One of the heated debates which took place at the Talk About Local un-conference ’09 – a day designed to bring together hyper-local bloggers from across the country to discuss common issues, problems, share ideas and talk about the future – was how council press officers treat local bloggers.
For example, in Sarah Hartley’s recent article for the Guardian, Stoke Council’s head of PR and communications, Dan Barton, said bloggers were excluded from press breifings and the press table in the council chamber. He said:
Opinion should be encouraged but we do draw a distinction between what is news otherwise we are in danger of de-valuing the role of journalists.
Tom Harris, MP is musing about how newspapers charging for online content will effect bloggers:
a staple of political blogging is the external link to a news site. Guido has his “Seen Elsewhere” widget and almost all of the PoliticsHome homepage is links to features and news articles in the dailies.
What happens after all these newspapers start restricting access to paying customers? Will bloggers have to assume their readers are subscribers to the external sites we link to? Those who regularly include links in their Twitter feeds, or who regularly follow such links, will face the same problem. As will those who rely on Google Media Alerts to flag up news articles on specific subjects.
Tom’s thinking of this as a potential problems for the bloggers. However his last sentence above shows how much of a problem it is for the newspapers. If the system they use makes people reluctant to link to their website, then surely the newspapers site will be less likely to show up in search.
Other newspapers writing freely and openly about the subject will get the links, as will other blogs, as will people like politicians who’ll be saying their own things on their own sites. The New York Time’s David Carr hinted that people will be bookmarking new news sites, but the links problem is surely even more fundamental. It is the start of a spiral of decline, isn’t it?
Of course Murdoch and his team may have had a uniquely brilliant new thought about this and the paid for content problem. A cunningly brilliant idea that hasn’t yet occurred to the tens of thousands of people who’ve been worrying about this for many, many years.
If they have then that is content I would pay to read. Once.
Say Liz comes in to have her portrait taken. Once she’s had her image taken, she’ll be invited to suggest how she may like Matt (who is next in line) to pose. (She may ask him to smile, to frown, to stand or slouch, to display the object he bought earlier from Artsfest. She’s limited only by her imagination (and the laws of decency!)) The photographer will take a few frames, and then Liz will get to choose which one she would like to exhibit.
Not quite as crowdsourced, but I’ve always fancied doing an interview with a Birmingham active citizen and at the end asking them who I should talk to next – then following their nose to the next wonderful person. Perhaps a photographer would like to share the project with me? I’ve done a few of my own.
Neville Davis of the Sparkbrook Neighbourhood Forum
Perhaps you can teach me to be better with the camera and I can help you schuusch up your audio stuff? If you think it’s a good idea please nag me below .
Update:
Besides the comments below we also have this, from Matt Murtagh (who is very good at taking pictures):
I’d be interested in that, the artstfest thing is kinda my idea…
Help Me Investigate allows people to ask civic questions and work together to find answers. Since it emerged into life a couple of months ago people have sought answers to questions ranging from:
“Why wont’ Birmingham City Council hand over the running of Lightwoods Park to Sandwell Council”
“Help me investigate why my doctor has an 0845 number”
“What is the tracking process for petitions handed into Birmingham City Council.”
The site feels quite Birmingham centric at the moment simply because we are experimenting using questions about the place where many of us live. As the site evolves that will change.
Who pays for this?
It is funded by Channel 4’s 4ip fund, Screen West Midlands and Advanatage West Midlands and it’s launch attracted interested from the mainstream media. The Guardian summed it up like this:
Rather than a publishing platform, the site is a tool that could equally benefit news organisations and the public; it follows the MySociety mould of successful activism sites like TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet.
“Journalists think investigative journalism should be very secretive, but [HelpMeInvestigate] has to be seen to be owned by the community than by journalists because that puts off the public. People can contribute their expertise to answer specific questions, and journalists with no resources could use the site to call on the community for help.”
Today the site, still in a private experimental phase, saw it’s first spin off mainstream media news story.
The Birmingham Post runs an HMI story on Parking Tickets.
This morming the post ran this story about how HMI had found the worst street for parking fines in Birmingham. The story began here, with a question from Heather Brooke:
Help me investigate on which Birmingham Streets are the most parking tickets issued?
It’s an interesting HMI question because it is about something which bothers many of us, but it’s also specific and local. It’s also a classic local newspaper question, but what thye may not take the time to ask.
The next stage was a freedom of information request, which you can see here on MySociety’s brilliant WhatDoTheyKnow service, which makes FOI requests public and easy to make.
When the information finally arrive in three files another user of the site stepped into to help. Neil Houston likes messing around with spreadsheets (part of the point of Help me Investigate is to allow people to play to their strengths).
He quickly established the 10 worst places to park for ticketing were:
•Alum Rock Road, Washwood Heath (3,995)
•Stratford Road, Sparkhill (2,418)
•Corporation Street, city centre (1,748)
•Alcester Road, Moseley (1,545)
•Waterloo Street, city centre (1,455)
•High Street, Harborne (1,391)
•Gas Street, city centre (1,083)
•Whittall Street, city centre (1,022)
•St Paul’s square, Jewellery Quarter (1,008)
•Dean Street, city centre (978)
Neil normally blogs about food, so even though he wanted to right about this he didn’t want to contaminate his normal blog. He borrowed some space on Be Vocal to write this piece, including the observation that:
it’s surprising to see that the warden BM739, issued 5,080 tickets. The next ‘top’ ticketer issued 3,559. This shocked me, as that’s a LOT of extra tickets by BM739.
Tom Scotney at the Birmingham Post started to use his papers position to seek explanations for the figures from the council, and this morning he posted the article including explanations for these questions: 1/2) Why is Alum Rock Road the most ticketed area in Birmingham?
3) Why did the number of tickets given out rise significantly over the last full recorded year?
So what do I make of this?
Thanks to the Birmingham Post for running the story and more importantly sharing credit for the story. It’s important for news organisations to get used to being open and generous with sources.
It’s good to see citizens and journalists (who are also citizens, I know) collaborating with each other to get to the bottom of something
This one set of data has already triggered new questions about car clamping and could lead to a flurry of similar questions across the country.
The other thing to remember though is that this may not be typical of what happens on Help Me Investigate. This is a question which has general interest, hence useful for a mainstream news organisation. Many of the questions though may be, on the face of it, more mundane and more about how thre system works or perhas problems that are very very local.
For these the collaboration could involve public servants using the questions as a means to improve the work they do. At least let’s hope so.
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