No one likes dog poo.  It’s a curse of modern urban life – it isn’t the dog’s fault, it’s the owners’ and sometimes the local authority’s fault for not policing the issue properly.

Local websites can help people give voice to a problem that other media outlets ignore (it’s quite hard to sell advertising next to a discussion on dog poo).  It’s an issue that often pops up on  local websites.  There is a robust discussion in the site in rural Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire and a wry observation about signs on this site in Leith, Edinburgh.

In Kings Cross, frustrated by the council’s apparent indifference I took things one step further and created some ‘dog poo flags‘ with the council’s brand on them, took photos and put them on the website.  It didn’t achieve a result – there is still a big problem – but it made me feel better that i had done something.  Nicky has written an interesting piece on a map of UK dog poo !

Wow – there’s a great discussion going on over in the google group on sessions for #TAL10 in Leeds on Saturday 17th April.  All this in addition to my roundup of Friday. For those of you who don’t do google groups here’s a quick update.

Matt from the great MyTunstall in Stoke-On-Trent has written a wonderful piece on making websites pay – it details his experiences with affiliate marketing and is brutally honest about what works and what doesn’t:

‘I have however, had more success when I write the odd article with the
affiliate market in mind. Back in October I published the Peter Kay
tour dates for Manchester and ranked highly in google, so over those
few days, site traffic was way up, and people were clicking through to
ticketmaster and buying peter kay tickets. This is the most luck I’d
had with affiliate publishing, but because the tickets sold so quickly
via other means, again I could have made more money for the site.’

There’s reassurance for those who haven’t come out before as hyperlocal that #TAL10 will be open, friendly and welcoming, appealing to all. Ray says some very kind things about the event we ran in Stoke-on-Trent last year, TAL09:

‘Can vouch for the friendly nature of TAL09. It was also one
of the most inspiring events I’ve been to. It has certainly influenced
me on a day-to-day basis and led to an enjoyable and steep learning
curve! I even understand some techie stuff now!’

A session on basic skills and how to get started is coming into focus – Suzanne from Skillset is coming along – nice to see the sector skills council acknowledging the hyperlocal sector.

Good chatter continues about a session on covering the 2010 elections from a hyperlocal perpsective – from how to stay neutral through to getting a local site recognised by the candidates.

And we have two volunteers to contribute to a session on bringing media newsgathering techniques to hyperlocal sites.

As well as the mainstream stuff, it seems like a geek session is firming up for the deeply technical data wizards – Chris aka CountCulture of openly local will co-ordinate.  The geek stuff always makes me dizzy but some will love it – Clare White was waxing lyrical.

And remember you can find other sessions in my Friday post.

One of my favourite books at the moment is called Watching the English, by Kate Fox. In it she puts forward some very persuasive generalisations about how we use our gardens, including the observation that we will wait for months for an opportune moment to speak to our neighbours in their front gardens rather than knock on their front doors.  This is certainly true for me – memories of a stint selling Avon door-to-door still bring me out in a cold sweat – and it holds true in Stoke-on-Trent, right through to her other observation that except when they are serving as a neutral space to chat about the weather and that awkward planning application you put in, front gardens are for show only.

Anyway, it was looking for a more succint reference to these observations that I stumbled across a new seam of hyperlocal blogging in Britain: the garden blogs. Starting off with the Patient Gardener’s Weblog from Worcestershire, the bloggers have formed a clear community across the country and share delightful photos, drawings, questions and observations. A look through the Patient Gardener’s blogroll quickly takes you as far as California and Nova Scotia, but of course many of you will prefer sticking to England and the chance to peer into some luscious hidden back gardens and allotments. You can even follow the journey of a novice bee-keeper.

There’s always a bit of a perception that blogging is for computer geeks or wannabe politic pundits, but the ease of blogging, linking and adding photography means that there are plenty of communities sharing their passions for each other and the rest of the world. If you’re wondering whether this applies to your hobbies and interests, have a browse round WordPress’s Showcase section or Google blog search. (example). ‘Passion-blogging’ is also a great place to start if you’re not sure you have anything interesting enough to blog about. Regular, enthusiastic, reflective and useful blogging will always find an audience, especially if you make the effort to put friendly feelers out to other bloggers through comments and links to posts you enjoy. And as the gorgeous gardening blogs show, there’s no such thing as too hyperlocal.

Pretty photos courtesy of the Flickr community and Flickriver.

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.

The group that owns the Daily Mail has announced that they are going to set up websites in towns that don’t have newspapers.   We shall see if this works – it could be another top down platform without any bottom up engagement from people on the ground.  But the reporting of their plans is only partial so I can’t easily form a judgement.

I was struck though by the entertaining debate that ensued at this post on Hold the Front Page.  People who seem to have a stake in the traditional media weighed in suggesting that the sites will be swamped by waves of libellous trolls.

Insightful comments from people who seem to be connected  to the current local press include

‘The only people who read such illiterate ‘local’ online rubbish are the halfwits who spend the wee small hours writing such tosh and railing against the unfairness of life, instead of going out and getting one’

and

‘These sound more like community websites than anything relating to actual news. Is anyone involved in this going to have any kind of qualification? If not, it’s no different to it being set up by a villager who allows all and sundry to write whatever they want, regardless of its news value. That’s not my understanding of journalism, citizen or otherwise.’

and

‘Wonder how long it is before one of these sites face libel action because those running them are ‘citizen journalists’ who wouldn’t have a clue about defamation law?’

These views might apply to The Mail, only time will tell, but it doesn’t axiomatically have to be that way.  On Kings Cross Environment we have 700 articles and about 500 comments over three years produce by volunteers – we have had about half a dozen comments to block for being abusive or plain mad.  Our content often tackles difficult community issues and is of high quality – we have a good relationship with the Islington Gazette who borrow our stories (but are polite enough to ask first). Yet we don’t have a rolling battle with trolls.

Sites run by community activists, people campaigning to change things in their community have a strong interest not to be full of internet nutters.  If activists sites are perceived to be bonkers then people don’t take the campaigns seriously. Troll abuse is not an issue that local web publishers raise with me – either they don’t attract at as in my case, or they manage it fine.

Tom Steinberg once said that that, on the web;

‘If you don’t want a fight, don’t set up a  boxing ring and invite people in‘.

Good community sites follow this maxim and create a climate in which people don’t get abusive.  Traditional newspaper websites of course don’t – by setting up a story as a ‘controversial issue’, you invite people to have a scrap.

‘This is an emergency. Act now, or local news will die’ said Polly Toynbee’s headline writer in one of the alarmist pieces about the fate of local news in the past month. As readers will know I see a rosy future for hyperlocal or ultralocal news in volunteer-run community websites.  And am hopefully close to a contract with 4IP and a regional funder to help people set up such sites.   But the shroud waving press coverage has either missed or distorted some important points covered below.

Of all the pieces written the best was this by Stephen Moss – he starts to get under the skin of what can be done locally and doesn’t have rose tinted view of local papers.  Moss suggests that if in his case study, Long Eaton people who can write and create a website can link up with people who hunt out content then:

‘I’m convinced the town would have a journalistic vehicle far more powerful than the old stripped-down, clapped-out Long Eaton Advertiser. Local advertisers and well-wishers would flock to it; maybe the government could start an Arts Council-type fund to facilitate local news-gathering. And then Long Eaton could say it was in at the rebirth not just of local journalism, but of a revitalised civic life.’

There have been many media transitions before, this is just another one. The transitions from print to radio in the 1930s, from radio to TV in the 1950s-70s and from static to rolling news in the 1990s.  In no case did the preceding media disappear, it just adapted and learned to live alongside the new medium that eventually stole much of the limelight.  People thrived who adapted their skills from one medium to the next.  The world did not end, it just changed.  Along the way the odd publication fell – the Picture Post had little place in a TV age.  That is where we are now, publications whose model is from a previous media age are suffering – and the new media are exposing the weirdness of older business practices, such as the curious complicity of the Lobby.

Public sector intervention in the market must leave editorial neutral – it is hard to see how paying money to newspapers can be done neutrally, whether through advertising or grant.  Polly Toynbee’s piece on this was worrying. The big, unspoken threat to local pluralism and democratic voice now is local papers becoming even more dependent upon revenue from local authorities – they are already dangerously dependent upon council advertising for say street works etc.  It is likely that even this local revenue stream will soon shift to the internet, as the official notices in the wonderfully semantic  London Gazette have.  Councils striving the meet the new National Indicators for empowerment and popular perception of their services, measured by survey will be tempted to splurge on paid for editorial, many are running their own papers already.  This is bad for democracy.  Ian Jack’s piece here captures nicely the democratic tensions that are emerging:

‘Local newspapers often reproduce the press releases of local authorities unchecked and unchallenged as the cheapest way to acknowledge new information; written by former local journalists, its style fits perfectly with the paper’s. Journalism is quietly migrating with journalists to the public sector, enabling (according to the NUJ) newspaper owners to make even bigger cuts. Slattery quotes an NUJ official, Miles Barter, wondering why “the poor council taxpayers of Burnley and Accrington” should subsidise the shareholders of newspaper chains such as Johnston Press and Newsquest.‘

Deep dive investigative reporting will change to a new distributed model reflecting wider internet practice.  A journalist or a team cross subsidised by the clothing ads in the celebrity section will fade out further.   Long burn investigative stories will be done via collaborative online networks maybe in different countries. The Sunlight Foundation work on collaborative investigations is an early indicator – pile the data up and then everyone can have a go at investigating.  Why can’t analysis of 1.5million MPs expense forms be outsourced to India? The hair splittingly detailed work of bloggers during the US election points the way.  As the pockets of new media outlets deepen they may subsidise some investigative work, in much the way that brash new TV channels rarely do public service at launch but come around to it later.

Broadcast television companies and people are not well suited to the grass roots web and hyperlocal stuff. The recent angst by the print media has obscured continuing distress about ‘local’ TV news.  Video is a helpful adjunct to local news and campaigning but mixed media web environment allows you to see that for the majority of stuff video is too time consuming – text and photos rule.   But watching the telly people on the local news front is a bit like disco dad on the dancefloor.  In the UK the ‘balance’ criteria on TV news aren’t well suited to hyperlocal reporting.  BBCAction network and then their very odd, rejected local video proposals all suffered from  top down control, rather than bottom up empowerment.  ITV has never recovered its online momentum after buying Friendsreunited at precisely the wrong time.  For telly, it seems very hard to unlearn a lifetime of increasing ‘production values’ and bureaucratic overhead of broadcast news, with intrinsic high costs.

One of the reasons i am working with 4IP is that they can see the weaknesses of the traditional telly model.  The web is about Dogme video at most – the evolution of dance has v low production values but several hundred million views.  If you see someone approaching video for a website with an HD camera and a lighting rig, they are probably the wrong person.

And i did all this without mentioning Clay Shirky.  More to follow on advertising.

There are many urban villages in London, some old, some newer like West Ealing, where there is a good community site run by local residents.  West Ealing Neighbours is run by a residents association who aim to stick up for their patch.  So like a traditional RA there is a constitution of sorts.  As well as over 200 news articles, the site has covered specific campaigns, such as the West London Tram.  And a handy little forum. For the technically minded it has a set of how to documents.

Wirksworth is a Derbyshire town with a good community based magazine style website with a simple discussion forum attached.  Wirksworth.net is nicely executed by a local group of volunteers in a not for profit company.  The site integrates video from youtube, photos from flickr and a feed from the forum.  The forum is a simple vbulletin, but the site itself deserves recognition for a hand drafted content management system, rather than doing it the easy way in hosted typepad, wordpress or blogger.