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.