A couple of days ago the the London Olympic website opened up registrations to become ‘Game Makers’ or what was known in good old English, a Volunteer at the 2012 games.
I had a quick look at the site and you can register as a Generalist or a Specialist, Generalists are people who want to volunteer and maybe have no desire to do anything other than collect tickets, direct people and just be part of ‘it’. Specialists on the other hand are people who have skills in certain areas which will be useful at the games. A lot of the specialist roles are already filled or certainly have groups of people ear marked for the roles, see this post, Stoke-on-Trent City Council Worker Heading To The Olympics.
I had a look at the site and one of the Specialist roles was press operations staff and that got me thinking about the press coverage and what about Hyperlocal sites up and down the country or even around the world?
Come July 27 2012 London will be bursting at the seams with press from around the globe all working away to provide syndicated news, pictures & results to all the mainstream press. So what about hyperlocal sites, what do they do where do they get their information from? Yes of course there will be 1000s of people there tweeting and sharing pictures. We can read the reports in the mainstream media but wouldn’t it be good if there were some hyperlocal sites represented at the games who could syndicate their content to the wider hyperlocal community.
I’m not saying we should have people sitting alongside the big international broadcasters or publishers, but given that we have had hyperlocal bloggers at the G20, the recent papal visit, and HM Treasury added a number of hyperlocal sites to press list for the June Budget information, then maybe we should be given the opportunity to report on the Olympics in a hyperlocal way.
Just a thought.
Mike Rawlins
Away from Talk About Local I take photos, fly my quadcopter and walk my two Beagles.
If I'm not doing any of the above then you'll find me volunteering at my local RNLI station as a press officer.
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I think there could be two angles here. There could be hyperlocal sites that have someone competing from their area who want to follow their progress at the Olympics. I reckon this would work best if that site was able to gain access to that competitor and gain behind-the-scenes insights that were not available to the mainstream press.
My second suggested approach is a hyperlocal site for the Olympics itself.