- NewBizNews: Hyperlocal « BuzzMachine – The value of volunteering: This is the hardest to calculate but is critical to the local models: People are contributing to the newssphere because they want to, because they care. With help, I’m confident they’ll do more. That’s part of what we’re trying to discover at CUNY in our work with The Local at the New York Times: how communities can be supported to report on themselves. This could be podcasting a school-board meeting or crowdsourcing projects or looking up records. This, like new ad models, will be the subject of some speculative brainstorming. And it will be difficult to put numbers to it. But it’s critical.
- Mediabox – New strand Mini Mediabox – with grants from £1,500 – £5,000 is now open. Mini Mediabox is for grassroots and community organisations with an annual turnover of £100k or under, designed to enable smaller organisations to access funding for their youth-led projects.
- Home | Nominet Trust – We aim to support distinctive and inventive Internet-related projects that can make a difference to people, primarily in the areas of education, online safety and inclusion. With our grants we back programmes and organisations using IT to benefit society. The Nominet Trust is a charity created by Nominet, which maintains the .uk register of domain names and is one of the world’s largest Internet registries.
- The Straight Choice | The election leaflet project – Election leaflets are one of the main weapons in the fight for votes in the UK. They are targeted, effective and sometimes very bitter. We need your help to photograph and map them so we can keep an eye on what the parties are up to, and try to keep them honest.
- Murdoch: Web sites to charge for content – CNN.com – “I suspect within any readership there is a small slice — maybe three percent — that is willing to pay. News organizations are going to have to find a way of getting money from that slice without driving away everybody else,”
Tag: Local Government
Stuff I've seen from May 2nd to May 6th
These are my links for May 2nd through May 6th:
- twittl | Twittl – Chat Catcher is a simple script that you can install on your website or WordPress blog and it will pull in all conversations related to your blog post from Twitter, Friendfeed, and Identi.ca. These conversations get posted as comments/trackbacks on your blog post. http://tr.im/kCji
- Working Together – Public Services on your side. – Working Together – Public Services On Your Side details the steps the Government is taking to give people, communities and frontline staff the information and real power they need to personalise public services. Reflecting their local and individual needs will create a richer, fairer and safer society.
- Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky – “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”
- Pixelpipe – Free your content, post, upload and share anywhere – Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text and upload photos, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 75 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and other online destinations. We provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their media and sharing their life.
Links for April 29th, 30th and May 1st
- Cabinet Office API programme: All Civil Service Jobs – An API for all Civil service jobs. To play with.
- Anecdote: Vital behaviours for knowledge sharing – “Hmmm, I think people spend more time moving about the floor and having conversations,”
- Your Right To Know » Article: Beef or chicken? Same gravy, different flavour – You can’t hope for a better result as a campaigner than to have the prime minister announce a major policy change within 48 hours of your documentary. Is this the power of television? Was Brown watching and choking on his dinner?
- Charlie Beckett: Faster than the speed of mind: is media change out of control? – Some institutions should not fear the digital reaper. Anders Sandberg thinks that the value of the British Museum, for example, lies in its amazing collection of unique objects. They won’t change in a digital age. You could create a virtual British Museum but that would be additional to rather than replace the core essential value of its physical collection.Conventional libraries on the other hand may have to face up to the extinction of their previous book-based business model. The physical library could become irrelevant.
- Basic Premises For Every Community Manager | Connie Bensen – Here’s a summary of the basic premises every community manager should keep in mind. And companies that are creating communities should also realize their importance.
- Business Strategy: Ordnance Survey – it has determined that Ordnance Survey should implement a new business strategy to meet the changing needs of customers and the wider market.
- WordPress in UK Government: an informal audit. Puffbox – “I thought it was about time I compiled a list of all the UK (central) government web projects I know of, which use WordPress.”
- Headliners | 2009 | Drug Pressures in Alum Rock – Headliners in Brum: “This film was produced by Headliners reporters; Moneeb Khan, 14, Idrees Suleman, 13, Zayyan Ahmed, 12, Mohammed Ehsan, 13, Ahsan Arshad, 11, Wasim Arif, 18, Adnan Hussain, 16 and Mohammed Abass, 17”
- BCN (Birmingham Canal Navigations) « CanalScene – Like this site and it’s use of Google Maps to trace canals.
- DFID – UK Department for International Development – What I like about this site is the way it puts the story first – makes space at the top for frsh content. It’s designed to encourage a conversation between dfid and the rest of us.
- Your content at risk: A credit crisis for the co-created web – If Flickr were to fail, how would that change your online generosity? Of course, Flickr would not be the first to disappear, taking our treasured content with it. But it would be the first co-created giant of the social media age to tank. Imagine the holes it’s sudden desctruction would leave across millions of websites and blogs… there would be one on this blogpost, for a start.
- Report: Social Media And Video Site Engagement Reshapes The Web | Nielsen Wire – “The meteoric growth in social media is the single most significant story in the online media space today. The numbers speak for themselves: the continuing growth in audience and engagement are like the bullet train that could.
On the other hand, the implications of the social media phenomenon for marketers and publishers far outweigh the impressive metrics: the world’s leading marketers are realizingthat at the heart of the social media movement lies a method to transform the manner in which brands communicate with
their consumers. We may be on the cusp of a disintermediationthat the advertising world hasn’t yet experienced.” - Government API Directory – ProgrammableWeb – Says what it is
Should the government stop local councils competing with local newspapers?
Below (scan down a bit) is a piece I’ve written at the invitation of Paul Bradshaw from the Online Journalism Blog. Paul e-mailed to say: “I’m creating a 6-part series of responses to the government as part of its inquiry into the future of local and regional media. I will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. They invited responses on 6 areas. This part will look at the 3rd:
The appropriateness and effectiveness of print and electronic publishing initiatives undertaken directly by public sector bodies at the local level. The question of what public sector bodies should be allowed to publish, how that affects local journalism, and how it affects local democracy, is one of the most difficult to resolve – not least because it involves so many interconnected elements.” So that’s what Paul asked. He has written this and here are my thoughts – mostly on the question of the quality and transparency of information paid for from the public purse:
—————————————–
I talk to a lot of people who work in council communications departments. They’re all conscious that the regional press is in trouble. If they’ve not recently lost a local paper they’ve certainly seen local journalists lose their jobs.
They consistently tell me one thing: “Because there are fewer reporters it’s easier to get coverage. Those who are left are really grateful for the stuff we give them. More and more they run it verbatim”.
On the one hand we have newspaper editors complaining about direct competition from council newspapers and websites, on the other they increase their reliance on content from these same sources. This tension amply illustrates the waning value of newspapers as mediators.
Public bodies will continue to want to connect directly with an audience. They will find it ever easier to tell their stories in audio, video, maps, text and images and they will attach all that content to rss feeds to be used by individuals and publishers of all sizes.
Not only that but public services have a growing responsibility to talk directly to the public. The conversational web and data mashing offer an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate with us to improve public services. It would be negligent for any media regulation to stifle this. Indeed central government already actively encourages local councils to improve their direct relationship with the communities they serve.
Any minister making decisions now risks being derided in years to come for not understanding quite how powerful these new flows of information are, first to undermine the business model of newspaper and second to strengthen the democratic opportunities for our public services. I can’t imagine any sensible intervention from Andy Burnham or Hazel Blears demanding that this trend should be somehow stopped!
New standards for Public Information
Newspaper editors should stop bleating about potential competition. Instead they should fight for new standards for public information.
Clearly all public communications departments take care to be accurate and negotiate the line between politics and public service. Often they will check their facts more carefully than journalists might because they get more stick for being wrong.
But as more and more material from local government press departments is used use un-mediated by millions of people how do we guarantee the quality of this information?
So now is not the time for government to stifle council communications teams. Now is the time to ask if we have the right editorial guidelines for council press officers and communications departments. Let us instead ensure every single one is a centre of excellence for plentiful, high quality and easily re-usable public information.
We already have at least one model for using public money to pay public servants to create content for the public good. It’s called the BBC. This is based on the rather clumsy notion of impartiality. The new model should be built on guarantee of quality that comes with transparency.
Any comments you make below will be posted, by Paul, through to the enquiry. Others in the series include:
Alex Lockwood on “The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information”
Adrian Monck on “The opportunities and implications of BBC partnerships with Local Media”
Paul Bradshaw also on “Should Councils Publish Newspapers”