Talk About Local has a special connection with canals, since we all live fairly close to them and by chance [in the over-romantic eyes of your blogger], Stoke-on-Trent to Digbeth to Kings Cross quite closely shadows the old routes of the revolutionary Midlands industrialists. If we weren’t in such a tearing hurry all the time we could easily commute around by narrow boat rather than train. But that’s a post for another day. It’s good to know that if we chose to move from rail to water there is just as active an online community to help us along.

On 15th November I was lucky enough to grab a ten minute chat with Andrew Brightwell of Hasbrum, the new website of ‘Birmingham Hyperlocal News’ created by a group of students on Birmingham City University’s MA Online Journalism course.  Hashbrum is a true experiment – the team do not have a clear long-term goal for the website, they just want to test the possibilities of delivering local news online.

The idea is to try and find out a bit more about how local news can be in the future, so we’ve decided to try to cover bits of Birmingham and try to experiment with our coverage by using different forms of media coverage – video and audio as well as writing and we’re just having some fun really…We’re letting it all hang out and see what happens!

These experiments take various forms – for instance, like many local news sites Hasbrum aggregates relevant content from other local websites, but it’s aggregation with a twist rather than just regurgitating the information.

What we’ve discovered is if we use other people’s content in clever, different ways then we’re happy to do it, we’re not just going to aggregate content in the normal way.  We’re using maps, for example which is a good way of aggregating content. If you take stories from elsewhere and put them into a map then you’re giving a new twist to it.

However, Hashbrum focuses on generating original content rather than presenting other people’s.  In doing this the has team found that, because of their different backgrounds, this content varies in form and feel.  Andrew, who worked as a professional local journalist for several years, is more inclined to stick to that facts with his storytelling whilst others with a blogging background inject more opinions to their pieces, which gives the website ‘a real mix’ that highlights the difference between the two types of delivery.

I’m trying to learn how to do things in a more opinion-based way because what you find is if you do just factual stuff people don’t necessarily have a relationship to that….It’s not something that you would necessarily want to respond to.

You can definitely see their personal bias when looking at the news items they choose to focus on.  For instance, the site has a feature page about the plight of historical Birmingham swimming pools.

We’ve been quite selective in what we do.  Birmingham’s a big place..we’re not trying to cover all of Birmingham, we’re not trying to pretend that we’re a proper sort of news product like the newspapers or even the radio stations. All we’re trying to do is pick out things that have been neglected to some extent…we’re choosing what we do and I guess we’re having an impact on that as well….we’re bringing our own view to it.

Andrew hopes Hashbrum’s readers will start to play a part in directing this focus – steering the site to cover topics they want to learn about.  This seems to be the reason the team haven’t fixed upon an overall goal for Hashbrum – they see it going where the audience wants to take it.

I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be….the goal if you like is for other people to tell us what they want. For there to be some kind of relationship between the readership….and us as the creators of content and for those two things…to be equal. So other people start to contribute to what we’re doing and they also direct what we’re doing as well…Our audience can be our editor.

This audience-led environment is a far cry from the one Andrew prepared for in training as a journalist.  The new world professional journalists now face was something he’d discussed earlier that day on Rhubarb Radio’s Sunday Local with Birmingham Post Editor Marc Reeves, Peter Fletcher and Michael Grimes. During the show they touched upon the definitions of and differences between journalists and bloggers, and came to the surprising conclusion that it isn’t as important as some might think.

There isn’t really a difference necessarily…There have always been people who have become journalists…people who are interested in what they’re doing who have got some kind of expertise and they’ve been able to use that to become journalists.  They haven’t necessarily been trained as journalists but they’ve been able to make that step.  Lots of bloggers are doing that.  There’s a huge difference between someone who just gets on the internet and sounds off…and other people who are going out and finding news and bringing it to an audience.  And that’s where journalism starts and obviously it develops into something else eventually.

Far from being fearful of this new playing field, Andrew sees a role emerging for journalists of gathering the news, footage and content that website managers and bloggers can use for discussion with their audiences.

Maybe we can be part of some new model in the future where there are full-time professionals who are going out to the coalface and bringing in news and then other people are using that for their own blogs or for their own audiences.  That relationship could be good for journalists because it might give them a career that they don’t have at the moment…I’m interested in finding out if there can be a relationship between these two worlds that would be mutually beneficial.

It looks like the outcomes of the Hasbrum team’s experiments will be something we can all learn from, not just in terms of innovative online news editorialship and delivery, but the place they find for themselves within that.

You can listen to my full interview with Andrew below:

Interview with Andrew Brightwell of Hashbrum by getgood

Hannah Waldram, a journalism graduate who grew up in Bournville, Birmingham, has gone live with a hyperlocal site for her home town.  Bournville Village provides ‘The latest news, pics and chat from the Cadbury community’, filling a gap currently left open by traditional media:

Bournville has no local newspaper and little going for it on the web – and tons of advertisers who would love to have their services published to the local community. Seems like a sure fire hit? Well it takes time and energy to set up – and it’s only little old me working on it at the mo – albeit with a web of friendly and supportive bloggers in Birmingham and plenty of other hyperlocal experts to take advice from.

However, Hannah has found the time to build up an insightful community blog.  Bournville Village has not only given a local perspective to the story of gunshots in the traditionally peaceful village, which has received some coverage in the Birmingham Mail, but has also shed light on the smaller stories of concern to villagers, such as a pump installation in the Row Heath Park pond to save its fish.

Bournville Village has some quite useful aggregation, with RSS feeds of Twitter mentions and Flickr photos on the site to link villagers up to online activity about their area.  Hannah is also working to take the pressure off ‘only little old me’ by building up a team of authors with different voices and views, and has already found a first recruit in the shape of Birmingham blogger Dave Harte.

….hyper-local, collaborative and aggregation seem to me to be key terms in the future of local journalism online. And I’m excited my home town Birmingham is pioneering such innovative and exceptional work.

Bournville Village is an interesting example of how traditional media training can be translated into creating an informative community site, and Hannah looks set to answer William Perrin’s question to site managers of ‘What would you do with a journalist?‘ by example.

Jack Wallington from loveclapham.com talks to TAL about building his site.

I’ve lived in Clapham for most of my adult life (so far!) and like most people running local sites, became disappointed at the quality of the local press and the lack of online representation for the vibrant Clapham community. LoveClapham.com was born!

Setting up the site was the easy part, involving a couple of weekends to set up Wordpress and create a design I was happy with. The hard work started with the creation of content and getting the local community involved.

One of my personal priorities was to help local shops, restaurants and bars survive the biggest recession we’ve ever known – it would be a terrible loss for the area to be overrun with just known brands. I don’t charge local businesses to promote things on the site as long as the residents benefit from it too. However, getting local businesses involved has been incredibly difficult. I’ve launched the Clapham Awards 2009 as an incentive to help awareness and to reward them.

Other things we’ve tackled in the site’s short life are reporting on major developments and raising awareness of a campaign by residents of Clapham Junction to stop oversized tower blocks. Clapham also has many large events throughout the year, like music festivals. Love Clapham provides a guide to all of these events including travel, nearby amenities etc.

Another thing I really wanted to do with the site was open up channels of communication. In London too many people have issues but don’t know how to deal with them. Top of my list of things to do was to meet and interview members of the local council and other important organisations. It’s too easy to criticise councils, but we’re lucky to have passionate councillors in Lambeth, I’d rather be a conduit to work with them than against them.

My top tips for setting up a local site are:

1. Design. Content is undoubtedly king, but I think it’s important to make the site look lively and exciting too. Not over the top, but although we’re discussing serious issues, it doesn’t mean a site has to look serious too.
2. Write about the area and local issues – find out what matters to other people and get them involved. Be fun with it, again, there will be serious issues, but local communities can be fun!
3. Make sure you’re listed in search engines like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! (there’s a lot more to search, but listing is the first step).
4. Tell all your friends about the site, and ask them to tell their friends.
5. The likes of Twitter and Facebook are indispensible at reaching out to people – starting a Twitter account or Facebook page isn’t enough though, you have to seek out and start conversations with people. I found Twitter the easiest, because you can search for your local area (e.g. “Clapham”) and then find people in the area that way.
6. Get out and about! I spent an entire weekend delivering hundreds of home printed leaflets to local businesses. You might not get a massive response, but at least it’s free.
7. Interview important local people. It’s relatively easy, but extremely high value content. It also opens up a dialogue with the organisation you’ve interviewed.
8. Local sites are fairly cheap, but there’s still a cost to buying a domain and hosting. I highly recommend adding Google Adsense to your site (https://www.google.com/adsense/). You can change the layout and colour so they don’t look too intrusive and while you won’t make your millions with them, you will cover the cost of hosting across the year.

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.

The internet is the first port for new information these days – ask any encyclopedia salesman.  The internet can define how places appear to the world.  For cities Google turns up loads of web pages – many of them commerical.  But in the UK search engines turn up very little content by local people for small communities and even large towns.   So good local websites, firmly about a place, frequently updated by volunteers stand out and often do well in Google.    The less well known a place is the more a good local community site can rise to the top of popular search engines and define the place online.  

A great example is the little village of Bishopthorpe (pop. 3,000) just south of York (map).  Kevin Harris linked to a marvellous community site there run by volunteers.  Bishopthorpe is a small village, and the site is only updated a few times a month.  But it is the only substantial online presence for the village and site rises effortlessly to the top of search engines.  And it plays a strong role in how Bishopthorpe is presented to the world.

Across the UK development agencies and councils spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on brochures and ad campaigns to raise awareness of their area or regeneration towns.  Ads featuring actors and actress strolling hand in hand through meadows strewn with poppies or heritage buildings often do little more than scream ‘Look we exist! And we aren’t as grim as you think’.  Once the campaign is over and the money spent you normally can’t find this promotional stuff on the web at all – the money is spent and gone in a puff.

Spending a tiny slice of that promotional money to train local volunteers, campaigners, activists, community organisers to self publish online would create a long lasting and vibrant impact on the web, visible around the world.  There are some great examples out there I’ve referred to before – Digbeth is Good, Saltaire, Brookmans Park, Parwich.  If you were an ad agency this sort of positive, genuine, grass roots voice endorsing your product would be gold dust.  

The positives far outweigh any disagreement with the authorities over say a planning campaign.  It’s far better to get a generally positive and occasionally critical voice out there than some of the things people will do if they only want to express their negative energies about a place.  Birmingham City Council has got the hang of this – the Digital Birmingham campaign funded Pete Ashton to run some community blogging workshops.  Would be good to see more of this as cities prepare for a post industrial digital future.

Seattle, home to Boeing and Microsoft is probably the definitive modern technology driven city – but it is great to see it shares the same ultra local news values as Saltaire. Thanks to Tom for pointing to an interesting post by Cory Bergman about a ‘hyper local’ news experiment (see here).

It is fascinating to see that MyBallard.com covers all the ultra local classics – construction, planning permissions, graffitti, shops opening and closing, events, links to public services and even public transport.  An interesting feature is groups of links relating to subdistricts or areas – i haven’t seen that before.  The site has a positive constructive tone, uses photos heavily and is nicely laid out in Wordpress.

This website on the famous Saltaire is a beautiful ultra local site.   It was so comprehensive that I thought it might have been done by an agency for the tourist board so I asked Pamela the webmaster to tell the story:

I moved to Saltaire in 2003 when I got married. I didn’t know too much about making websites then, but I had been inspired by the Nelson village website in British Columbia, Canada – the place where they filmed Roxanne (a reworking of Cyrano de Bergerac) – a gorgeous place.  I left a message on their chat board and it was picked up by a couple who grew up in Nelson, and we’ve become friends.  Fabulous!  So – when I discovered that Saltaire didn’t have a website – I took the initiative.  I cobbled together a few rather pathetic pages – but that didn’t matter – my intentions were good and I stuck at it.

Nearly 3 years later, the website has grown and is supported by a team of people who contribute and answer emails.  Saltaire is a World Heritage Site – and so it gets lots of interest from all around the world.  We get the most fantastic snippets of history – it’s like putting a jigsaw together.  We all work for the love of it – there’s no funding and no money changes hands.  Everything we do is free.  I’m not retired so, as you can imagine, I’m doomed to be poor!
I act as a webmaster generally – a point of contact and an editor.  Access to the website is encouraged and we’ve not had to refuse to publish anything yet. It’s very enjoyable and the website has been used as a platform to support the Saltaire History Club and to publish The Saltaire Journals and The Saltaire Sentinel.  All very gratifying – and it’s certainly helped me to feel part of the community and make friends.

Great story from Pamela – getting a team working on a site really allows you to expand the range of content you can post – and it is good ultra local content that keeps people coming back.  Pamela’s point about ’sticking with it’ is crucial – I remember the first dozen or so posts on my own site – it was really hard work to get it going and i felt like a fool much of the time.  But setting up an ultra local site is one of the best things i have done.

Digbeth is good tickled my fancy – an irreverent, cheerful, colourful site that perhaps confounds the expectations.  Digbeth is (or was) spiritual home to Birds custard, Typhoo Tea and a lot of manufacturing, prior to the 1980s but now undergoing huge regeneration. Nicky Getgood has an wonderful up, irreverent and dynamic voice on this blog.  Like many ultra local sites Nicky gets a high Google position for her area – a good example of how a site like this can help promote an area.  I like this post inparticular about a local guard dog.

A different point of view comes from the protest site Keep Digbeth vibrant – which is a voice campaigning against development – something i can sympathise with from Kings Cross.

Although I live now in London’s Kings Cross i spent 18 years in remote countryside so I was delighted to find this gem of a rural community site after a tip from Simon Berry.  Parwich.org is community run site for four villages. unusually it has a commercial element with sponsorship by local businesses.  The ads are done in a sensitive and well thought through way that doesn’t detract from the core content and shows that ultra local community add value for local business – there are also holiday lets etc.  There is a very good strand of posting at the minute on flooding.

There is a high rate of posting (two to three a day with kosher content) for what is ostensibly a small community – everything from village shows, to film societies to local crime alerts.  You get a good sense from the comments that there is real community involvement here, not just a one man band. Communication is hard in the countryside and Parwich.org seems to add real value.

The designer has a good eye for graphics which are well used in almost every post and the site runs in wordpress.

William Perrin