In this guest post Ofcom’s Damian Radcliffe cross-publishes his latest presentation on developments in hyperlocal publishing for September-October, and highlights how partnerships are increasingly important for hyper-local, regional and national media in terms of “making it pay”.

When producing my latest bi-monthly update on hyper-local media, I was struck by the fact that media sales partnerships suddenly seem to be all the rage.

In a challenging economic climate, a number of media providers – both big and small – have recently come together to announce initiatives aimed at maximising economies of scale and potentially reducing overheads.

At a hyperlocal level, the launch on 1^st November of the Chicago Independent Advertising Network (CIAN), saw 15 Chicago community news sites coming together to offer a single point of contact for advertisers. These sites “collectively serve more than 1 million page views each month.”

This initiative follows in the footsteps of other small scale advertising alliances including the Seattle Indie Ad Network and Boston Blogs.

These moves – bringing together a range of small scale location based websites – can help address concerns that hyper-local sites are not big enough (on their own) to unlock funding from large advertisers.

CIAN also aims to address a further hyper-local concern: that of sales skills. Rather than having a hyperlocal practitioner add media sales to an ever expanding list of duties, funding from the Chicago Community Trust and the Knight Community Information Challenge allows for a full-time salesperson.

Big Media is also getting in on this act.

In early November Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL agreed to sell each other’s unsold display ads. The move is a response to Google and Facebook’s increasing clout in this space.

Reuters reported that both Facebook and Google are expected to increase their share of online display advertising in the United States in 2011 by 9.3% and 16.3%.

In contrast, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are forecast to lose share, with Facebook expected to surpass Yahoo for the first time.

Similarly in the UK, DMGT’s Northcliffe Media, home to 113 regional newspapers, recently announced it was forging a joint partnership with Trinity Mirror’s regional sales house, AMRA.

This will create a commercial proposition encompassing over 260 titles, including nine of the UK’s 10 biggest regional paid-for titles. Like The Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL arrangement, this new partnership comes into effect in 2012.

These examples all offer opportunities for economies of scale for media outlets and potentially larger potential reach and impact for advertisers.  Given these benefits, I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see more of these types of partnership in the coming months and years.

Damian Radcliffe is writing in a personal capacity.

Other topics in his current hyperlocal slides  include Sky’s local pilot in NE England and research into the links between tablet useand local news consumption. As ever, feedback and suggestions for future editions are welcome.

Liveblogging the strikes: Twitter's #n30 stream

Today sees the UK’s biggest strike in decades as public sector workers protest against pension reforms. Most news organisations are covering the day’s events through liveblogs: that web-native format which has so quickly become the automatic choice for covering rolling news.

To illustrate just how dominant the liveblog has become take a look at the BBC, Channel 4 News, The Guardian’s ‘Strikesblog‘ or The Telegraph. The Independent’s coverage is hosted on their own live.independent.co.uk subdomain while Sky have embedded their liveblog in other articles. There’s even a separate Storify liveblog for The Guardian’s Local Government section, and on Radio 5 Live you can find an example of radio reporters liveblogging.

Regional newspapers such as the Chronicle in the north east and the Essex County Standard are liveblogging the local angle; while the Huffington Post liveblog the political face-off at Prime Minister’s Question Time and the PoliticsHome blog liveblogs both. Leeds Student are liveblogging too. And it’s not just news organisations: campaigning organisation UK Uncut have their own liveblog, as do the public sector workers union UNISON and Pensions Justice (on Tumblr).

So dominant so quickly

The format has become so dominant so quickly because it satisfies both editorial and commercial demands: liveblogs are sticky – people stick around on them much longer than on traditional articles, in the same way that they tend to leave the streams of information from Twitter or Facebook on in the background of their phone, tablet or PC – or indeed, the way that they leave on 24 hour television when there are big events.

It also allows print outlets to compete in the 24-hour environment of rolling news. The updates of the liveblog are equivalent to the ‘time-filling’ of 24-hour television, with this key difference: that updates no longer come from a handful of strategically-placed reporters, but rather (when done well) hundreds of eyewitnesses, stakeholders, experts, campaigners, reporters from other news outlets, and other participants.

The results (when done badly) can be more noise than signal – incoherent, disconnected, fragmented. When done well, however, a good liveblog can draw clarity out of confusion, chase rumours down to facts, and draw multiple threads into something resembling a canvas.

At this early stage liveblogging is still a form finding its feet. More static than broadcast, it does not require the same cycle of repetition; more dynamic than print, it does, however, demand regular summarising.

Most importantly, it takes place within a network. The audience are not sat on their couches watching a single piece of coverage; they may be clicking between a dozen different sources; they may be present at the event itself; they may have friends or family there, sending them updates from their phone. If they are hearing about something important that you’re not addressing, you have a problem.

The list of liveblogs above demonstrates this particularly well, and it doesn’t include the biggest liveblog of all: the #n30 thread on Twitter (and as Facebook users we might also be consuming a liveblog of sorts of our friends’ updates).

More than documenting

In this situation the journalist is needed less to document what is taking place, and more to build on the documentation that is already being done: by witnesses, and by other journalists. That might mean aggregating the most important updates, or providing analysis of what they mean. It might mean enriching content by adding audio, video, maps or photography. Most importantly, it may mean verifying accounts that hold particular significance.

Liveblogging: adding value to the network

These were the lessons that I sought to teach my class last week when I reconstructed an event in the class and asked them to liveblog it (more in a future blog post). Without any briefing, they made predictable (and planned) mistakes: they thought they were there purely to document the event.

But now, more than ever, journalists are not there solely to document.

On a day like today you do not need to be journalist to take part in the ‘liveblog’ of #n20. If you are passionate about current events, if you are curious about news, you can be out there getting experience in dealing with those events – not just reporting them, but speaking to the people involved, recording images and audio to enrich what is in front of you, creating maps and galleries and Storify threads to aggregate the most illuminating accounts. Seeking reaction and verification to the most challenging ones.

The story is already being told by hundreds of people, some better than others. It’s a chance to create good journalism, and be better at it. I hope every aspiring journalist takes it, and the next chance, and the next one.

Expect a lot of sniffy reviews of the Huffington Post today. That’s par for the course: a short, odd-looking interloper is bursting into a roomful of graceful, if elderly brands. Scrappy-Doo at a cocktail party.

It’s a tough crowd. With The Guardian having long ago signed up a number of leading voices to its Comment Is Free platform and niche networks, outlets from The Telegraph to the New Statesman having signed up many other major bloggers, and remaining high profile bloggers having enough traffic and profile to no longer need any help, HuffPo UK looks like it is fighting for scraps.

In the US Arianna Huffington was well known, and HuffPo positioned itself as a liberal alternative to a homogenous mainstream. It was an early mover – and still attracted enormous criticism, with the launch widely seen as a flop.

But success is in the eye of the beholder.

HuffPo UK is launching with a small and relatively low-profile staff, which puts it under less pressure financially and gives it room to look like a growing company.

It is focused on building a news platform from a network, rather than the other way round, which still makes it relatively unique.

And while there are plenty of similar networks covering niches such as science and technology, no one has yet attempted this at a mass market level. There may just be a gap for an effective networked aggregator in the notoriously competitive UK market.

The missing piece of the jigsaw is how much ad sales muscle there will be behind the site. There are some obvious economies of scale in selling ads through staff at both AOL UK and the US Huffington Post, but that approach has flaws. If HuffPo UK comes undone anywhere, it may be at the hands of a competitive UK advertising market.

But its major weakness – the fact that it doesn’t have much of a history – might also be its biggest advantage. The only baggage it carries is the acquisition by AOL. That is not insignificant, but neither is it insurmountable. It is free to build an identity around its users – and if it’s sensible, that’s what it will do. It can no longer pretend to be the outsider it once was.

Launching without a community manager in post is a problem on that front, but it also suggests that they take the role seriously enough to be prepared to take their time in finding the right person. They’ve done well to recruit dozens of bloggers without one, but they need a dedicated staffer on that front fast.

Without that person their approach to bloggers can seem slapdash, with little care paid to explaining why a blogger might want to sign up to the HuffPo UK project, what that project is, or who the people are behind it.

Building that brand, and those relationships, is going to take time. If HuffPo UK is going to work, AOL will need to allow for that, and not expect instant results.

Image by jimmiehomeschoolmom on Flickr

The sale of the Huffington Post has sparked another raft of posts about how we’re all suckers for building up the value of these companies through giving away our content for free.

The New York Times’s David Carr is typical, describing users as “A Nation of Serfs” and quoting Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa’s similar soundbite “a world of digital feudalism”.

Carr misses the point entirely: that this is not “people working free” (sic) but an exchange. A user exchanges demographic details and content for the functionality offered by Facebook. They put their photos on Flickr because they benefit from the network, access, and tools.

This is nothing new: we do not criticise telephone companies for being built on people ‘giving away their content’ in the form of the billions of conversations that take place across those networks. Or the demographic data we hand over when we sign up. Oh, and we pay them.

It’s a symptom of journalistic egocentrism that it should seem odd that other people hand over their content ‘for free’ (and of being a little threatened?).

Another symptom is to see the likes of Twitter and Facebook as content platforms, rather than communication networks.

Even the Huffington Post is a network as well as a content platform – the interesting problem for that site in selling to AOL is that while some people will have been happy to contribute for the network benefits (access to likeminded individuals), some will not.

But here’s where feudalism is no comparison to make. Serfs didn’t have a choice. Huffpo bloggers can leave – as indeed, many left similar operations before (Anthony De Rosa‘s analysis is sophisticated enough to recognise this). One of the questions occupying my mind at the moment is whether the current domination of Facebook will turn out to be a stepping stone to other forms of blogging, or if the social network will be enough for most people.

The fundamental point is that this is a marketplace, and if the exchange does not feel fair, users will move on – as they did with MySpace, and Friendster before that.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a wider problem around corporatisation of the public sphere, but don’t insult millions of people by calling them serfs.

Yessi Bello continues the Hyperlocal Voices series of interviews, talking to the Edinburgh Reporter‘s Phyllis Stephen.

Who were the people behind the blog, and what where their backgrounds?

I am the person behind it. I had just graduated with a Masters in Journalism and needed to find an outlet for my work based here in Edinburgh. It seemed to me – particularly after attending the News Re:Wired conference in January 2010 – that hyperlocal is the new buzzword and that I could do it right here on my own doorstep.

I had loads of new multimedia skills desperately needing to be used and practiced. Prior to that I had been a solicitor for a number of years but took a career swerve in 2008 when I decided to go back to university. Same skills – different result!

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

I first set the blog up with WordPress in February 2010. It was hacked and then I started using Rapidweaver (Mac software). It took a while to realise that this was not the best platform (It was very cumbersome to add in articles and even Google Ads was nightmare).

I relaunched The Edinburgh Reporter properly with some professional technical help at the end of July 2010. We also have sites placed in Aberdeen, Dublin, Glasgow and London which we will grow given time.

What other blogs, bloggers or websites influenced you?

I had read or visited a number of blogs, particularly The Lichfield Blog which always seems to be held up as the guru of hyperlocal in the UK. I really like SE1 and also Will Perrin’s King’s Cross blog.

The one which influenced me a lot, and I even got the book on it – was The Huffington Post. I don’t see why we can’t have something like that here – and I see no real barriers to our site becoming more like that given time and lots and lots of connections.

How did – and do – you see yourself in relation to a traditional news operation?

We cannot cover every story like a newspaper with a lot of staff. It is impossible. But I see us plugging a gap for local people to have access to news about Edinburgh in one place.

I think it is useful for Edinburgh residents to have one site to get news about their own city – even if that news is also elsewhere on the internet or in the newspapers. People have jobs and their own lives. They do not have all day to trawl the internet looking for stories about Edinburgh and that is where we come in. We do not see ourselves as competing with traditional news – we hope that we complement it.

But I do take the practice of journalism very seriously, and we try to get original quotes when we can. One of our best and most popular stories of recent days was the day I was out early taking photographs of a house which had caught fire in the early morning. I had the photos up before any newspaper site. Even the BBC just had one line by the time my article with quotes from firefighters and householders was published online.

It is simply easier on occasions to use press releases, particularly if time is pressing. It is the best way to get a wide spread of news out to our readers, and I have no real problem in using press releases to help do that, but I always edit them thoroughly before publishing.

We are very different from traditional news outlets in that our possibilities of using multimedia to tell the story are endless. Video, photographs and audio all add colour to the story itself.

What sort of traffic do you get and how has that changed over time?

Our traffic is increasing all the time in a straight line and this month, a mere six months into our new entity, we are approaching 10,000 visitors and more than twice that number of pageviews. We think that is rather good in the time allowed but we have no real way of knowing! Our Twitter presence is also effective and we have just under 1300 followers at today’s date.

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

I think the use of WordPress is now a monumental factor. We have several contributors who can log in remotely and thus my role as editor is developing naturally. Our articles will cover a wider spread with more contributors.

But I resist the temptation of calling us a blog. We aim to be a true hyperlocal website with static pages of information as well as news stories: one of our key pages and one which we work on continually is the Free Wifi page.

I spent today at the hyperlocal C&binet event, organised by Creative Industries MP Sion Simon at the Department for Culture, Media & Sport. I’ve already blogged my thoughts leading up to event but thought I would add some more links and context.

For me, it is significant that this happened at all. Normally these sorts of events are dominated by large publishers with lobbying muscle. Yet here we had a group combining hyperlocal bloggers, successful startups like Facebook, Ground Report, Global Voices and the Huffington Post, social media figures like Nick Booth and Jon Bounds, and traditional organisations like The Guardian, BBC, RSA and Ofcom. Jeff Jarvis pitched into the mix via Skype.

As for the event itself, it began the previous afternoon with a presentation from Enders Analysis, embedded below:

The following morning saw more experiences thrown into the pot – Jeff’s CUNY business models for hyperlocal; Rachel Sterne’s experiences at Ground Report, embedded below:

US Hyperlocal News Market –

Nick Booth’s experience from Podnosh followed, then my own contribution, and The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Northcliffe all took centre stage at various points too.

Following that exchange of perspectives attendees put together 2 lists: what they thought government should or could do, and what they thought government should not do. These are listed on co-chair Will Perrin’s blog and some reproduced in their glorious fluorescence below:

You can read more about the day on that Will Perrin blog post and Hannah Waldram’s post for Podnosh.

Karthika Muthukumaraswamy on how crowdsourcing experiments in journalism need to learn from their commercial counterparts – and how the end results could bring financial rewards for everyone.

The crowd has done a great deal for journalism: it has counted the number of SUVs on the streets of New York City, determined Bill Clinton’s financial impact on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and offered valuable suggestions to transform an impoverished Ugandan village.

Ever since journalism jumped on the crowdsourcing bandwagon following innovative business models in T-shirt designing and problem solving, it has been baffled by the intensity of crowd response. Consequently, the media’s implementation of it has lacked the selection process that is essential to use crowdsourcing to its fullest potential.

There are only so many T-shirts that Threadless can make and sell; there are only so many solutions to Innocentive’s complex problems; and there are only so many photographs that iStockphoto consumers will purchase.

But when the News-Press in Southwest Florida turned to its citizens for help with investigating the rising costs of local public utilities, much of the voluminous response – amounting to 6,500 pieces of user-generated stories – was published in six weeks following the investigation.

The difference lies in the ultimate goal. A company that aims to create a product is merely looking for the best idea to create one, and one that is looking to solve a problem is looking for the best solution. Journalism, on the other hand, while seeking the best stories, is also hoping to mobilize the maximum number of civilians and fulfill the ideals of democracy.

Stimulating citizen participation is, and should, in fact be, an important goal of crowdsourced journalism.

However, when it comes at the price of quality, as any cursory glance at citizen journalism sites would reveal, it not only compromises the media’s role in society, but also belittles the effectiveness of civilian engagement.

Not surprisingly, there is now an increasing desire for more reliable information on the Web, as seen from the popularity of sites such as BigThink and Mahalo, which rely on expert and professional sources rather than random, large groups of people.

The aim of crowdsourcing is to effectively enhance the quality of journalism because of crowd contributions, not despite them. And that is why distilling the best ideas, and thereby their utilization, becomes important.

Selecting for the top contributions and contributors is not new to citizen journalism. Establishing a community of dynamic civilians that a news organization can tap into on a regular basis is an important objective for most crowdsourced journalism projects.

The citizen journalists who established their credibility through productive efforts in Off the Bus have been largely retained to help report on the parent news site, the Huffington Post.

The investigative journalism site, Propublica, hopes to build a similar community of citizen journalists through its recently announced pro-am project.

The News-Press’s Team Watchdog went one step further and implemented a rigorous screening process that involved resumes and interviews to select twenty citizen volunteers from the Fort Myers community.

While such organization is essential for the success of open-source projects, news entities should be careful so as not to replicate the top-down hierarchy that still prevails in conventional media. This could defy the tenets of decentralization and independence that are essential to James Surowiecki’s concept of crowd wisdom.

It also ends up reinforcing the digital, intellectual, and economic divide that crowdsourcing already perpetuates.

The pharmaceutical company, Innocentive, has used a less conventional approach to seek out experts. Its website posts open calls to solve complex chemical problems to its large global community. While many of the 160,000 registered members of Innocentive are from highly specialized fields with advanced degrees (over a third have doctorates), almost anyone can register and take a crack at a problem.

Little surprise, then, that the company has turned up some unlikely problem-solvers in the form of patent attorneys and college students. Hence, real-world degrees and professional experience may not be the defining parameters for expertise, a finding that is reinforced by research from Harvard University.

The open-source technical support site, Experts-exchange.com has the luxury of using a more democratic approach to source “experts” from the crowd. The best solutions to technical problems are voted on by users, and the higher a contributor’s rating, the higher his authority and credibility in the community.

While the idea of allowing communities to choose their own experts would be desirable to citizen journalism, this form of user rating does not appear to work in more subjective areas.

While quantifiable answers to technical support questions are easier to rate, crowd wisdom is less reliable in judging more creative fields such as art and journalism. We all know that sensationalism would sooner get a Digg story on the home page or make an Internet video go viral than high-quality journalism would.

Hence, it would probably be in the best interest of news organizations to make these determinations at the editorial level.

In addition to improving the quality of content, such a strategy would promote better submissions from users. Crowdsourcing ventures like iStockphoto and Innocentive have shown that providng rewards – in the form of fame or bounty – works. As Jeff Howe, who coined the very term that all the fuss is about, has learned, community standing and recognition might be the key motivators in crowdsourced operations.

If you are one among thousands of people and don’t get recognition for your particular effort, there is little motivation for you to come back and participate.

If the more deserving contributors are acknowledged, and given special access privileges (such as being able to post content without moderation, for instance), it would encourage them to contribute more, and urge other contributors to compete at a higher level.

The unique, creditable, and more attractive content that would result from such moderation will eventually lead to higher site traffic, increased number of unique visitors, and hence, more advertising revenue. This might legitimize charging for content, thus allowing greater profits for news organizations, and possibly payment of individual contributors.

With contributors specifically chosen for the merit of their submissions, news organizations could finally explore the possibility of compensating the crowd for the product it creates. The opportunity to make money has been shown to be the most popular reason to participate in crowdsourcing projects.

Three years ago, when crowdsourcing first made a splash in the world of business and journalism, its democratic, freewheeling ideal was intriguing in all its novelty. But now, critics – and contributors themselves – have begun to question the legitimacy of a concept that puts people to work for little or no monetary gain while holding complete ownership over the product. “Is crowdsourcing evil?” asks Howe in Wired this week, detailing a backlash that is brewing in the design community.

It may be argued that the weeding out of contributors goes against the grain of grassroots citizen journalism. However, it is important to remember that news organizations are also entities that offer a service to people, and it behooves them to perform this service well.

In the field of business and innovation, companies are implementing a division of labor – specialized tasks are sourced to “experts,” while more general assignments are sourced to crowds. It is tempting to speculate that such a practice would work well for journalism.

Seeking ideas for stories from general readers, as well as involving them in the debate and discussion would fulfill the core purposes of journalism. On the other hand, the knowledge and skills of more prolific contributors could be utilized for specialized reporting. This would ensure the dissemination of quality content while still utilizing crowd diversity.

Elections bring out the best in online journalism. News organisations have plenty of time to plan, there’s a global audience up for grabs, and the material lends itself to interactive treatment (voter opinions; candidates’ stances on various issues; statistics and databases; constant updates; personalisation).

Not only that, but the electorate is using the internet for election news more than any other medium apart from television (and here are some reasons why).

PaidContent has a good roundup of various UK editors’ views, and decides blogs, Twitter and data are the themes (more specifically, liveblogging and mapping).

Choice picks include the Telegraph teaming up with the New York Times and RealClearPolitics.com; the Independent teaming up with LiveJournal.; and MSN teaming up with Populus for a “wisdom-of-crowds” predictor. Sky’s interactive map is quite fun too.

Innovation in Newspapers has been running an ‘Election Journalism Caviar’ series, mainly focusing on the journalism itself, but interactive highlights include the New York Times’ Electopedia of candidates’ views and PolitiFact’s ‘Attack File’ scoring the attacks made on candidates.

Chrys Wu has an overview of where to follow the results live online:

“Editors at Yahoo News will be culling election-related photos from [Flickr] and posting them on yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com. Put the word “election” somewhere in the title, comment or tag to be part of the search.

“If you’re going to be out and about, bookmark the Online NewsHour’s mobile site. In addition to updates on the election, there’s a handy list of poll closing times and electoral votes.”

And Reuters has a piece on the use of user generated content:

“The New York Times is asking its Web site visitors to take pictures of their polling places and upload them … Nonprofit group Video the Vote plans to post up to 1,000 video reports, focusing on any problems at the polls … [and] Current TV … through a partnership with social networking sites Digg and Twitter will rely on Internet users to provide its news content. The channel’s TV screen will be a crowded and sometimes disconnected “dashboard” of text and video created or chosen by Internet users.”

Distributed journalism, personalisation, and maps

Current.tv, in fact, is “throwing a social media election party” across a number of platforms – the best example of distributed journalism I’ve so far seen – and also the most fun-sounding.

MSNBC’s results widget is another, more obvious, example.

Yahoo has its own flashy election page, with some interesting indicators, including ‘most blogged about’, and how many people are searching for each candidate. If you’ve read Click, you’ll know how important search patterns are. You can also ‘Create your own scenario’ – personalising the map which you can then email, compare or link to from your blog. (hat tip to Matthew Solle)

CNN also does personalisation with CNN YourRaces: a customisable tracking tool that allows you to follow selected races in real time. The service is also available via CNN’s mobile interface.

And I’ve already written about Google’s creep into content creation with its InQuotes project comparing candidates’ quotes on selected issues.

YouTube is doing Video Your Vote, with a map for navigation and colour coding including ‘Voter intimidation’ and ‘Registration problems’.

And two university students started Map the Candidates, which uses a Google Map to present information about candidates’ visits around the US, and is now hosted at Slate.

Map junkies can get more at 270towin.com (h/t Matthew Solle again) and data junkies can get a stronger fix at Perspctv (thanks EricScherer and Joeri Rodenburg).

Text junkies can get SMS updates from the BBC and the New York Times.

Twitter followers Matthew Bennett, John383 and 10000words also mentioned the Huffington Post, FiveThirtyEight.com, and The New York Times’ ‘Choosing a President’ video.

I’ve said elsewhere that 2004 was the blogged election, 2006 the YouTube election, and this year’s Super Tuesday was the mashup election, so what does that make the 2008 election?

The Twitter Election, if replies on Twitter are anything to go by. Building on its success during Super Tuesday, it has a dedicated Election 2008 site (if only it did the same for similar events outside the US), and has partnered with the likes of Current.tv and techPresident for their coverage, while dozens of organisations are using Twitter for their updates, including the Washington Post and TwitterVoteReport. Also watch out for lost of organisations using liveblogging tool CoverItLive, and a few, including St. Louis Post-Dispatch, using live mobile video streaming tools Qik and Bambuser.

Those are just some of the highlights I can find – I’m sure you have more (particularly from non-English language sources). What’s impressed you in the online coverage? What’s disappointed? 

UPDATE: Gabriela Zago adds: g1 (news portal from Globo) has several interesting infographs explaining the US elections, but they don’t seem to have done one especially for today. O Globo (from the same news organization) has 3 maps (they’re in the bottom of the screen). One of them has quotes from Brazilian people living in the US on what they think about the elections.