Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian gave the annual Cudlipp lecture this evening entitled ‘Does journalism exist’.  He featured an interview i did with him about the hyperlocal website i run in London’s hard-pressed Kings Cross (i have inserted links):

‘…..Which – before we think about business models – is probably a good moment to introduce the man who prompted the title of tonight’s talk. Last autumn I was at a government seminar on the future of local newspapers when one of the participants suddenly interjected: “I don’t believe in journalism.”

This was a very direct challenge to my general worldview, not to mention my job, so I sought out the person who had made it – a very interesting man called William Perrin – a former Cabinet Office civil servant who threw it all in to run a hyperlocal website reporting on the area of London where the Guardian now lives – King’s Cross.

Perrin absolutely believes in the moral power and importance of what many of us might think of as journalism. But he isn’t a journalist, he doesn’t call it journalism and he is completely uninterested in the monetary value of what he does. He finds other ways to pay his mortgage. This is William Perrin:

William Perrin: “I set up a very simple website in 2006 … to my surprise this thing took off and has been very successful. In three or four years we have written 800 articles on King’s Cross and area a mile long by half a mile wide …The website we have used to drive campaigns on the ground. We’ve run big campaigns against Network Rail, where we secured a million pounds for community improvements. We used the website again to take on Cemex, a multibillion-pound company … we took them on and we won. We have about four people who write for the site, on average, there’s up to six, but normally there’s about four of us writing. We all do it as a volunteer effort. It costs us about £11 a month in cash, which is about three of four pints of beer … we have a very strong community of people around here who send us stuff. None of the people who work with me are journalists. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination; it’s an entirely volunteer effort … Some people what I do in my community some people label journalism, it’s a label I actually resist.”

Depending on your point of view, you may find that vision of new ways of connecting and informing communities inspiring or terrifying. I think it is both – but it is a useful starting point to thinking about the value of journalism, in every sense of the word ‘value’. And it is good to be forced to think at an even more basic level – about what journalism is and who can do it.

Overall it’s good to see a major media figure give local websites the recognition they deserve.  There are many people out there with better local sites than me – I hope that their local editors reach out and talk with them too.

The Audit Commission was asked in digital britain to review the state of council publications, newspapers etc.  Their report to Stephen Timms has emerged on their website (despite carrying an embargo for Monday 25).

There is something in it for everyone but overall it damns expensive council newspapers with faint praise.  The Commission rightly defends councils’ need to communicate.  But the Audit Commission’s core role is assess value for money and impact of spending on council performance:

We cannot draw strong conclusions at the national level about the value for money and impact of communication spending from the data available. There is not a significant relationship between levels of recorded communication spending and a number of different outcome indicators drawn from the Place Survey or earlier Best Value Performance Indicators. Some commentators have cited relationships in a single year, for example between how well-informed residents feel and the extent to which they think the council provides value for money, as evidence of the importance of council communication spending.

However, there is no relationship between changes over time in key variables, undermining any conclusion that council communication spending has a demonstrable causal impact. Frequency of periodical publication is also not significantly correlated with key outcome measures such as satisfaction with the way that councils run things.

I remain of the view that it is wrong for a branch of government to publish something that looks, smells and feels like a newspaper with editorial (eg ‘how well we are doing’).  It isn’t good for democracy, especially at a time when traditional local media is in decline.

Councils do have to communicate – it’s vital that local people know and understand what the council does for them.  But Councils should focus on equipping local people with the skills to communicate for themselves to hold local services to account – the sort of thing talk about local does.  That’s the modern way of doing it – not the C19th newspaper.

( Thanks to Kevin for the tip)

auditcommisionreport auditcommissionletter

One of many ideas that really appealed to me in David Halpern’s Hidden Wealth of Nations, which I’m reading at the moment, is Fureai kippu, or ‘caring relationship tickets’.

This is a community currency which operates in Japan, creating social structures to replace family and community units which broke down as people become more mobile. A simple illustration is that someone who has an elderly parent in another part of the country can look after an older person locally and then exchange the credits they earn for doing so for their parent’s care.

The first question, asked as soon as I tweeted the link, was “would it work here?”.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I write, I am at the first meeting of the Local Public Data Panel.  As preparation I asked people interested in the topic on Twitter and Facebook for some raw material to feed in.  Thanks to all who commented – this has been very helpful.  I shall update further on the panel in due course.
19 January 2010

@willperrin ‘talking to government data types today – what data sets would you most like from your council’

Feedback emerged quickly as follows, anonymised

1.    property development issues – number and type of contracts going out, number and type of bidders, number and type of successful bidders
2.    councillor expenses and campaign contributions…?!
3.    Concentrate on what is useful for the citizen. Housing stock would be nice. But all non private data by default.
4.    Internal search within council websites & SEO of ‘data pages’ must be better so we can find data without resorting to contact.
5.    Break down of council agendas for public perusal in easy-to-digest format – encourages interest in meeting items.
6.    it is also important how the council data is exposed. Many different APIs and registration would still obfuscate the data.
7.    first data set I’d like would be list of all the data sets they’ve got do we could stop guessing who holds what. +1 for contacts
8.    which departments are spending less than this time last year & deserve a bonus
9.    sounds like standard info as a minimum. Date/time call, who made/taken call, type of issue, resolution, hand off etc
10.    the dull ones. The GIS data for where the bins are, where the grit lorries go, street cleaning routes.
11.    planning applications
12.    Small area data: make it easy to select areas before downloading dataset. Don’t want to strip it down ourselves. #hyperlocal
13.    How much salary do they pay, to whom, & *for what* ?
14.    What assets do they own (especially land)? Useful for everyone from #allotment campaigners to inclusion & employment schemes
15.    Bin collection routes & timetables! Bus timetables & routes. Planning applications (in a good format for once!)
16.    ward budget expenditure is one small communities could really get their teeth into
17.    API access to the excellent information at Transport Direct – which no one seems to know exists – www.transportdirect.info
18.    We are running a campaign to get #hyperlocal datasets released in Manchester. We should talk
19.    road works (GPS/times), school dates and times, all reported indicators / tracked measures, election-related items.
20.    all data please and not in PDF format In fact, RDF please!!!
21.    Public Data Panel could publish a guide to public data sets
22.    Personally think that we need a definition of a common method of access to data across different LAs, public bodies (eg API)
23.    release the lot and get the group to concentrate on definition of standards to make the datasets work across LAs easily
24.    Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
25.    web services have never really solved the problem of making the data “machine findable” afaik – Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
26.    Cllr attendance records, expenses, committee membership, changing party affiliation etc
27.    What crimes have happened locally (not the crime maps they are rubbish)
[ends]