Tag: Journalism

Relationships between local bloggers and local councils

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.

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Stuff I've seen August 28th through to August 31st

These are my links for August 28th through August 31st:

  • 15 Unconventional Uses of WordPress – "In this article we will highlight some of the most unconventional uses of WordPress and show you how you can use WordPress in these unconventional way as well." via @problogger
  • Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text | Wired Science | Wired.com – Neat way forward to what we think we can rely on, colur coding the wikpedia stiff that is form people we trust and survives: “They’ve hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia,” said Wikipedia software developer and neuroscientist Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the project. “Everyone’s injecting random crap into Wikipedia, and what people agree with more often sticks around. Crap that people don’t like goes away.”
  • Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – "technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions."
  • BBC – Peston’s Picks: What future for media and journalism? – Robert Peston: "the blog is at the core of everything I do, it is the bedrock of my output. The discipline of doing it shapes my thoughts."
  • Access Space Overview & Site Map – Sheffield – "Access Space is the UK’s first free media lab: an open-access learning community where participants learn, create and communicate online. Participation empowers individuals and develops skills, community, creativity and resourcefulness."
  • New feature: custom locations / The EveryBlock Blog – Draw your own neighbourhood: "As a neighborhood news site, we try to maintain accurate lists of neighborhoods and their boundaries, but we're inevitably incomplete. Neighborhoods change, areas get renamed and redeveloped, and even the most well-established districts can have ambiguous boundaries. (In fact, some argue that neighborhoods have no true boundaries, only centers, but a computer needs to be able to draw the line somewhere.)" Via @dominiccampbell

Paid for newspaper content, blogs and search.

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.

A quick link about Help Me Investigate, collaboration and journalism

  • Journalism.co.uk :: Help Me Investigate: How working collaboratively can benefit journalists – Birmingham Post reporter Tom Scotney reflects on the first story he wrote as a result of working with Help Me Investigate (I’m one of three people behind the site): “what’s most important when working like this is to recognise that you’re part of a process, not the end result of it. Which means giving credit where it’s due, getting the facts right, and making clear in the article the process by which it was created. All the sort of things that ought to be standard practice for a reporter anyway, but are more crucial then ever when using a source like this. And the risks are higher – get things wrong and you not only look stupid, but also like you’re stealing the work of others. So there’s no room for complacency – but get it right and you’re becoming part of an investigative team that’s bigger, more diverse and more skilled than any newsroom could ever be.”