Why Cameron's open data Big Society will drive hacks to finally face up to technology

('Today We're Social' cartoon by Oliver Wibber - Geek and Poke)

On Friday the iPad finally arrived in the UK. If the frenzy of excitement among journalists on Twitter on the day of Apple's product announcement, and the number of hacks suffering from iPad-delivery anxiety last Thursday are anything to go by, it is possible the entire UK media community now owns Apple's new wonder gadget.

As if to justify their own purchases, a series of articles on "Why every journalist must have an iPad" is bound to follow, just as there have been articles written on why every journalist should own this phone, that camera, and the other recording machine. But must they really?

I am not one of those rushing to get my paws on what Apple-sceptic Charlie Booker called "the world's most expensive rectangle" in a Guardian column, but I have recently started acquiring a collection of other electronic appliances myself with the pretext that "I need them to develop my journalism work".

I do not randomly collect gadgets. I buy them as and if the need arises. The need is a very 21st century one, with tools helping journalists work more efficiently, be more mobile and flexible. But owning a piece of hardware, no matter how cutting edge, is only a first step towards making a tool effectively work for you. An electronic device alone will not write a story, let alone research it or fact check it on your behalf.

Journalism vs. technology
The first News:Rewired conference organised by Journalism.co.uk in January 2010, was an excellent eye-opener to what lies ahead for journalists in the digital age, as more and more tools and skills become necessary to keep up with the speed and complexity of information available.

Open University lecturer Tony Hirst (@pyschemedia), gave a fascinating presentation on data mashing (a summary is available on the News:Rewired site), which caused a collective brain meltdown among the audience of journalists, as he started demonstrating how to manipulate and analyse data using tools such as YahooPipes, Google Fusion Tables, ManyEyesWikifield, and several more. You name it, I hadn't heard of it.

The new  coalition government has since pledged to introduce radical changes in the public's 'right to data', making large volumes of government data accessible as part of their Big Society proposals.

From gatekeeper to masher
In the Media Guardian last Monday, Chicago-based web developer Adrian Holovaty was quoted saying that even though journalists may lose privileged status as gatekeepers of information because of the upcoming torrent of data availability, the more of it there is, "the more essential it is for somebody to make sense of it."

In other words, one of the key functions of journalists is about to shift from being fact reporters to that of also acting as data mashers and analysers. This could entail a hack being able to do more than simple sums and subtractions in Excel, being familiar with CAR (not an automobile but "computer assisted reporting"), knowing the difference between bag pipes and Yahoo Pipes, plus a smattering of coding knowledge thrown in for good measure.

Taking into account that government data will start being released in matter of weeks, not years, I wondered aloud on Twitter how many hacks actually have such skills today. The good-humoured tweet I received in response from James Ball of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is not that far from the truth:

If geekery is not your cuppa
With so many  journalists coming from a humanities background and not exactly with a mathematician's nor a data analyst's head on their shoulders, this knowledge gap could prove to be a bit of a challenge in times to come.

The new generation of young journalists, on the other hand, may revel in this type of environment. Students of Paul Bradshaw of the Birmingham City University or of Murray Dick (former BBC trainer of online research at the BBC) at Brunel University, for instance, will have been trained in database journalism and are unlikely to shy away from experimenting with data scraping.

We could say all journalism is investigative. Yet if success in 21st century journalism is to be determined by how able you are to fish selectively from a sea of raw data, those who have been specifically trained in investigative technology, rather than techniques alone, are likely to fare better in the long run.

If the continuing recession further increases competition in the job market, will media organisations fill their rare vacancy with an old school hack with top-speed shorthand and traditional reporting skills or a freshly graduated young multimedia journalist, for whom social media tools, data mashup and most online technology may be second nature? Whereas one will have the experience and wisdom youth cannot buy, the other may have the resilience that brains hardened by experience may find awkward to handle.

Age matters
I was delighted to come across a blog by Andrew Brightwell, one of Professor Bradshaw's MA students in Online Journalism, describing how Tony Hirst's teachings had inspired him to use GoogleDocs to analyse swimming pool opening times in Birmingham. The same Tony Hirst, who had me dumbstruck with the complexities of the data mashing world had not intimidated this young journalist in the least but filled him with genuine "joy", as he himself admits in his post.

Those of us who are well past our school days, or not particularly technically-minded, however, may need a helping hand in sorting through and breaking down such great volumes of information. How else are we supposed to logically explain data to our readers, if we cannot ourselves make sense of it, analyse it and present it in small digestible pieces, maybe even with the aid of visuals?

(Photo: Infographics by The Guardian by tripu)

Back to school
Course providers may see a golden business opportunity there to cash in on crash courses for techno-phobe journalists, or those who may hate Excel. Conferences such as News:Rewired, geared towards digital journalists, are likely to become even more important as a place for acquiring technical know-how while networking with those who may have skills and knowledge you need but do not yet have.

While we wait for more specialised training opportunities to become available, some hacks have taken the initiative to spontaneously pursue coding lessons in a friendly, relaxed environment.

Two (or more) heads are better than one 
A group of journalists led by Joanna Geary, web development editor of The Times, and James Ball, started meeting up monthly in a London pub to learn a programming language called Ruby – over a few beers of course. You can follow their conversations under the hashtag #rubyinthepub or #ritp on Twitter.

Judith Townend, of Journalism.co.uk, went along to one of the Ruby evenings and wrote a report of her impressions here. Her general view was that whether the journalists actually managed to learn and digest any of the coding taught by the programmers, it was most significant that the Ruby In The Pub meetups opened up dialogue between the two parties.

The lesson might be that, if you are not nerdy enough to be a geek, you might as well have a geek as one of your friends.

Community
In the US technologists already collaborate with journalists within digital communities, such as Hacks/Hackers, aimed at helping "apply technology lessons to journalism".

The community even has a useful Question and Answer forum (image below) for media technology issues, which I believe might soon turn into a type of wikipedia for journalists struggling to keep up with the technology.

OWNI has published an interview with Hacks/Hacker's co-founder Burt Herman, which illustrates the spirit of collaboration among the founders.

In a dog-eat-dog world that journalism can sometimes be, partnership and teamwork risk being overlooked in favour of solo performances and a single place in the sun. But when outcomes are best achieved through conquering technological challenges not everyone may be comfortable with, forming specialist communities to respond to those emerging needs, to exchange and share knowledge, seems like a no-brainer. The age of journalists living in ivory towers is long gone.

United we stand
Friendship is not a bad place to start for geek wannabies either. Over a conversation about multimedia skills necessary for the modern journalist, Sarah Booker, of the Worthing Herald, and I discovered a common desire to learn how to podcast and are planning to get together in a few weeks' time to trial out our first joint podcasting session.

Once we become confident, it is likely we will each go off and do our own, but it is very comforting to be able to work with another journalist on such collaborative terms. It reminds me of how much fun I used to have as a child going over to a friend's house to do homework together. It may not be Ruby, but it still feels like a gem.

As the data dams open up and government figures come flooding in, it remains to be seen whether journalists, who have so long fought for their release, will die of ecstasy or simply stand frozen in sheer bewilderment. Whatever happens, if the data release will be as large in scale as the government is promising it to be, investigative journalism will  never be the same again.

Will hacks be able to hack it?

It might not be too soon to start joining hands, brains and gadgets, and order some more beer at the bar.

International Women's Day: some random thoughts

Today is International Women’s Day, a day for remembering and celebrating the achievements of women past, present and future.

The fact that there isn’t an International Man’s Day seems like an indication that women have always had it much harder than men to get to the same places.

Men certainly seem to dominate the upper echelons of print and broadcast journalism and although some of my favourite journalists are in fact female, their careers seem to be generally blighted by sexism and ageism, which get better or worse, depending on what the part of the world they work in.

Age concerns
It wasn't that long ago that BBC boss Mark Thompson came under fire for replacing a mature female judge in a popular dance show with a pop star 36 years her junior.

The fact that in television, older, grey-haired male presenters carry on commanding respect well into their retirement age, whereas their female counterparts get sidelined as their age starts to show, could be a reflection of a society's warped views about women, and not exclusive to the industry.

Women's value and employability should not be conditional to age or appearance, but women in highly "visible"jobs such as television or film, do not always have a choice.

Anna Ford (photo right), a journalist worshipped by her male peers as something nearing a sex goddess in her heydays, decided to retire in April 2006, at 62, saying:

"I might have been shovelled off into News 24 to the sort of graveyard shift.”

But I am placing my bets we would be perfectly happy to accept a geriatric Paxman on a zimmerframe presenting Newsnight.

The BBC announcing the recruitment of “older female newsreaders” soon after the Strictly Come Dancing judge swap saga, strikes me as being laughable. I can visualise a screaming headline: “Older women join ethnic minorities and the disabled under positive discrimination scheme.” Or, more bluntly, as The Independent put it: Must be Female. Young Need Not Apply.

The future is not orange
The very idea that women are so vulnerable they need to be placed in a special category of their own is preposterous.

I worked for many years in publishing and have always been outraged by the existence of the Orange Prize for Fiction, a literary prize awarded solely to women. Some might say it provides women authors with an extra opportunity to have their work recognised. My view is that it implies women writers are so lacking in talent that competing for the Man Booker Prize alone doesn't suffice.

It is most unfortunate that the current sponsors of the unisex Man Booker Prize are an investment company called Man Group, giving the prize its present name. Had they not decided to retain the “Booker” from its original name, Booker-McConnell Prize, the country's most prestigious literary prize for fiction would simply be called Man Prize.

It is ironic when you think women read more fiction than men.

Too many women spoil the broth
Publishing may be a sub-sector under the media umbrella, and pay equally poorly at entry level, but unlike in print and broadcast journalism, women reign in the world of books .

In an industry known for the predominance of female workers it is not uncommon for women to climb their career ladders to become directors and publishers in their 30s and 40s. A female-dominated industry can make it easier for women to break the glass ceiling; it may even offer better working conditions, such as flexitime for working mothers and good maternity leave terms, but publishing also has its drawbacks.

For young, single female workers hoping to meet future partners at a book fair or book launch party, the prospects of finding an eligible bachelor among the married and gay men are dire. Let's put it this way: book fairs and book launch parties are not exactly a speed dating scene.

Had I known this in my early 20s, I might have chosen journalism sooner. The idea of being able to approach an intellectual-looking sub in a newsroom to consult about the correct use of commas is a major turn-on compared to the girls' club that publishing is.

Women in uniforms
Some women-dominated professions seem to deceptively put them in a position of power, when they are the ones most susceptible to malicious exploitation.

I am thinking of nurses and flight attendants. The uniform makes them look as if they were in a position of control, and yet they are less threatening to men than an executive woman in a power suit. This seems to enhance their sex appeal.

Perhaps you will remember Virgin Airlines' 25th anniversary "Still red hot" TV advert. A group of model-like gorgeous flight attendants march down the airport with the pilot, wearing the airline’s red suit – short skirts and red pin heels – while men ogle, drop phones and hamburger fillings in astonishment. The ad concludes with a passenger saying, “I need to change my job,” and the other “I need to change my tickets.” Despite complaints that it was sexist and insulting to women, the Advertising Standards Authority dismissed them, saying the ad was " unlikely to be seen as a realistic depiction of the profession", as reported in The Guardian.

We may be well aware real-life stewardesses don't actually dress or walk like the ones in the Virgin ad, but it does add fire to some people's fetishist fantasies.

Flight attendants working for Japan Air Lines (JAL), the bankrupt airline recently rescued by the Japanese government, are facing not only the risk of losing their jobs but the double humiliation of having security chips sewed on to their uniforms to prevent them from selling them to the black market when they've been laid off. The story was broken by Sky News and appeared in The Times, The Telegraph and the The Daily Mail.

Last week the carrier announced 400 cabin crew jobs would be axed, and the local sex industry was already going into a frenzy to lay their hands on their uniforms for customers keen on role-playing. A JAL suit on online auction sites are said to be selling for thousands of pounds. Go figure.

Bras on fire
Is there a solution to women being exploited, patronised or sidelined because they look too sexy, too vulnerable or too old? Should we be stomping off to Westminster to burn our bras in front of Parliament like the feminists of the 60s? What would we achieve? What do we want to achieve?

I guess no single answer can sum it all up, as each woman has her own battle to fight. For some, it may be as basic as learning how to write their name so they can access better opportunities (65% of the world's illiterate population are women). There is still so much work to be done.

Whatever it is that may be constricting women from achieving their right to achieve, be it a brasserie they can easily unhook, or a social stigma or discrimination that are harder to undo overnight, today is a day for reviewing milestones past before we set goals for the future.

The long path already travelled, makes us what we are today, collectively, for we women are more powerful than we imagine.

As Alice Walker said:

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."

Hyperlocal vs local: how about a truce?

An article I wrote appeared in one of the local papers this week. And for the first time I didn't cheer.

Instead of the usual elation in getting a byline, the sight of my story in print brought on the type of anticlimax you get when you have fought a battle for so long and so hard, victory feels anything but sweet.

This is the story of that battle.

The priority queue
My article was about ineffective CCTV footage failing to help identify yobs, who had vandalised a local shop window in a town with anti-social behaviour on the rise.

The paper's news editor was excited about it and wanted to publish it straight away, but, typically, the story didn't appear for another week. Perhaps they needed time to flesh it out with less local and more regional facts and figures. But it is generally the case that hyperlocal stories, unless they involve death, sex and/or gore, are seldom rushed into a paper that covers a wide geographical area.

When there are only so many pages for news, small town news can easily end up at the end of a lower-priority queue.

With only two newspapers covering the area I live in – one from the Newsquest group, another from Johnston Press – I usually submit local news pieces to both to maxmise chances of publication.

Reputation
I have been a resident in this town for less than two years, but since I started contributing to the local press, I am constantly surprised at how many townsfolk know me as a journalist. I am of course always "fishing" for stories. I attend the local Chamber of Commerce meetings, council meetings and local cultural events whenever possible; I pay attention to locals' gossip, as sometimes there can be a good story behind them. Local traders – bless them – are always eager to give me tip-offs about upcoming events they are involved in, hoping I will do them a write-up and provide them with some free PR, which I am happy to oblige with if I can.

I was chuffed when, the other evening, the town's mayor came to say hello at a public meeting, and a senior staff member of the district council recognised me and offered me a seat right next to Norman Baker MP.

With my community reputation on the up, I am well placed to become a hyperlocal reporter. The role, however, comes with a price tag, and it is not a pretty one.

It's charity work
By 'price' I refer to a type of penalty and not, sadly, the payment of a fee for work done. Local papers do not have budgets for freelancers full stop, especially not in mid-recession.

Frustrating as it can be, I can even overlook the lack of payment by the papers that publish my work, if I think of my reporting as community service. It would certainly make a world of difference if newspapers could cough up even a nominal tenner per article, just as an acknowledgment of hard work. It is not the absence of money that hurts the most, but the utter absence of appreciation. (Low-waged junior reporters must feel exactly the same). As it stands, there is no clear line marking where the keen work experience student finishes and the keen professional journalist starts.

Does my pothole look big (enough) in this?
The next big battle is getting my hyperlocal news pieces accepted, and published, by local papers.

There is a priority issue, as I have already mentioned. Is the pothole in my street as newsworthy as one in a larger city like Brighton, for instance?

Other times, the story is taken up, but with an "of course we are happy to help build your portfolio..." type of comment, to drive home the fact that they are publishing my piece as a favour, NOT because I picked up on a good story they had missed.

No love lost
Last week I also realised a local reporter assigned to cover this area regards me as a thorn in her side.

This is a senior journalist who, when I once mentioned I expected to see her at a certain public event but she wasn't there (and therefore I had written a report about it), tartly retorted, "But I didn't receive an email about it." Heck. I hadn't received an email either. A local trader had told me about it. Aren't reporters supposed to sniff out off-diary stories within their beat? Or do they sit around waiting for press releases to arrive in their inboxes?

I have only myself to blame for being so naïve. What was I thinking believing a local hack would accept my contributions with open arms, grateful that I was filling in gaps for her. There is obviously no interest in cultivating a working relationship with a freelance/unemployed journalist, who continuously exposes their own gaps and, even without pay, is enthusiastic about pursuing community news.

An inconvenient woman
At a local police meeting we both recently attended, she behaved as if I didn't exist. She was aware I would be there, as we had chatted about it on email an hour before; I was sitting less than two metres away, and right in her line of vision. She had met me before and knew what I looked like. I can only conclude it was intentional.

Even so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and told myself she had other people to talk to, that she was probably in a hurry to go home. But a stiff one-line email from her the following day, informing me my she had placed my "other (much shorter) article" on page x in the upcoming edition, with no mention of the meeting, confirmed my suspicions.

Had the message arrived before the snub, I would have read kindness into her words. But all I could hear now was: "this story is mine, stay off my beat."

The lesson is clear – there is no room for a hyperlocal journalist in a town with an established local paper. Collaboration is not on the cards. I am a threat, an inconvenience.

The last straw
Since then I have been so depressed, I cannot motivate myself to do anything journalism-related. The notes and recordings from the meeting are sitting forlornly at a corner of my desk, my desire to write another story out of them now lost. I have shelved my plans to send an FOI request to the police. My long list of ideas for future features are still in my notebook but haven't been actioned. Right now I can't see the point in investing any more time in any of it. I might as well spend my days and nights writing job applications and stuffing my face with junk food in frustration and boredom.

Long-term unemployment drains you of energy and makes you rapidly lose confidence and self-esteem. It affects you mentally, emotionally, physically. To counter those ill effects, I have been trying my best to keep intellectually and socially active by attending conferences and networking, learning new skills, listening to advice from other journalists, experimenting with digital technology, sharpening my skills all the time...

I have been attempting to be a journalist, even without a job. And what have I received in return? Contempt. Closed doors. "You are not one of ours." Snide comments. Silence.

I am too exhausted to fight any further.

Find your niche
According to a friend, who is a magazine editor, I am wasting my energy writing poxy little articles for poxy local newspapers, which are doing nothing to enhance my employment prospects. He says I need to find my niche market, and he is so right:

"Ultimately, landing a few very small paid assignments for an outlet that has a legitimate audience will do more for your career than grinding away at a hundred labor-intensive articles for a small local paper."

Symbiosis
Here is what I believe. Local and hyperlocal can co-exist quite happily in a symbiotic relationship. While news under hyperlocal may be small, the thinking behind it must be big in order to work. Hyperlocal initiatives offer plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurial journalists, who are resourceful, enthusiastic and community-oriented. I aspire to be one of those.

I have not given up on journalism, but I am taking some time out to re-set my priorities. I've had enough of small-town/small-mind journalism, which concerns itself mainly with defending personal reputations and territories. At the end of the day, who is the media serving? Advertisers? Media bosses? Individual journalists?

Isn't it time we put small communities on the map?

Potholes need to be covered. Or someone will fall into them.

Hyperlocal 2010: a roundup of predictions

New Year is here. Media pundits have been busily trying to forecast the future of print news and paywalls as journalism struggles to survive the worst recession of all times.

I have been reading up all year on one of my favourite topics – hyperlocal initiatives – and would love to know where that is heading towards.

The need for community-level reporting platforms seem to become increasingly evident with every new local newspaper that shuts down. But do they have any commercial viability in the long run? And is there a workable model of mutual collaboration with mainstream media?

Here is a roundup of what journalists and bloggers have been foreseeing with their crystal balls for 2010 and beyond.

The cash factor
Jo Wadsworth (@BrightonArgusJo), web editor of the Brighton Argus, well-known for her work with community reporters, predicted in a Q&A on Jon Slattery's blog that in 2010 hyperlocals will start making money.

Patrick Smith (@psmith), on reporting about the AOP's Microlocal Media Forum in paidContent:UK, came to a less sanguine conclusion...

"Whether anyone will be making a real living from [hyperlocal] – as a mainstream publisher or a start-up – seems unlikely in the near future..."

And yet, Philip John (@philpjohn), the technical geek behind the Lichfield Blog, believes it is possible for hyperlocal sites to make money and even blogged a list of suggestions.

Birmingham City University lecturer and Help Me Investigate founder Paul Bradshaw (@paulbradshaw) thinks new models require new (financial) strategies. He was reported by paidContent:UK as having said:

Are we expecting margins online that are coloured by our print experience? Why are we expecting to make as much money?”

The problem is that many consider 'hyperlocal' synonymous with amateur enterprise and hyperlocal blogging as "comment" as opposed to a journalist's "news". Matt Wardman (@mattwardman), who is compliling a directory of ultralocal blogs, says on his website:

"This is a ludicrous position to take, bearing in mind the extent to which news and opinion are mixed in the local (and especially the national) media, and also the miraculous range of howlers and planted stories which appear regularly."

Any hyperblogger approaching the managing director of Newsquest's digitial division, Roger Green, about possible partnering in the near future, can expect to be met with total scepticism. As the Press Gazette reported, Green didn't mince words in making his views known at the AOP Forum:

"You should sit in on some of the joke meetings I’ve been in with people from no-name start-ups who say we should help them start their business and pay them for the privilege."

The journalist-over-citizen bias
On the positive side, however, Walsall Council's Dan Slee (@danslee), has started calling for other local government press offices to treat local bloggers with the same respect as they would journalists from traditional media and vice-versa.

Slee deserves much credit for the initiative because, as Sarah Hartley (@foodiesarah) wrote in The Guardian about the TalkAboutLocal's first 'unconference' in Stoke-on-Trent, the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) "looks unlikely to change the definition of who gets treated as a journalist". The Guardian quotes an NALC spokeswoman:

"We can say anecdotally that we would encourage councils to treat only accredited journalists as journalists. And treat citizen journalists as citizens."

One more reason why a change of attitude to accept local bloggers filling in market gaps "needs to come from the top", as Philip John commented on Sarah's personal blog.

The synergetic view
I have a huge respect for the opinions of multimedia journalist Adam Westbrook (@AdamWestbrook). He is the type of progressive-thinking mentor the next generation of young journalists can only benefit from.

On the News: Rewired site (he is one of the speakers at the event on 14th January), Westbrook identified three ways to be an entrepreneurial journalist, the first of which is to match needs of the market with what you can offer in the same way "James Dyson [...] realised people were tired of bags in vacuum cleaners".

"Hyperlocal websites which start up in areas well served by mainstream media will struggle, because they’ll be trying to offer an alternative to a market which is quite content."

In Westbrook's vision, mainstream giants co-exist symbiotically with hyperlocal businesses:

"The future of journalism landscape still has the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, BSkyB and all the other big names in it – just with other, smaller, businesses around it. They will be complimented [sic] – not threatened – by start-ups."

Alas, the backlash
Of course not all share that view, particularly the change-averse, stick-in-the-mud old-schoolers.

Software developer Dave Winer (@davewiner), compared the rise of citizen journalists to the arrival of "amateur skiers" at professional ski slopes but says, seemingly with regret, that "the exclusivity is gone".

"The pros have to share the slopes with people who don't take the sport as seriously as they do."

As I wrote in my comment to his blog, should saving professional skiers by keeping the "amateurs" out take precedence over saving skiing as a sport by embracing the positive aspects "amateurs" can bring into it?

My personal hope is that, just like ethnic profiling for anti-terrorism scanning at airports is causing an outrage now, one day linking words starting with "citizen" and "hyperlocal" with incompetency will be taboo and a thing of the past.

And what does your crystal ball say about hyperlocal? Add your views below.

Hyperlocal is here to stay (Help Me Investigate)

As an enthusiast for investigative journalism and a believer in the power of crowdsourcing, I volunteered as an investigator on Paul Bradshaw's Help Me Investigate platform.

The topic I chose to investigate was "How much local council news coverage is there in your local newspaper?", led by The Guardian's local launch editor Sarah Hartley.

I picked one daily, The Argus, and one weekly, the Sussex Express, and analysed their coverage of local council news.

The instructions were to:
a) count the total number of news pages (excluding ad pages, sports, property section, etc)
b) count the space occupied by local council stories (1/4, 1/2 or 1 page)
c) divide b by c to arrive at a percentage

Outcomes
The two papers returned very similar results. In four weeks, Sussex Express produced an average of 4.15% of council news in its news pages and The Argus, an average of 4.46% over five days.

If you are interested in helping the investigation, go to the Help Me Investigate site, read the guidelines and let Sarah (sarah.hartley AT guardian.co.uk or @foodiesarah on Twitter) know which papers you are covering from this list.

The outcomes were in line with my expectations. Since regional papers started shedding staff as ad revenues fell, the resulting understaffing in local papers' newsrooms meant the remaining reporters had to stretch themselves to tackle the increased workload and cover their patches.

When editors are under pressure to publish stories that sell papers (i.e. gore, crime, deaths, scandals) and move circulation figures upwards, stories about local government decisions, which are not controversial enough to stir a strong response from the reader, are likely to be given lower priority, or, might, at most, end up as a nib (news in brief) in a spare corner of the page.

Hyperlocal
To me this only underlines the importance of hyperlocal news bloggers, as addressed in this blog by Dan Slee, a former journalist who now works in local government. Slee thinks local bloggers should be respected and treated as journalists by council press officers whereas bloggers should behave like journalists, checking facts and studying basic media law.

He refers to another ex-journalist, Ross Hawkes, who decided to found the Lichfield Blog, currently with 16,000 users, when he heard a fire engine run past his house one day and his wife wondered where it was going. He told Slee about his a-ha moment:

“I realised that there was no way of finding out anymore because local papers just aren’t there.”

Case studies
Only a few days ago, the Press Gazette reported that The Argus would be using journalism students from the Brighton Journalist Works as community reporters for the newspaper's website. Web editor Jo Wadsworth will also be training PCSOs to upload news and appeals to the community, virtually turning them into beat bloggers.

This hyperlocal initiative of transforming local contacts into community correspondents was also picked up by Sarah Hartley in her blog. It will have the dual benefit of providing students with valuable experience and multi-media training, while expanding the scope of news covered by The Argus.

Another Newsquest paper, The Northern Echo, responds to ultra-local news content needs by regularly recruiting members of the public – ranging from teenagers to pensioners – as contributors to their website.

Assistant editor Nigel Burton explains here that their community correspondents do not replace staff journalists, but rather supplement their work by covering ultra-local stories they would normally miss. Or give a miss to.

Changing landscape
With resources thin on the ground and space on print paper so precious, is training community correspondents to become hyperlocal journalists groundwork for a more interactive and a less recession-vulnerable type of journalism?

A decision at a local council meeting, which may not make headlines, might still generate debate and mobilise people at grassroots level. So, even assuming there is no harm in limiting coverage of unexciting council stories to 4% of a local paper's content, having a team of community correspondents further scrutinise that 4%under the magnifying glass of citizen journalism might be a step in the right direction towards empowering their communities – as both news generators and news receptors.

How that will eventually change the future definition of news and journalism is a hot discussion topic for another rainy day.

Watch this slide presentation given on hyperlocal by Sarah at the Digital Editors Network event in Preston in October:

Hyperlocal space

View more presentations from sarahhartley.