New Report on Hyperlocal News in UK

Collaboration between AHRC-funded projects in the UK has led to a report on the status and viability of hyperlocal community news.  Some key findings:

• UK community news sector is well-established, with nearly three-quarters of players producing news for 3 years or longer (one-third doing so for more than 5 years)
• 70% see what they do as a form of active community participation; half identify their activities as local journalism, half as an expression of active citizenship
• More than half have formal journalistic training or mainstream media experience
• Most hyperlocal news sites have modest reach, even in their local communities

• Most community news producers classify their activities as part-time (only 11% report spending 40 hrs/wk or more on producing community news).  Also, most producers fund their projects themselves - only a quarter raise enough money to cover their costs.

Source :  UK Hyperlocal Community News: Findings from a survey of practitioners. Research report

Community news and newspapers still important

Post contributed by Bethany Braden

The recent state of the media report mentioned that media revenue for daily papers is down, but there’s some good news for weekly papers.  In the Feb. 2012 issue of Quill, one of the features is about the Community Current newspaper in St. John Washington. The paper comes out roughly every month, and subscriptions cost less than $20. The paper is staying above water.

  The Current makes it work by practicing hyper local journalism, and they have been profitable each of the 18 years it has been in print. How can this be in a world where it is predicted newspapers are wheezing their last breaths? It turns out, according to a Pew study, newspapers “play a far more complex role in the civic life of communities than many people believe.”
  The Pew study  revealed that the local paper is where many adults go to get information on jobs, real estate, obituaries, local politics, government affairs, taxes and other civic issues. The problem, the study alleges, is that only a tiny segment of the population care about these issues. 

This brings me to a few other points:

·          Interest in these issues must be taught. Nobody gets up one day and says “I’d really like to know what’s going on with the government.” Children must be taught from the time they’re young that local affairs are important to us as well as to the next generation. This is a societal issue that has very little to do with economics, but an issue to address.

·          For those of us who want to find a job working with newspapers, these statistics provide an interesting perspective against the doom and gloom of hearing how newspapers are dying. The key, it seems, is that anybody searching for a newspaper job should seriously consider taking a position in a tiny little town to start with.  Working hard in a small town will further equip you to report for bigger papers later….and if there are no bigger papers to work with later, you have had the writing experience to adapt to an online job.

Sources -  For Love of Community, Quill (Feb 2012 issue)

How people learn about their local community: The role of newspapers,  Pew Internet & American Life report


BJB forgot to add title - now fixed

Mergers & Acquisitions: It happens with nonprofits, too

It was recently announced that two major Californian nonprofit news organizations will "merge."  Leaders from The Bay Citizen and Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) announced that the move will result in the creation of a single newsroom with a staff of 70, that will focus on investigative and accountability journalism that will be published under three brands - The Bay Citizen, which will focus on local Bay Area coverage; California Watch, for statewide reporting efforts; and CIR for national stories.
  One Bay Citizen staffer offered a different perspective -

“While technically a merger, a similar deal in the corporate world would be termed an acquisition, with Berkeley-based CIR assuming a dominant role on the board and in the management of the combined organization. No one from The Bay Citizen’s current senior editorial or technology management teams will have a leadership role in the expanded organization.”
Also: “The Bay Citizen will likely no longer cover breaking news or culture, as CIR leaders have said they see those as commodities that don’t fit the expanded organization’s core mission.”

  The founder of competing community news outlet Oakland Local suggested that in might be a bit of poetic justice, as at one point that Warren Hellman, the sponsor providing start-up funds backing The Bay Citizen, had initially consulted leaders of CIR, but then had decided to start the Bay Citizen with a different editorial team.  With Hellman's death, his foundation has continued to fund the Bay Citizen, but has not committed to long-term support.

Source - Bay Citizen, Center for Investigative Reporting Merge,  Knight Digital Media Center News for Digital Journalists blog

Personalized News? Microsoft takes a shot

Mcrosoft's Future Social Experience Labs have been quietly collaborating with Cambridge University on the development of what's been labeled a "personalized news stream."  Developed as an app for smartphones running Windows, Project Emporia reuses data and news from social networks.  The app relies on two Windows technologies (auto categorization and matchbox) and gets all of its news information from shared URLs on Twitter.  The service is said to be similar to the way marketers determine personal ad relevance in the personalization of ad delivery.

However, the journalist in me has to wonder about relying on Twitter for news feeds - while Twitter can be a quick and easy source for breaking news, it also transmits a lot of unsourced, unchecked, and possibly malicious information -- and you have to wonder whether Project Emporia has a filter to sort the wheat from the chaff among more than 1 million Tweets a day (and if it does, how it works).  Will Project Emporia become a personalized news feed, or a personalized gossip feed?

While I'm at it, Microsoft has also been working on another project (Montage) which lets users create Web pages from stories or news from friends and others, and can be used in support of crowdsourced news.

These projects contribute to the diffusion of mechanisms supporting the personalization of news and information, which can also be readily adapted for citizen journalism and highly targeted micro-news services.  And the fact that allow of the collection, editing, page creation, and distribution can be accomplished from a smartphone or tablet, further embraces the ideals of citizen journalism and the idea of hyperlocal, hyperfocused,.and/or crowdsourced news. 

It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out over the next few years, and how it will change our notions of news and journalism.

Source: "Personalized News: Microsoft Digs Deeper Into Social", Online Media Daily

"Why I Gave up the Newspaper to Save Newspapering"

Colleague and Asst. Professor Elizabeth Hendrickson recommended this column, recounting one person's decision to leave the family newspaper business and start an online community news website.  While acknowledging that newspapers face in a transforming media environment, his motivation for leaving had to do more with shifting ownership structures. He argues that Publishers are increasingly not from the communities they cover, but are visitors in the towns they cover.  As a result, the ties between newspapers and their communities are being lost.  Recognizing the role that the Internet and Web play in fostering and developing new communities, this former publisher concludes in saying that he walked away from his family's generations-long heritage serving communities through newspapers, because he thinks a community news website start-up has a better chance to resurrect the ties between news and community.
The article's short, and I recommend reading it.

Source: "Why I Gave up the Newspaper to Save Newspapering"  Mediashift (a PBS Blog)