Centre for Community Journalism hyperlocal help and research launched

This 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.

The research element (which Talk About Local is involved in) is funded by the AHRC to map the world of hyperlocal and at Wednesday’s event academic Andy Williams was able to share some early findings from an analysis of the content being produced by hyperlocal sites.

The full slide set is below and some of the findings will be published more widely shortly but we can already see it’s going to throw up some interesting debates about what ‘local-ness’ is, whether any democratic deficit in holding institutions to account can be addressed by this activity and how diverse the voices in the space are.

Slides, CCJ conference, value of hyperlocal news, Andy Williams
Earlier in the day, participants were able to take part in workshops which ranged from getting started with hyperlocal publishing, seeing an insight into internet newsroom Storyful to turning a profit from local publishing. The slideshow here is from a session by Damian Radcliffe on the UK Opportunity for hyperlocal publishers.

A full collection of tweets and links from the day, including all the workshops, has been captured on this Noticeboard www.communityjournalism.n0tice.com, which gives a fuller picture of the issues under discussion. I’ve also popped some more images tagged #cjc13 on my Flickrstream.

As always when you get a bunch of hyperlocal-ers together, the day also proved a great opportunity to catch up with old friends, meet some new ones and start those conversations all over again. A sort of hyperlocal new year celebration as 2013 gets underway.

* For more information about the resources available at the new centre, check out the website at communityjournalism.co.uk. Emma Meese, who is responsible for developing and managing the centre is also keen to hear from any hyperlocal websites who want to be included on the map being created to help network people together which you can see here.