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From the monthly archives:

January 2010

Lessons from traditional media

January 25, 2010

In his first blog post of the new year, and the first as ex-Birmingham Post editor, Marc Reeves outlined 3 reasons why he’ll miss newspapers and 3 reasons why he won’t. (Hey, Marc, your link baiting worked!) I was directed to the post by Dan Slee who called it ‘essential reading for anyone connected to [...]

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Every little counts, especially lost cats and dogs

January 22, 2010

I’m not a massive animal lover, having only ever really had fish as pets but you can’t knock the collaborative effort behind Animal Finders, the service based out of Oxford that helps people to report lost and found animals. There’s even, of course, a Google Map. This is just the sort of service that hyperlocals everywhere [...]

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Could hyperlocal apps usurp blogs?

January 21, 2010

I mentioned the other day that I didn’t believe, for the most part, that hyperlocal is sustainable in it’s current form. Blogs run entirely on the back of good will from volunteers donating their spare time and the odd bit of cash are not going to make a massive impact on local media, in my [...]

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Future of News West Midlands?

January 21, 2010

I’ve just arrived home from the second Future of News meetup organised by epic visionary, Adam Westbrook. When Adam first announced the meetup I thought one for the West Midlands would be good but didn’t take the thought further till I met Adam at last week’s news:rewired conference. You may be thinking, “oh great, another [...]

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Conservatives propose ultra-local television stations

January 19, 2010

In a Parliamentary debate on the newspaper industry last week, Shadow Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, Ed Vaizey MP said that the Conservatives will propose ‘ultra-local television stations’ as a response to the decline of the newspaper industry. Combined with the relxation of media ownership rules they believe this is the correct course of [...]

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Is social enterprise the future of local media?

January 18, 2010

In a recent parliamentary debate on the state of local newspapers, Derek Wyatt, Labour MP for Sittingbourne & Sheppey, made reference to the The Guardian’s status as the subsidiary of a charity, the Scott Trust as opposed to it’s rivals who are for-profit ventures. He went on to propose the model for local media as [...]

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Useful Android apps for bloggers and journalists

January 11, 2010

As people get their first looks at the new Google phone, the Nexus One, I thought it might be a good time to highlight some of the best free apps for journalists and bloggers that are available on Android. I’ve been using the HTC Hero for a while now and am finally beginning to get [...]

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E-book review: Newsgathering for Hyperlocal Websites by Adam Westbrook

January 11, 2010

Newsgathering for Hyperlocal Websites is a new educational e-book from multimedia journalist, blogger and lecturer Adam Westbrook. With several years of experience in journalism, Adam saw the rise of hyperlocal and decided it needed a guide to gathering news online, both for the traditional journalist who may not be web-savvy and the non-journalist who needs [...]

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Generating revenue for a hyperlocal doesn't have to be hard

January 8, 2010

There’s plenty of experimentation going on in local media at the moment, from pay-walls to blogger recruiting drives and everyone asking how to make money from it all, whatever the answer is. So far, I’ve not seen anything that really gives me confidence that anyone has that answer. It strikes me though that when the [...]

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Helping hyperlocal: One simple action to aid e-democracy

January 8, 2010

A while ago I pledged to donate £5 per month to mySociety, the e-democracy charity behind such great sites as TheyWorkForYou.com and WriteToThem.com. I made my pledge through their excellent PledgeBank.com where Tom Steinberg, director of mySociety promised to donate £5 per month if 250 others did the same. The pledge only reached 144 people, [...]

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