforms in the past – in the 1990s his papers were a barker channel for Sky TV (Private Eye for years ran a feature ‘I Sky’ on gratuitous cross promotion) So now they could reverse the trend and have the TV promoting the online news services – Sky News already promotes its website ad nauseam.

Of course such a model wouldn’t raise a theoretical £108m (£1 X 9m UK subscribers X 12 months) and even this would require massive restructuring in a traditional newspaper with its legacy overhead.   A restructuring as radical and bloody as the moves to modern production technologies in the 1980s.

Murdoch has taken radical steps in the past to secure the future of his businesses – the 1986 literal pitched battles with the unions at Wapping pre-date the web, .  Murdoch has shown imagination in new markets he bet the whole business on  launching Sky TV in 1989 and determination to stick it out when the establishment tells him he is doomed to fail.  Would he be prepared to bundle telly with text news content?  Do the economics stack up? Only time will tell.

Declaration – The views expressed here are in a personal capacity in the context of a project experimenting with the future of local news www.talkaboutlocal.org – The views here have nothing to do with my former employer, HM Government.

We now have a signed contract with 4IP with funding from Screen West Midlands and Advantage West Midlands – thanks to Daniel Heaf,  Melanie Hayes and Jason Hall in particular.

The pre-publicity is out there in the Guardian today, thanks to Jemima Kiss.

Money is starting to come through and we can now get the show on the road.

So next – build the project up: recruit some staff, get a base, rapidly agree a delivery contract with Helen Milner’s excellent team at UK online centres, get engagement and training materials together, build a core website.  Start to trailblaze with some adventurous partners on the ground, keep building partnerships.  And do all the fiddly start up things you have to do with a new company.

As part of all that i shall also take the hyperlocal alliance on to the next stage.

Next on this site will be a job ad for someone to work on the project with me.