I’m really excited about this! Many of you will know Journal Local because of the emphasis on hyperlocal, but it’s also a platform for niche journalism and a consumer of data for re-purposing in support of journalism or hyperlocal reporting. To that end the sourcing and mashing of data is very interesting to me.

It’s why I attended the Hacks & Hackers day in Birmingham back in July. Andrew Brightwell summarised what our team got up to with leisure centres in the West Midlands.

Now Scraperwiki, the organisation who organise these events, are doing another one in Manchester and I decided that it makes sense for Journal Local to support it, so we are! The day will see hackers (like myself) and hacks (that’s journalists!) get together and create interesting ‘stuff’ that helps journalists to tell stories and developers to add that extra polish to a good story.

It’s like the everyday relationship I have with the editor of The Lichfield Blog and the other site owners hosted on Journal Local, but with people from all different backgrounds whether big media, independent publisher or freelancer.

If you’re at all interested in creating stories using data or online tools in general, come along.

It’s a completely free event and you can find more details at the Scraperwiki blog.

Hacks and Hackers is an event intended to bring  journalists and freelance publishers (such as hyperlocal site owners) together with developers (such as myself) to share knowledge on news gathering and coding for new gathering.

Organised by ScraperWiki and sponsored by Birmingham Science Park Aston and Digital Birmingham, the event is free to all though spaces are limited so sign up quickly.

Publishers and hackers will be put into groups to share ideas about what data they would like to learn more from and together create projects which use the data in interesting ways.

Prizes will be given for the best projects and there’s a good chance that some really interesting applications will come out of the day.

The event takes place on Friday 23rd July at Birmingham Science Park Aston and registration is available through the Eventbrite page.

I blogged a while ago about Patient Opinion’s new widget that offers site owners the ability to embed a widget about health services in their area into their web site.

At the time there were a number of items of feedback, including the width which was too wide for most blog sidebars.

In response, Patient Opinion have now slimmed down the widget and you can see an example of how it looks on the builder where you can generate your own.

Now we’ve had today’s budget, why not see if hyperlocal can try and assess the local impact.

HM Treasury has provided us with three press notices, a couple of photographs and the regional budget reports, one for each of the 10 regions of England and then one for each of the devolved regions of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Download them below;

Press notices

• Press notice 1
• Press notice 2
• Press notice 3

Regional budget reports

• East Midlands
• East of England
• London
• North East
• North West
• Northern Ireland
• Scotland
• South East
• South West
• Wales
• West Midlands
• Yorkshire and Humber

Photographs

• George Osborne outside no. 10
• George Osborne and senior ministers outside no. 10

See what you can do with it, and show us what you’ve done in the comments!

This one has already had a good dollop of re-tweets and blog posts about it so I thought I’d leave it a while before posting this to give it a *bump* (and because I’m rubbish and only just got round to it).

David Higgerson, who’s a top bloke from Trinity Mirror and looks after their regional web properties (in a roundabout sort of way) has blogged a list of 10 ideas for where hyperlocals and local papers can work together.

It’s a good list and includes a lot of the stuff David and I covered in our session at TAL10.

And if you’ve already started working with local media, are planning to or having other thoughts on the subject, share them in the comments below.

…but you’re probably right as well.

Today a lot of people have been commenting on a blog post by David Ottewell at the Manchester Evening News about hyperlocal. In it, David says,

There is a lot of talk these days about ‘hyperlocal’ sites. The idea is that journalists working in a small community can cover stories that might get lost at, say, a regional or local level.

Too often, though, these sites disappoint. They end up simply regurgitating press releases, or ripping off stories from local newspapers, because they are one-man bands run by amateurs who don’t have the time, resources, or sometimes skills to dig out the news.

What David fails to recognise is the diversity among hyperlocals. When I read the post I instantly though of the phrase ‘tarring with the same brush’ which is a connection shared by Guardian Local editor Sarah Hartley. Will Perrin offered the following examples of hyperlocals in the comments;

http://pitsnpots.co.uk/
http://www.greenerleith.org/
http://bournvillevillage.com/
http://www.greenerleith.org/
http://parwich.org/
http://thelichfieldblog.co.uk/
http://ventnorblog.com/

As I said in my comment, these are largely examples of sites that are at the news end of the hyperlocal spectrum. Often journalistic in nature, these do aim to provide news coverage to their community.

However, at the other end of the spectrum are those that are run by community activists and aim purely to provide an online voice for the community, encouraging interaction and sharing. These never intend to be news sources and don’t want to be. Often, they’re referred to as citizen journalists by people in the journalism community but they are not journalists.

That’s probably where some of David’s comments come from – too often journalists seem to look at all hyperlocals as journalistic operations which they often aren’t and don’t pretend to be. Too often the journalism community looks at the hyperlocal scene in generic terms and thinks that we believe we’re the solution to local media’s problems.

Some of us believe we have a significant part to play and my news onion demonstrates how I feel about it. In fact, the local media landscape has already changed significantly in recent years and it will continue to do so. One form this will take is that hyperlocal will work more and more alongside traditional media like MEN.

Readers of this blog will tomorrow see a post about Trinity Mirror’s David Higgerson’s ideas for collaboration between hyperlocal and local papers. Hopefully the work David is doing within TM will filter through to MEN seeing as it is now a Trinity Mirror title, and David Ottewell’s comments will be tagged ‘mis-informed’ and ‘soon forgotten’.

Further reading (including those referenced above);

• The MEN V hyperlocals by Sarah Hartley (Guardian Local launch editor)
• News is an onion… by Philip John (that’s me)
• Hyperlocal websites: 10 ideas by David Higgerson (Trinity Mirror’s Head of Multimedia and thoroughly nice chap)
• Hyperlocal war breaks out in Manchester by Louise Bolotin (co-founder of Inside the M60, a Journal Local-hosted hyperlocal site)
• Hyperlocal wars break out in Manchester by Nigel Barlow (the other co-founder of Inside the M60)

P.s. For what it’s worth I don’t think we should be spending much brain power worrying about comment approval. Sometimes it takes a while, there are usually more important things to be getting on with.

Our lovely friends at Talk About Local have trained many active community members to run their own sites but they say they often struggle for ideas after the first few posts.

So they’ve started a list of content ideas for new hyperlocals to get started.

They include things like local festivals, wildlife, transport and local issues as ‘minor’ as dog mess.

If you’re just starting up, check it out for ideas and if you’re established, why not suggest some more!

This is the start of what founder Carll Tucker event hopes will be 3,000 hyperlocal news sites by 2013. Before embarking on creating a hyperlocal news empire, Tucker was editor and publisher of Trader Publications, a community news company based in Cross River, NY.

via Hyperlocal Network Mainstreet Connect Raises $3.97 Million First Round | paidContent.

Patient Opinion is a great service that allows anyone to provide feedback on their experiences of health services in the NHS.

They’ve just realised a widget so that you can embed recent feedback based on criteria you select to your web site. You could use this to provide additional information to visitors or to supplement a news story, for example.

Have a go at creating one yourself, an example of which you should see below.

You must have a browser that supports iframes to view the Patient Opinion widget

While plenty of people were shouting about how 2010 would see the first social media election, I wasn’t so sure. A more locally-focused general election seemed on the cards from where I sat (not surprising though as ‘local’ is kinda my thing now).

The Orange Digital Campaigning Awards are supposed to pick out those good examples of online campaign during the election. Except, as Matt Wardman has pointed out, the panel is open to mostly London-focused politicos rather than ‘normal’ people. The awards seemingly don’t even have a web site!

So Matt tagged me in his meme to help with nominating candidates for a grass-roots version. The awards are;

• Best use of digital campaigning by a political party
• Best use of digital campaigning by a candidate
• Best non-party digital initiatives
• Funniest use of digital campaigning
• Worst example of digital campaigning

I’m only really aware of what some sites within the hyperlocal scene have done – primarily those that are close geographically or that I’ve worked with so I’m only going to nominate for the ‘best non-party digital initiatives’ category.

My nomination is for *drumroll* … Pits ‘n’ Pots! Their election coverage in Stoke-on-Trent started long before the election was even announced and was detailed and included fantastic audio and video interviews with prospective candidates. They also did a fantastic job of covering the launch of the BNP’s election campaign, getting video interviews with leader Nick Griffin.

Their election night coverage was also excellent – a live feed including video interviews with the candidates at the count and live announcement of the results.

I’d also like to mention Tamworth Blog who did a similar live feed with video from the floor of the count, covering the result as it happened. Disclaimer: I was there helping Tamworth Blog with their reporting on the night.

So I should also pass on the nomination baton to others to help build up the number of nominations, so here goes;

• Will Perrin of Talk About Local
• Paul Bradshaw of Online Journalism Blog
• Nick Booth of Podnosh
• Marc Reeves of The Business Desk West Midlands

However, that doesn’t mean no-one else can nominate. In fact, I encourage you to do so! Tweet me your nomination with the #orangedigitalawards hashtag and I’ll include them on this post. Or simply blog your nomination, linking back to Matt’s post to have him include it.