On 25 June 2010, together with Caroline Sutton, I attended news:rewired – the nouveau niche at Microsoft HQ, London as a representative of the Brighton and Hove Community Reporters project. We witnessed the convergence of some of the most influential and prolific minds in journalism and communication. More than 100 media professionals attended the event and participated in discussing their specialist niches from creating online communities to developing information graphics.

The day-long event, split into keynote sessions and panel discussions organised by Journalism.co.uk, was the second in a series of events focused on addressing the future of journalism in the online digital age.

When media, comms and PR types meet with journos to discuss online publishing, you might expect pessimism to override. “Where’s the money?” “Who’s financing online publishing?” But the message delivered loud and clear at NewsRewired, was to the contrary. “Wake up!” Embrace the era of uncertainty and innovate. The printed newspaper is in gradual long-term decline and sales are plummeting daily. This is due to a rise in the free consumption of online news. Online journalism offers a sphere where news can be user generated, contributed to, collaborated with and commented on. The Internet is enabling people from different socio-geographic areas to create their own community and contribute in ways unimaginable 10 years ago. How we move forward with the expansion of social media and news sharing portals is exciting. And ‘virtually’ anyone can play a part, qualified journalist or not.

The day kicked off with an introduction from the Journalism.co.uk team followed by a keynote presentation by Peter Bale, executive producer, MSN UK. As well as announcing a new editorial code of conduct which has now launched on the company’s website, Bale presented the latest tools MSN are using to tell stories including Deep Zoom and Photosynth, a new photo stitching software. Presented as the ultimate journalists’ friend for capturing a moment in time quickly, Photosynth allows you to create an interactive photographic experience to feature alongside your online stories. Tools like these are free and available to anyone and enrich stories online.

Bale called upon the work of Josh Halliday, Jemima Kiss, Robert Andrews and Will Perrin to exemplify that it is down to the individual to harness an online space and build their own brand.

Introductions were quickly followed by the first session, which was split into two ‘streams,’ with delegates choosing between Mobile and Building online buzz.

I attended Building online buzz featuring speakers Mike Harris, public affairs manager, Libel Reform Campaign; Tony Curzon Price, editor-in-chief, openDemocracy; Vikki Chowney, editor, Reputation Online, Centaur Media.

Having developed a community sound and story-telling exchange project in Brighton and Hove, which now exists as an online interactive sound map, I was keen to find out more about building buzz.

Tony Curzon began with an overview of the big scale trends through the acrcheaology of the Internet to get us thinking. From the decentralised distribution of data to search engines doing a centralised brokerage job. The leap from the ‘blogger’ as mini-dictator to the ‘anyone, everywhere’ social media epidemic comes to some like a smack in the face. Curzon believes that email will remain strong against Facebook and Twitter as it is the most personalised yet decentralised mode of online communication.

Mike Harris put forth the most relevant advice in this session explaining that buzz comes from the noise created by your readers. When reproached by Tony Curzon on how this noise translates into action in the case of a campaign, Harris replied, “its about tapping into energy levels of specific communities.”

Here’s a list of top tips I picked up on to help you build online buzz:

1. Finding people who will build your web presence for you is very important. Most blogs receive direction from other sites. Use Twitter and Facebook to link your stories.
2. Make links with friendly bloggers and people writing about similar subjects who will promote you on their own blog.
3. If you have a blog or e-newsletter, ask people to tweet at least one of the news stories.
4. If you want to keep tabs on all your online activity, aggregate all your activity across different social media sites and get notifications you when someone has responded to one of your posts. Here are 20 ways to aggregate your social networking profiles.
5. Ask your community what they want to receive.
6. Use website analysis tools such as Google Analytics to see where your hits are coming from and exploit these areas.

After a quick 15 minute networking break (not long enough if you ask me), most of which was spent hunting down non-existent coffee, we entered the second session stream. This time we had a choice between Building user-driven projects and Paid-for content. I was naturally drawn to the former. Brighton and Hove Community Reporters intend to form a self-managing network for people interested in reporting in their community. Ensuring that the network is self-sustaining and that members are able to pool from each other’s expertise is a central aim.

Chris Taggart developer of OpenlyLocal, a website that takes council data and makes it available to everyone, began by answering the obvious yet crucial question: Why involve users? “It leads to good stories and conversation. Readers have specialist knowledge that you need to tap in to. You know nothing in comparison.”

Paul Bradshaw, founder of Online Journalism Blog and Help Me Investigate echoed that when it comes down to it people are our greatest resource was. Help Me Investigate is a platform for crowd sourcing investigative journalism. Anyone can submit a question to the site, which is then broken down into a series of ‘to do lists.’ It is not a publishing tool but a project management tool for anyone. Once you have completed your investigation you can publish a link to your report on the website.

Paul broached the topic of open source journalism:

It isn’t about going on a site and saying, ‘please help us, or please pay us.’ Where it works is by sharing yourself on a creative commons license, that’s when you get people responding and contributing their knowledge.

Here’s Paul’s slideshow:

The Internet offers a space for communities to form and address a range of topics democratically but be careful where you place advertising. Lulu Phongmany, business development & marketing manager at iVillage, said when looking for ways to monetise a website always seek consent from the community it is home to.

By the time questions opened to the floor, my mind was racing. The most stimulating question asked by the audience had to be, “Are interactive hyper local sites drawing new audiences and activating political awareness?” At which point Chris Taggart, replied:

Liberating arcane bits of data and facts allows people who wouldn’t want to get involved in a political debate to be part of it. There will always be a hardcore and there needs to be a hardcore. People did see the financial crisis coming and looked at the data and exposed it. But ultimately there is potential in enabling others…

So where do we go from here? Well it’s quite simple. According to Samantha Shepard, online journalist and digital projects co-ordinator at the Bournemouth Daily Echo, “If you build it, someone will come.” She says there are three types of online inhabitants, the lurkers, shouters and reader +’s and they will prove to be invaluable to you.

Rounding up the day was a panel discussion between four pioneering brains in journalism and digital publishing including Hannah Waldram, beat blogger for Guardian Local Cardiff and founder of Bournville Village.

Hannah’s story resounded with my experience leaving university after studying for a fine art degree. Graduating into a recession, Hannah Waldram couldn’t find work so she moved back to her hometown, Bournville near Birmingham. She decided to set up Bournville Village an online local news website proving there’s more to Bournville than chocolate. Coincidentally, the day it went live there was a shooting in the area, very unheard of for a small leafy suburb. So it kicked off with a bang.

Tools Hannah Waldram use include an audio recorder, hand-held video camera, a tripod for both and a smart phone. Once she has gathered her material she sorts it on Delicious. She edits her audio on Audacity and she shares her photos on Flickr and Tweetpic.

Hannah looks at what data isn’t available in Bournville and aims to make it visible in innovative and interactive ways, “Everything I do is about bringing people together.”

The future of journalism lies in open sourcing information that the councils are already starting to do. This makes for rich and fertile ground for journalists, readers, lurkers and shouters alike.

Overall this was an incredibly insightful day with the message at stake undeniable. Talking to Hannah at the end of the day we agreed that the distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ is blurring, so we can put the dichotomy to bed now. Although we came from different backgrounds, we appreciated that we both held separate knowledge and experience of community driven projects focused upon community reporting. Citizen reporting is flourishing in a world away from the printed smudge, it’s time to get on board with the open source and help each other access information in a fair and equal way.

For more information on speakers and the day’s agenda, click here.

This video includes interviews with four people who came to the Brighton & Hove Community Reporters Monthly Meetup in April 2010. They are Jo Wadsworth, Paula Snyder, Ron Sharrat and Paul Jackson and they give you a great idea of what community reporting is all about.

By  John Scott

 The Quaker Meeting House played host to the Community Reporter volunteer journalists. Divided into two halves, the evening included demonstration talk by Frank LeDuc about Brighton and Hove News

Using a video-projector displaying the ‘newspaper’ front page he explained how he set up the  web pages as an experiment when he was unemployed.   He discussed how the news was gathered-from Police and Council press releases to ‘walking the streets’ finding items like shop or pub closures to incorporate into the news pages. There is also a rolling news inclusion…and journalists put everything together in their lunch hour.

Advertising is being considered,  he told us. New volunteers are welcome. It was an ace presentation and made one want to join the group.

 After a short break the second half consisted in discussing the upcoming  BHCR Refugee Week in June. The gathering of about twenty people were divided into three groups and each person given a Refugee Week flyer where the events were listed in date order. Group members chose the venues in which they were interested and gave an writing angle  they would adopt at their chosen place.

Amy Riley and Caroline Sutton led the team and Nick—a Media Police Officer was also present.

The meeting lasted between 19.00 and 21.20. Coffee and biscuits were provided. 

Journalist Paul Bradshaw has written a very useful summary of how to write for the web, starting with the need to keep things brief. He suggests that anyone writing online needs to get used to creating short chunks of text, rather than long sections, and using one paragraph for each idea. He also thinks that 500 words is more than enough for any page – that making your copy any longer risks losing the reader.

As Rick Waghorn points out in the comments, however, this is very much a question of your audience and its preferences. His site is MyFootballWriter.com, which attracts people who are happy to read much longer stories. and he sets the limit closer to 1,000 words.

The best place to start, as ever, is by thinking about your audience. Do they want detailed insight on a specialist topic, or short sharp updates that can be scanned and understood as they skim across the web?

Paul Bradshaw has proposed three principles for journalists in the online age. It is a neat summary of the role of a journalist in the internet age and recognises how sharing stories between communities can empower people:

• To verify & contextualise what’s online;
• To digitise what’s not online & make it findable;
• To empower communities & make connections between.

This links very neatly with the aims of Brighton & Hove Community Reporters:

• To help promote community cohesion by sharing stories and encouraging links between people from different parts of the community;
• To help improve the quality of news and information being reported from within local communities;
• To help people from marginalised communities to share their stories.

Here is Paul’s list in full:

3 principles for reporters and bloggers in a networked era

1. To verify & contextualise what’s online

• Because finding things to publish isn’t difficult – for anyone.
• Because the voices that stand out online are those that dig behind the statistics, or give meaning behind the headlines.
• Because curating context is as important as curating content.

2. To digitise what’s not online & make it findable

• Because in a networked world, information that’s not online is, to all intents and purposes, for most people hidden.
• Because journalists have always sought to bring hidden information to a wider audience – but in the networked era that’s no longer a one-way process. SEO, tagging, linking and social media marketing are just as important as publishing.
• Because online, information has a life of its own: adaptable, aggregatable, mashable.

3. To empower communities & make connections between

• Because the web is a tool as much as a channel.
• Because journalists have always been generalists whose strength is in making connections between diverse areas – in the networked era that role is reinvented as a connector.
• Because serving communities sometimes means looking out as much as looking in.

This is a very neat summary of the core work of a journalist in an age in which we have more data than we can handle and need someone to help us organise it so that we understand what it is telling us. There are some great ideas in Paul’s article, many of which are explored further in the comments.

Thanks to Dan Wilson for the link.

Caroline Sutton launched the first Brighton & Hove Community Reporters training course on Saturday 8th May at Coldean Library. Ten eager students from a wide range of backgrounds will be studying at the library for six weeks. Here’s an interview with Caroline about how it went.

Just to let everyone know both courses are now full.  The first one is due to start this  Saturday at Coldean Library at 9.30am.

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and hope the course will be fun and helpful.

If you’ve not managed to get on a course this time, keep in touch or drop us a line to be put on our waiting list for when we announce the next ones.

The growth of social media is changing the way we communicate with each other. It’s not just changing how we keep in touch with friends but it’s reconfiguring the ways that we gather, assimilate and share the news, ideas and stories that matter in all parts of our lives.

It is changing our personal interactions and our business networks and it is also altering our view of the big events in our communities, whether that is the election, the World Cup or a new round of Britain’s Got Talent. So what is it doing to the role of the journalist?

Millions of tweets are sent every day, sharing news, opinions and connections untouched by a journalist's hands.

Journalists have always been there to help people to understand and make sense of what is going on around them. In an age of social media that challenge is magnified as everyone struggles to knit together the overwhelming volume of information that passes through our lives every day. So now the journalist must adapt their role, to recognise the new skills they need to remain relevent to the people they seek to help.

For anyone feeling cast adrift in a sea of change I recommend this presentation from US-based journalist JD Lasica, who suggests that the new journalist must combine six roles:

Photo from http://twitpic.com/photos/SimonBrading

Hello reporters and residents. Today is the day of Brighton Marathon and it’s the perfect assignment for anyone wanting to “give it a go” at reporting. The race started at 9am and weaves all across the city, through Brighton, Hove and back again with a dramatic finish at the Concorde 2 on Madeira Drive. Click here to see a full map of the race.

Reporting can be a tweet on Twitter, a photo or a video captured on your phone or full on write up of what you saw. We encourage anyone to have a go!

If you’re publishing on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or any other online or social media site, we recommend using #Brightonmarathon and if you want to give us a big up use #communityreporters.

A few Brighton &Hove Community Reporter people will be down there….look out for Argus Jo, me, Caroline – Caroline’s neighborhood is having a party!- and possibly others.

Feel free to comment your views, links to pics, tweets and posts, and thoughts on today’s events.

Philip John, Litchfield Blog

Talk About Local conference 2010

Session One: Big media and hyperlocal blogs – how can they work together?

This session was facilitated by blogger and programmer Philip John (Lichfield Blog) & David Higgerson from Trinity Mirror.

The two started working together to see how local blogs and the media could work together to each party’s benefit. Lichfield is the first hyperlocal blog for the area and the paper’s first positive relationship with bloggers.

Higgerson says he’s encouraging journalists to engage with hyperlocal blogs, not just for paper benefit, so people feel they’re getting something back from their local newspaper.

Lichfield Blog say they’re not interested in money and their principle is to serve the community, so the relationship with the paper is mutually beneficial in that they  get attribution.

….the workshop begins:

• Is it right for papers to lift content or photos from blogs?  David suggested saying to local paper/reporter: ‘how do you feel when you see your content on BBC or been lifted?’ Attributing a story to a ‘local blog’ is patronising.

• Some bloggers do their writing in their spare time, but what about the ones who do this full time and don’t get paid? “Could the papers syndicate stories so blogs get paid?” asked a blogger whose breaking story about a murder in her village was stolen, along with the photos. Sky News paid for photos to one blogger who went down one morning after a drive by shooting at a club.

• Cumbria newspapers do profit share with hyperlocal sites in community.

• “What does our audience want from the media? It might change what we understand as news or local,” said local parish councillor and blogger.

• A blogger who does restaurant reviews says if local press link to her blog, it’s beneficial as she makes some benefits.

• One blogger says he has a  good relationship with their local press, who always attribute pics and rewrite content . He feels the press takes their stories to a bigger platform and can help solve local issues such as  roadworks being taken seriously and addressed by the council. They also do summary of local newspaper on blog.

• One journalist for drinks with local bloggers to build relationship – recommends that bloggers should get in touch with reporters

Ventor Blogs talked about their unexpected success, which hasn’t equated  to financial success.:

“When you start your site you have one idea, no ideas that it could ben a business – now readership exceeds local paper & we are seen as threat.”

The blog, which receives 6-7k unique users a month, is run by two people, whose blog is seen as an alternative to the island’s paper. “The journalists are not allowed to mention our name there.”

“When we started out we never imagined that it would be taking over our lives and that we would be working full time on it. It has grown into this massive thing that people demands news and if we don’t deliver it they complain. not that they’re putting their hands in their pockets.”

“Being paid for the content you’ve produced – it’s really important to us. And we have been paid before, by the Argus, the BBC have paid for some stuff. Money isn’t the end all and be all but… if it’s a big national they should pay for it.”

So how can bloggers & big media work together? final thought:

One of the conference organisers, William, said he was on a panel to inject hyperlocal into a panel of big media companys. He put up a few hyperlocal sites on a projector & said ‘what would you do with this site? how would you work with them?’ In most cases they hadn’t thought it through. A few did & came up with answers. The most important thing – what are the terms of trade?  He said he even had difficulty of getting £50 donation from a paper for taking his story.

This was later echoed: “Both parties need to know where they want to go & that makes it a lot clearer.”

TAL10 Conference

Bloggers and big media session

TAL10 Conference, Leeds

TAL10 Conference, Leeds

More live coverage: http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/tal10-live-coverage/