Jon Bounds surely has the claim to the most memorable title of a hyperlocal blog. Birmingham: It’s Not Shit (“Mildly sarcastic since 2002″) is a legend of the local and national blogging scene in which Jon has been a pioneer. In the latest of my ‘Hyperlocal Voices’ series, he describes the history of the site:

Who were the people behind BiNS, and what were their backgrounds before setting it up?

There was, and to a large extent still is, just me Jon Bounds. Although I’ve now got a couple of ‘columnists’ and feel that there are people around that I can call on to let me have a break.

I’ve an odd background of a Degree in Computer Science and a postgrad (CIty & Guilds) qualification in Journalism (and a brief, not entirely successful time as a freelancer on very poor music publications), but it was really working on internet design books in the late 90s that made me think about “the web” as a method of sharing.

As a kid I’d run fanzines (computer games and later football), but there were real creatives getting to grips with the web at that time and that was exciting.

What made you decide to set up the blog?

The blog part of the site came a couple of years after the site itself — which was originally a much flatter website with funny articles/video and a forum. The idea behind the site came as a direct reaction to the terribly drab view of the city that Marketing Birmingham/the Council put forward for the European City of Culture bid in 2002 — and the fact that all of the local media went unquestioningly with it.

Birmingham wasn’t – and still isn’t – a city of loft living and canalside bars, yet “organisations” only seemed comfortable with that little bit of it. To cover the bits of Brum that real people recognise and care about is still the main thrust of the site.

The forum was the real heart of the site, it was a great source of inspiration and support — but it waned after the switch to more in-depth blogging: people migrated to commenting instead. The community still exists, it’s just spread more widely — across people’s own sites, Twitter etc.

When did you set up the blog and how did you go about it?

The first pass was hand-written by me in PHP — it was an easy way to add new content to the site, and be more flexible about what that was (with the link log/blog I could justify covering smaller and more time dependant things).

I later expanded it to a separate blog with Blogger, but that wasn’t very connected — so I quickly moved over to a self-hosted WordPress install so I could integrate the whole site.

For content, it started mainly giving links and information about local events — stuff which wasn’t and still to a certain extent isn’t easy to find in one place. It came from me searching the web and the media by hand. There wasn’t an attempt to do “news” as you’d conventionally see it.

What other blogs, bloggers or websites influenced you?

There were very few blogs around when I started, at least none that were covering local areas that I’d seen — it was mostly inspired by the attitudes and community around Popbitch.com and b3ta.com. They handle community and real events in a very grown-up way — trusting people to contribute, self police and comment without hyperbole on news events and history.

For all that the communities are built around the creation and consumption of seemingly trivial they are fantastic sources of information. Popbitch was the only site still working on 11/09/01 and the people there handled the unfolding story in a genuine way — something that mainstream media just didn’t do.

When transitioning to a more standard blog format, Pete Ashton’s series of posts on Birmingham were useful (sorry best link is http://peteashton.com/page/2/?s=%22brum+blog%22) as something contemporaneous — Diamond Geezer (despite being about #thatlondon) was and is somewhat of an influence too.

How did – and do – you see yourself in relation to a traditional news operation? How are you different and how are you the same?

I didn’t see any relation to trad news when BiNS started. We got a little bit of coverage (some patronising, some ‘shock horror’) when the site first started and then were roundly ignored for a good few years (except when the Sunday Mercury would dip in to the forums every so often for some filler).

There was originally no attempt to cover the same things — the site was a reaction against how the city was being shown. There was deliberately uncensored commenting (bar removal of libel/racism – of which there was very little) and a tendency to cover the more esoteric of Birmingham’s charms.

While I’d like to think that that’s how BiNS still operates, it has moved slightly towards news coverage – particularly in attempting to hold an eyeglass to the operations of the larger orgs that run the city. It’s also had a bit of a campaigning zeal to point out any churnalism or obviously uncritical reporting of (council especially) activity. There is a lot of this in Brum still.

What BiNS doesn’t try to do is to cover the same stuff that people will see in the trad news media — that would stretch resources and dilute the voice — when facts are there it’ll just link.

There has been a movement towards BiNS’s style by some of the proper outlets (including them asking me to contribute) – BBC Midlands Today’s coverage of the “Wolverhampton Ring Road Tramp” seemed to me to be something that they really wouldn’t have done when Birmingham: It’s Not Shit started – it tried to be sentimental and have an arched eyebrow about a story that it probably wouldn’t have touched years before. I’m not saying BiNS was responsible, but the way people could converse on the net has changed the media.

I think there are certain journalistic standards (although not the same often-false idea of neutrality) that the site shares with trad media – and some where I (unbowing to commercial or sales pressures) am free to have higher standards.

What have been the key moments in the blog’s development editorially?

Interestingly, I feel it’s what I could leave out as other blogs and sites started up in Birmingham — the success of Created in Birmingham of rounding up (in a fairly uncritical manner) a lot of the creative stuff going on in the city meant that BiNS could concentrate on what it does best rather than trying to cover everything. The more blogs, the more linking there has been to replace what would otherwise be dry stuff as I don’t know enough about it — people with more knowledge and interest do it better.

My leaving the BBC, years ago now, gave me more freedom to comment on things — but it sort of coincided with the mainstreaming of the blog (a little after came the Birmingham Post putting me at number 14 in their Power 50 list).

Certainly being known personally (and knowing, to an extent) the people that I was covering made some posts more circumspect — and some items not covered at all. This could well be an inevitable problem for the more successful local blogs.

That said, knowing that some people in authority are irritated by it gives some reason behind some of the more campaigning coverage.

Anything else you feel has been important in the development of the blog that hasn’t been covered?

That I’m not a journalist, nor have aspirations to be one gives the site freedom — that it doesn’t solicit adverts (the few on the site are unpaid favours to friends) gives it a strength. A strength to not cover things that aren’t interesting, and to be seen as independent.

The name of the site was critical in both positioning it and getting attention in the early days, and while it no doubt hampers it at some junctions (it rarely gets a link from the press, for example) it sort of keeps it on track — there’s no point in going ‘mainstream’ with “shit” in the URL. It’s also a template for the sort of humour that I’d hope is still part of it.

In the last year or so there have been a number of new blog / news sites developing which provide commentary for a geographically identified area, covering politics but also giving a more rounded view of life in the area.

The site which has drawn my attention recently is The Lichfield Blog, which I mention on the Wardman Wire or on Twitter (follow me to keep up to date) from time to time. There are examples of sites with a similar ethos established for some time, including some personal blogs, and I’d mention Londonist and Dave Hill’s Clapton Pond Blog (Hackney), but also sites such as Created in Birmingham (Birmingham Arts, mainly) and Curley’s Corner Shop (South Tyneside).

Some areas have a range of local blogs. The tiny Isle of Thanet, for example, has Bignews Margate, Thanet Life and Thanet Online, in addition to the more idiosyncratic Thanet Coast Life, Eastcliff Richard and even Naked in Thanet. It’s worth noting that – once again – this set of blogs are all edited by men.

And if you think that Thanet is small to have all those local blogs, try the Plight of Pleasley Hill, an ultra-local blog specifically created to foster community in an area of 3 or 4 streets in the Nottinghamshire village of Pleasley Hill, near Mansfield. I did a podcast interview with Mark Jones, who has triggered the project, for the Politalks podcast. One interesting point is how the creation of a website has helped “institutionalise” a small group internally, but also how it can help externally in the process of persuading large bureaucracies (e.g., the local council) to engage with the group.

Some of those sites have political stances, and some don’t. The common factor is that they provide coverage of local life and grounded politics, and don’t pay unnecessary attention to the Westminster Punch and Judy show.

Occasionally “ultra-local” has been used to refer to areas the size of a London Borough, or a provincial city. I’d suggest that we need to think in *much* smaller areas. I wonder if the one-horse-town newspaper of settlers’ America, but written by local people for themselves, is where we are going to end up, and then with sites covering larger communities, areas and specialist themes which are able to draw an audience.

I’d suggest that there is also a new opportunity opening up for these independent commentary and reporting sites due to a pair of current trends:

• The drive by national media sites to find new ways of persuading their readers to pay for parts of their web content – pay-walls, charges for special services and anything else they can dream up. As the editor of an independent “politics and life” commentary site with a number of excellent contributors, I can’t wait for the age of “Pay 4 Polly” to arrive.
• The continuing liquidation of our local newspapers and regional media.

Locally focused blogs with a more rounded coverage may provide an answer to consistent criticisms made of “the political blogosphere”:

• Political bloggers only do partisan politics (which is wrong, but it can sometimes look as if it is true).
• There is too much coverage of the Westminster Village (which is right, but someone has to do it, and it is the place where many decisions are made).

I think group blogs with varied teams of contributors may be best placed to provide a decent level of coverage and draw a good readership, while competing effectively with other media outlets. That is a trend we have seen in the political blog niche over several years – the sites which have established themselves and maintain a position as key sites have developed progressively larger teams of editors, and provided a wider range of commentary and services.

A team of contributors allows a site to benefit from the presence of real enthusiasts in each area of reporting, from the minutiae of the Council Meetings to Arts Events at the local galleries.

I’m developing a list of sites aiming to rounded provide coverage of a defined local area, town, or community. If you run a good one, or know of one, please could you drop me a line via the Contact Form on the Wardman Wire. Alternatively, use the form below:

Loading…

(Note: if you want to know more about local news blogs in general rather than what I think can be done with them, the go-to place is Talk About Local.)

UPDATE: From the comments: similar lists now available for Norway and Sweden.

I will soon begin teaching my annual module in Online Journalism and one of the first things I get the students to do is set up a Twitter account. It’s often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter, so this time around, in addition to following each other, I’m going to give them 10 people to start following from the off. This is the list I’ve come up with – would welcome your suggestions for others:

1. @davelee - former journalism student and excellent blogger who landed a plum job at the BBC after graduating. Get the point?
2. @channel4news - example of how a news organisation can use Twitter in a personal, conversational way, rather than simply republishing its RSS feed (see also: @r4news, @mashable)
3. @jemimakiss – likewise, example of a journalist using Twitter to involve readers in production, as well as just be a ‘real person’ (alternative: Mike Butcher).
4. @jayrosen_nyu – journalism professor at New York University with excellent links and analysis on the news industry and online journalism (see also: @jeffjarvis)
5. @digidickinson – Andy Dickinson, UK journalism lecturer and online video specialist. Ditto above. (alternative: @egrommet)
6. @bhampostjoanna – Jo Geary of the Birmingham Post & Mail, uses Twitter brilliantly, and is so switched on there’s a power surge every time she wakes up. (alternatives: Sarah Hartley and Alison Gow)
7. @shanerichmond – Communities Editor at The Telegraph, knows his onions. (alternative: Martin Stabe)
8. @documentally - vlogger, moblogger, social media man, has worked with Reuters and others
9. This is a local choice so you would probably have a local equivalent, but @peteashton founded local arts blog Created In Birmingham, which recently won Best UK Blog. Every journalism student should be following – and talking with – people like this in their area. One good place to find out is by searching twitter.grader.com for your area
10. Likewise, @tom_watson is a local MP, but is closely involved in campaigning for the release of government data to the public, and in the government’s digital communications generally. You may have a local or national equivalent.

Needless to say I’ll be suggesting they use services like Twellow, Twitterlocal and Twits Like Me to find other users in their ‘beat’, but I think it helps get someone into a conversation quicker if they can see what other people are talking about – and how.

Over to you – who would you recommend…?