Tag Archive for journalism

Will hyperlocals be hit by the post Leveson rules?

Update at 11.30: There’s been more comment on this throughout the morning. The culture secretary Maria Miller is reported in this post on The Guardian to be saying the “one-man band or a single blogger” would not be affected by the legislation because of the definition of “relevant publisher” in relation to exemplary damages.

The piece goes on to say:

Miller said “student and not-for-profit community newspapers” will not be caught under the new rules and that “scientific journals, periodicals and book publishers will also be left outside the definition and therefore not exposed to the exemplary damages and costs regime”

Thanks to @gazthejourno on Twitter for sending through a link to the full document if you want to read up on it…….and we’re expecting Tom Watson MP to pop by here this afternoon to add his thoughts. In the meantime there’s a poll on this issue now running here http://www.facebook.com/n0ticenearby.

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The straight answer to that question is that nobody actually knows yet but there’s a great deal of confusion around the whole issue because the wording refers to websites which have some news content.

One of the key definitions highlighted here says a ‘relevant publisher’ includes:

“a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper of magazine)” Read more

Centre for Community Journalism hyperlocal help and research launched

IMG_0121This week’s launch of the new Centre for Community Journalism took centre stage at a Cardiff conference which saw key players in the hyperlocal scene come together to discuss enabling and empowering communities.

Set within the university’s journalism school, the new centre is an unusual, possibly unique, mix of practice, research and advice facility for people interested in local publishing and particularly independent set-ups. Read more

Community journalism in Cardiff and some tips on participation

indexHyperlocal issues are looming large for us this week as we prepare for the Community Journalism Conference in Cardiff tomorrow.

I shall be there and, together with Glyn Mottershead from the uni, will be running a workshop at 10am on How to set up HyperLocal platforms, open source sites and using multi platforms.

If you’re going, I look forward to seeing you there, if you’re not – I will blog from the day here and have also set up this noticeboard, CommunityJournalism.n0tice.com, to capture tweets, pics and whatever else happens to make it easier to follow. The hashtag for the event is #CJC13.

On the subject of community publishing, I have today published the latest installment in the ‘making a hyperlocal’ series which is intended to help people starting out on an independent publishing path.

For that post I asked various experts, ie. people who successfully run publications to offer their top tips for encouraging participation in a new venture.

One of those was Emma Bearman who runs The Culture Vulture in northern England who offered this advice which I’ll also share here:

Starting out?
Just Do it, set up a blog, audioboo, twitter etc, ask for help
Use it as your license to indulge your inquisitive curious mind
If you can’t be the source, be the resource. By which I mean if you aren’t brilliant at writing/editing etc then shine a light on others, curate, connect, be generous
Be in and part of the conversation
Make connections with the local university journalism course heads and tutors that really get it
Be guided by your moral compass
Love what you do. No point if it ceases to interest or delight you. Don’t let your blog be a monkey on your back
Be open, kind and compassionate. (those are my own mantra)
See the bigger picture
Take time to check your facts, don’t be a kneejerker
Try to leave your ego at the door.

Agree? Something more to add? It would be great to hear your top tips too.

Delighted to be a Knight Foundation news challenge:mobile semi-finalist

It’s great to hear that our augmented reality and geolocation toolkit for journalists has got through to the semi finals of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge: mobile.  Journalists have always had an acute sense of time about their work. But the rise and rise of mobile search means that they will need an equally acute sense of place to find an audience for their work.  Historically the ‘place’ bit has been a meta issue someone else took care of.  Your work was just in a paper or channel marketed at a specific place.  Publishers themselves have been slow to wake up to geo-tagging so that the web itself knows where their stuff is about.  And as the density of content about place and things increases exponentially media outlets , need to experiment with new ways of displaying place or object linked content such as the burgeoning augmented reality environments enabled by new powerful smart phones.

Our bid is to help journalists and others by providing simple tools to geo tag content and to bring it into augmented reality environments.  We’ve done the hard bit – getting the tech to work at all in partnership with NESTA – we hope Knight will support us to grow and bespoke this work for journalists working across our great networks.  Naturally I think we should win, but even if we don’t i hope our proposal gets people talking about the issues.

Are you in Google News yet? Help us track it

As we reported earlier in the week, lots of hyperlocal news sites have found their way into Google News.

Presumably some changes have taken place in the giant algorithm and now it seems people searching for local news and information in some areas are as likley to be presented with a hyperlocal blog as they are a local newspaper.

But how extensive is this? And is it all, or just some, content that’s being displayed?

If you run a hyperlocal site, would you spare a moment to help us carry out a quick survey?

I’ve set up this shared Google document to record responses and started it off with a couple we already know about.

If you’ve got a minute over the weekend, please could you carry out a search within Google News for something you’ve recently published and see what you get back in the search result.

This move, coupled with news of hopeful moves by the BBC to include links to hyperlocal sites in their local pages adds up to another good week for hyperlocal – greater visibility and, hopefully, even more connectivity.

Have a great weekend!

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