In this guest post, Damian Radcliffe highlights some recent developments in the intersection between hyper-local SoLoMo (social, location, mobile). His more detailed slides looking at 20 developments across the sector during the last two months of 2011 are cross-posted at the bottom of this article.

Facebook’s recent purchase of location-based service Gowalla (Slide 19 below,) suggests that the social network still thinks there is a future for this type of “check in” service. Touted as “the next big thing” ever since Foursquare launched at SXSW in 2009, to date Location Based Services (LBS) haven’t quite lived up to the hype.

Certainly there’s plenty of data to suggest that the public don’t quite share the enthusiasm of many Silicon Valley investors. Yet.

Part of their challenge is that not only is awareness of services relatively low – just 30% of respondents in a survey of 37,000 people by Forrester (Slide 27) – but their benefits are also not necessarily clearly understood.

In 2011, a study by youth marketing agency Dubit found about half of UK teenagers are not aware of location-based social networking services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, with 58% of those who had heard of them saying they “do not see the point” of sharing geographic information.

Safety concerns may not be the primary concern of Dubit’s respondents, but as the “Please Rob Me” website says: “….on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home… The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.”

Reinforcing this concern are several stories from both the UK and the US of insurers refusing to pay out after a domestic burglary, where victims have announced via social networks that they were away on holiday – or having a beer downtown.

For LBS to go truly mass market – and Forrester (see Slide 27) found that only 5% of mobile users were monthly LBS users – smartphone growth will be a key part of the puzzle. Recent Ofcom data reported that:

• Ownership nearly doubled in the UK between February 2010 and August 2011 (from 24% to 46%).
• 46% of UK internet users also used their phones to go online in October 2011.

For now at least, most of our location based activity would seem to be based on previous online behaviours. So, search continues to dominate.

Google in a recent blog post described local search ads as “so hot right now” (Slide 22, Sept-Oct 2011 update). The search giant launched hyper-local search ads a year ago, along with a “News Near You” feature in May 2011. (See: April-May 2011 update, Slide 27.)

Meanwhile, BIA/Kelsey forecast that local search advertising revenues in the US will increase from $5.1 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion in 2015. Their figures suggest by 2015, 30% of search will be local.

The other notable growth area, location based mobile advertising, also offers a different slant on the typical “check in” service which Gowalla et al tend to specialise in. Borrell forerecasts this space will increase 66% in the US during 2012 (Slide 22).

The most high profile example of this service in the UK is O2 More, which triggers advertising or deals when a user passes through certain locations – offering a clear financial incentive for sharing your location.

Perhaps this – along with tailored news and information manifest in services such as News Near You, Postcode Gazette and India’s Taazza – is the way forward.

Jiepang, China’s leading Location-Based Social Mobile App, offered a recent example of how to do this. Late last year they partnered with Starbucks, offering users a virtual Starbucks badge if they “checked-in” at a Starbucks store in the Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. When the number of badges issued hit 20,000, all badge holders got a free festive upgrade to a larger cup size. When coupled with the ease of NFC technology deployed to allow users to “check in” then it’s easy to understand the consumer benefit of such a service.

Mine’s a venti gingerbread latte. No cream. Xièxiè.

In this guest post, Damian Radcliffe highlights some topline developments in the hyper-local space during 2011. He also asks for your suggestions of great hyper-local content from 2011. His more detailed slides looking at the previous year are cross-posted at the bottom of this article.

2011 was a busy year across the hyper-local sphere, with a flurry of activity online as well as more traditional platforms such as TV, Radio and newspapers.

The Government’s plans for Local TV have been considerably developed, following the Shott Review just over a year ago. We now have a clearer indication of the areas which will be first on the list for these new services and how Ofcom might award these licences. What we don’t know is who will apply for these licences, or what their business models will be. But, this should become clear in the second half of the year.

Whilst the Leveson Inquiry hasn’t directly been looking at local media, it has been a part of the debate. Claire Enders outlined some of the challenges facing the regional and local press in a presentation showing declining revenue, jobs and advertising over the past five years. Her research suggests that the impact of “the move to digital” has been greater at a local level than at the nationals.

Across the board, funding remains a challenge for many. But new models are emerging, with Daily Deals starting to form part of the revenue mix alongside money from foundations and franchising.

And on the content front, we saw Jeremy Hunt cite a number of hyper-local examples at the Oxford Media Convention, as well as record coverage for regional press and many hyper-local outlets as a result of the summer riots.

I’ve included more on all of these stories in my personal retrospective for the past year.

One area where I’d really welcome feedback is examples of hyper-local content you produced – or read – in 2011. I’m conscious that a lot of great material may not necessarily reach a wider audience, so do post your suggestions below and hopefully we can begin to redress that.

Ofcom’s Damian Radcliffe produces a regular round-up of developments in hyperlocal publishing. In this guest post he cross-publishes his latest presentation for this summer, as well as the background to the reports.

Ofcom’s 2009 report on Local and Regional Media in the UK identified the increasing role that online hyperlocal media is playing in the local and regional media ecology.

New research in the report identified that

“One in five consumers claimed to use community websites at least monthly, and a third of these said they had increased their use of such websites over the past two years.”

That was two years ago, and since then, this nascent sector has continued to evolve, with the web continuing to offer a space and platform for community expression, engagement and empowerment.

The diversity of these offerings is manifest in the Hyperlocal Voices series found on this website, as well as Talk About Local’s Ten Questions feature, both of which speak to hyperlocal practitioners about their work.

For a wider view of developments in this sector, you may want to look at the bi-monthly series of slides I publish on SlideShare every two months.

Each set of slides typically outlines 20 recent hyperlocal developments; usually 10 from the UK and 10 from the US.

Topics in the current edition include Local TV, hyperlocal coverage of the recent England riots, the rise of location based deals and marketing, as well as the FCC’s report on The Information Needs of Communities.

Feedback and suggestions for future editions – including omissions from current slides – are actively welcomed.

This article – an overview of the local media scene in the UK – appears in the latest issue of Government Gazette.

The local media are currently trying to ride through a perfect storm of change, from a decline in readers that long pre-dates the internet, to advertisers fleeing their pages in droves and a new medium that steadfastly refuses to give them the profits they enjoyed in print.

It’s a complicated picture, and anyone who pretends to blame one company, or one business model, for their demise, probably wants something.

Digital media – and in particular the internet – have in a very short space of time transformed the way the business of publishing works. Fundamental to this is the difference between atoms and bits, the disintermediation of the web – and the rise of a currency that most publishers don’t even know exists.

The great decoupling

The first big change that local media are facing is the ‘decoupling’ of elements that they previously packaged for profit: a platform, content, and advertising. Online, those elements have become increasingly separate.

Unlike print, publishers don’t own the platform. Users have already paid for access to the internet, and for mobile phone contracts. Furthermore, the content publishers so carefully packaged for mass market appeal in print, is a virtual pick and mix online. If someone wants to read one story, or cartoon, crossword, or TV listings, they no longer have to buy everything else that went with it. If you want your sports coverage from your local paper but your politics from a national and celebrity news from an American website, then you’ll do just that.

But finally, and most importantly, advertising and content are becoming decoupled, on two fronts: firstly, because the web is a place full of tools, advertisers can choose to advertise against actions rather than content. This is why Google is successful – it does not sell advertising against content, but against searches. Likewise, sites like Autotrader and RightMove allow advertisers to reach potential customers when they are actively looking to buy.

But secondly, because advertisers can create their own content, and communicate with audiences without the need for publishers, they have started reducing their advertising spend in favour of communicating with potential customers directly. In some cases publishers are adapting by offering content production services themselves – for example, producing video ads for local businesses.

Cutting out the middlemen

It costs a lot to print and distribute newspapers. That’s why most towns and cities have only one newspaper. With only one newspaper serving a community’s information needs, basic laws of supply and demand have dictated the price of advertising to a local community. It has been a hugely profitable industry that has become increasingly concentrated in ownership and lumbered with associated debt. From highs of around 30% the margins are now closer to 10% – still better than Tesco, but the debts remain. And for most publishers the reaction has been to implement efficiencies wherever they can – moving out of city centre offices, publishing less frequently, and laying off enormous numbers of staff.

In contrast, it costs very little to publish online, and the distribution infrastructure is controlled by no one. The commercial and the communal share the same space, and for those who are trying to make money, competition is fierce.

As a result, for a local advertiser, the difference between buying an advert online and in print couldn’t be more pronounced. The enormous competition online, coupled with low cost bases, means advertising is cheap. In fact, competition is so fierce that display advertising – the idea of selling an advert next to some content – has been overtaken by other forms that promise more results: pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, for instance, only costs an advertiser money when someone clicks on an advert (this is the model that Google uses). Pay-per-action (PPA) only costs an advertiser money when someone takes action by, for example, booking an appointment.

Most local advertisers stuck to print. But recent research suggests the recession has increased the rate of change with increasing numbers of businesses looking to move advertising online for its low costs and measurable results.

The difficulty for local publishers, however, is that the profits are so much smaller than selling print advertising. For ad sales staff paid commissions based on the price of the advertising they sell, there is very little incentive for selling web ads.

The local get more local, and the nationals get local too

The buzzword of 2009 was ‘hyperlocal’ – a fuzzy concept that could range in scope from a single street to tens of thousands of people. Johnston and Newsquest have both offered community-level detail on their Yorkshire and West Midlands titles respectively, while Trinity Mirror’s hyperlocal project involved offering postcode-level news on their branded websites that also linked to local blogs. Northcliffe, meanwhile, launched Local People, a collection of forums, listings and the facility for user generated content – but little news.

Meanwhile, publishers at the national level have been eyeing up the local opportunity, with players including ITN, ITV and the Press Association partnering with video production companies, universities and regional publishers in their bids for the Independently Funded News Consortia (IFNC) proposed by Ofcom to fill the local news gap left by ITV. While there has been much talk of the online opportunity in these consortia from Ofcom, the reality of the bids suggests that this will be an opportunity missed.

In contrast, The Guardian is set to launch ‘beatblog’ operations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds in early 2009 that focus entirely on the opportunities that the online platform presents. Integral to the operations will be working with local bloggers and other online contributors, while the sites will integrate with MySociety and other services that provide civic information.

2009 also saw the launch of MSN Local, which aims to provide a local information service based on a range of data that can complement news stories elsewhere on MSN.

While large newspaper chains close offices and lay off staff, dozens of ‘hyperlocal’ websites have been springing up around the country to cover areas that local residents feel newspapers no longer serve – or never did. Many feel strong civic obligations and regularly attend the council meetings that local journalists no longer visit, while there’s a noticeable absence of the human interest and crime material that fills their print contemporaries.

My own operation – Help Me Investigate.com – launched in Birmingham in an attempt to find a way to pursue investigative journalism on a local level with the involvement and engagement of local people. It had a number of successes, most notably the uncovering of a £2.2m overspend on Birmingham City Council’s new website, and is in the process of expanding to other cities in 2010.

The business models for these startups are varied. Some are run as volunteer operations, while others see a commercial opportunity in a news operation without the costs of printing and distribution, and self-serve ad sales solutions such as those offered by Rick Waghorn’s Addiply – currently being trialled by Trinity Mirror in the north east. AboutMyArea has a franchise model; others sell products or services (such as consultancy).

Ultimately the internet has opened up a new market for local news and local advertising – with new rules. Some entrants are better placed than others to take advantage of the new forms of advertising, new forms of news production, distribution and monetisation that that presents. It’s early days yet.

On 18 September 2009, beloved London evening freesheet thelondonpaper folded. In its wake, London Lite remains.

While the closure is part of a larger effort by owners News International to trim the fat from their portfolio and erect paywalls around profitable titles, it also speaks to the future of freesheets on the web.

Back in April, thelondonpaper re-launched their web site. What was interesting about that was that London Lite had effectively no web site. It still doesn’t — just a ‘e-edition’. Its content is “incorporated” with morning freesheet Metro.co.uk. Looking back, one has to wonder what would have happened if the money hadn’t been sank into the web presence. Would thelondonpaper still be around?

In a comment on a Guardian article about the closure, a now-former londonpaper web developer had the following to say about the redesign:

I’ve been a freelance web developer at thelondonpaper.com for the past two years. After fighting through a huge amount of red tape, we were finally able to relaunch the badly failing launch website in April this year and have doubled our traffic within four months.

When it closed, thelondonpaper had a circulation of about 1.1 million. What we don’t know is the web stats. It’s great they doubled traffic — but what did they double?

The lesson to be learned here may be that general interest freesheets have no business expanding into the web. Other London freesheets that have web sites include Metro and City AM.

Metro qualifies as a “general interest” title, but the competition they face in the mornings is minimal — either pay for a paper, or pick up a free Metro. Also, City AM is extremely niche. There isn’t another free daily business news title that competes with it. The City AM web site isn’t very good, which is possibly intentional so to discourage web visits and drive print readership.

With thelondonpaper, News International wanted it all: a robust free print product and a robust free web site. When your product is free, losing millions every year and is often read just because it’s there, you’ve got to make a choice.

News International chose to close it down, cut their losses and move on. By the end of it, News International was so disconnected from the title they wouldn’t even entertain an offer to buy it. The brand dies with the company’s decision to close the title.

But it still makes me wonder what could have been if thelondonpaper had stayed away from the web. Had they of taken that money and instead sunk it into something else — other than a robust web presence — to set themselves apart, would the paper have survived?

Scientology has long been a tricky subject for journalists to cover; the corporate-structured religious movement has a reputation for litigation, against government agencies, news organisations and individuals.

Given this it is all the more interesting to consider the recent series of articles about Scientology in Florida’s St Petersburg Times, which focus on the behaviour of its leader David Miscavige and offer a counterpoint to the Church’s own line that “since the founding of the first Church of Scientology in 1954, Scientology has become the fastest-growing religion in the world.”

The Times presented the series as three large articles (totalling nearly 15,000 words, with the first article alone stacking up 6,618) published across print and web over three consecutive days, starting on Sunday 21st June. In addition the paper ran ancillary features which fleshed out elements of the main story, provided historical context, and also laid out some of the raw material which helped to underpin the series.

With its coverage the Times demonstrates some interesting and sometimes imaginative ways of handling a contentious issue, as well as leaving room for improvement in the future.

Name your sources

• The Times’ articles were principally based on lengthy interviews with four formerly high-ranking members of the Church of Scientology, each of whom had subsequently left, all of whom are named – Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder, Tom De Vocht and Amy Scobee

Sign your work

• The journalists responsible for the articles are clearly named – managing editor Joe Childs and Thomas C Tobin – and their email addresses published

Show your workings

• The story of how the story was written is included, under the title ‘About the story’
• Excerpts from videotaped interviews with two of the whistleblowers, Marty Rathbun and Amy Scobee, are included; these are email- and embed-friendly

Give right of reply

• The Times notes that it had asked to interview Scientology leader David Miscavige numerous times since 13th May, and had “met with church spokesmen and lawyers for 25 hours”
• Throughout the articles are rebuttals by Church spokesmen to specific allegations made by the whistleblowers
• A detailed article on 20th June – trailing the publication of the main features – gave an overview of the Church’s criticisms of the articles (as well as space to the ‘ethics files’ – confessional documents written by Scientologists and retained by the Church – of the whistleblowers)
• In addition the paper has published audio excerpts from interviews with Church spokesman Tommy Davis
• Finally, the Times published a written response to the articles by David Miscavige himself

Provide context

• The series included useful background information, such as a glossary of terms used in Scientology and a timeline of significant dates
• Archive videos from a range of sources, including Google Video and YouTube, add an extra dimension to the contextual material

Exploit your own resources

• Instead of rewriting too much, the Times makes use of its own, extensive past reportage of Scientology issues, both in the form of links to more recent stories held on its own website, and to older stories (some held on the Google News Archive)
• The Times website search engine usefully offers a four button choice – trawling the web, the newspaper’s site, the paper’s own archive (full text of pre-web published articles back to 1987), and Google News Archive (which provides scans of the paper as far back as 1901)

Report on the wake

• Finally, the Times has kept abreast of the response to the articles from not just other mainstream media news outlets but also bloggers, commenters and others from across the wider web

However, despite all the positive aspects we can see on show, especially in terms of marshalling so much material in a web-friendly fashion, we can also see some shortfalls in the presentation of the series.

Clearly much of the success of the series lies with the nature and exclusivity of the material presented; its weaknesses lie in what happens to that material after publication, and in the way that the Times manages interaction with its audience. The following suggestions look at those areas.

More external linking

• Individual elements of the feature series do include external links to websites by, about and sometimes critical of the Church of Scientology, but there is no section bringing these together in one place

Republish multimedia on popular portals

• There appears to be no St Petersburg Times channel on YouTube – those video and audio materials could easily be watermarked and reupped to ensure the widest possible audience, all with links back to the feature’s homepage

Take note of Twitter

• Whilst individual Twitter users did link to the articles, there appears to have been no real attempt to drive the story through Twitter or other microblogging platforms
• In particular there was no specific #hashtag attached to the series, and hashtags.org logs use of the #scientology tag over the three days of original publication, 21st-23rd June, at a meagre three, 11 and 21 (contrast that with 13,837, 8,187 and 18,222 over the same period for #iranelection)
• In mitigation Kevin McGeever, senior online news editor/assistant managing editor of tampabay.com, is a Twitter user and did tweet about the articles

Make discussion easier

• The individual articles have comments sections beneath them, but there is no overarching discussion function for the whole series, which can make for disjointed interaction at best; comments are also restricted to 250 characters

Present more primary evidence

• Given that much of what is described relates to court cases, medical examiner’s reports and other legal filings, it would make sense to publish relevant, publicly available material in as unredacted form as possible so that readers may form their own judgements (such as the Telegraph and the Guardian in the UK have done with MPs’ expenses)

Own the story

• The St Petersburg Times has done the legwork, but like the Telegraph on MPs’ expenses, it risks being overlooked as other news organisations take on the story: at time of writing, a Google News search on Scientology brings up 406 related articles across the first two results – but with the Times noted as the primary article in only one of them
• It is also interesting to note that the Scientology page on Wikinews has not been updated to include reference to the Times’ articles – the most recent article listed is from 31st May 2009

Offer updates

• If you are publishing your material in full for free on the web, then add syndication links – if not to each individual report in the series, then at the very least to the series homepage – so that readers who subscribe can more easily discover if you have added new reports; if you can offer RSS feeds for mug shots of local arrestees, then surely you can do it for a major news feature?

The following is the last part of a series of responses to the government inquiry into the future of local and regional media. We will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This post, by Alex Lockwood, looks at:

“How to fund quality local journalism”

The bottom has fallen out of the traditional publishing business model–and with it goes the hefty dividends expected by shareholders (e.g. £48.4m in 2008 for the Trinity Mirror Group). The future of local quality journalism can only remain with the current crop of regional newspaper publishers if they radically change their expectations, and innovate.

That might not happen. If it doesn’t, they will die off, and the future of quality local journalism will take a huge – but not definitive – blow. Then the future lies with new initiatives and the local communities themselves – passionate and entrepreneurial people, only some of whom will be journalists. What about local council initiatives to publish newspapers and local information? That’s not the way to go – covered in Part 3.

But how to fund it? Here are eight suggestions for the future of local journalism funding:

1. Save the big regional publishers through a public subsidy? The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, has already ruled that out: no state subsidies for beleaguered local newspapers. In some ways, that is good. Let’s not shore up businesses that have met requirements of shareholders over those of the local community, and which have – with a few notable exceptions – failed to innovate.

2. But… as Andy Price argued on this blog yesterday, “The regional press is the only institution with enough professional journalists to really cover civic Britain successfully.” So where public money is available, e.g. through the Digital Britain programme, efficiencies in government funding are necessary. As the authors of After the Crunch, published last week, write, “The DCMS, BERR, DCSF, Treasury, DIUS between them, spend a lot of money in the name of ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’, but much of their effort is frustrated by the lack of a coherent approach.” If quality local journalism is a public service, then what portion of the public service budget could go to newspapers? And only on the basis that they reform their structures (as suggested by @Geoffrey Gevalt).

3. That could be knitted together with a second point made in After the Crunch: that “the small-scale nature of creative industry enterprises connects more easily, and more productively with smaller-scale government.” The government could streamline legislation and funding frameworks for supporting media organisations at local levels without the baggage of outdated business models. They can work with Business Link and entrepreneurship schemes to offer many more bursaries and small business grants to new ventures that establish in their business plans a commitment to produce quality local journalism covering local democracy issues. These will most probably be started by two groups of people: those local journalists who have been made redundant, and who are deeply passionate about local democracy and community; and new entrepreneurs who can see the potential in investing in a portfolio of local media products using new, free technologies and mash ups.

4. Where regional publishers can prove they are adapting to the new media environment, individual papers or sub-regional groups (similar to what Peter Preston called for in the Observer last Sunday) could be cut out of the dying corpse of their parent company, and given subsidies to see them through the migration to a new business model.

5. Reduce costs through ditching daily print routines. Newspapers become professional news magazines published once a week but constantly updated online by continuing to grow community engagement and news as a conversation, and by investing in non-traditional ways to access information, e.g. these maps empowering social change (h/t @JoshHalliday).

6. Media organisations, both new and traditional, turn to community-owned, community-sourced local journalism.  Two-hundred years ago it was pampheteering. In 1932, it was nine interested individuals fed up with newspaper oligarchs who raised £40,000 and set up their own local paper, the Bristol Evening Post. Crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding have always been a part of the future of media. As argued for by former Northern Echo editor Peter Sands this morning on the Radio 4 Today programme.

7. Take a leaf out of new magazine membership models, as developed by numerous brands but articulated here via Alyce Alston: sell bundles of information.

8. Fund training programmes for current (recently redundant?) journalists in new technologies and entrepreneurship. This gives the next generation of media entrepreneurs preparedness for the need to adapt to rapid media change – and that means more money into projects such as Infuze at the University of Central Lancashire (h/t Laura Oliver)

What the typical local media organisation might look like?
So how about this? The future of quality local journalism is published immediately online and weekly in print, probably in magazine format.

• A small group of editors, journalists and community managers work with a network of contributors to develop feeds in a number of formats, e.g. news stories linked to local maps, for geographical and issue-based hyper-localities: all of this online, using APIs to mash together maps, local government records, planning information etc.
• A printed version provides a format for the weekend read and brings in advertising—similar to the ways the best Teesside hyper-local content gets published in weekly papers.
• The media organisation supports investigative reporting through entertainment, sport and feature copy that attracts advertising and sponsorship.
• The magazine is distributed freely around the local region.
• This local brand was set up with a government grant, including ongoing training in technology and entrepreneurship.
• The magazine is owned by the community through a crowd-funded structure (ten thousand people each pay £20 as a yearly debenture – not a subscription) and that community then have a vote on the governance and issues covered by the magazine… Want journalists to prioritise investigations into local planning decisions? Then pay for it.

Think of it as a combination of The Age of Stupid meets Spot.Us.

What other ideas are there?

The following is the fifth of a series of responses to the government inquiry into the future of local and regional media. Andy Price looks at the opportunities for ultra-local media services. Blog comments will be submitted to the inquiry as well. If you wish to add a blog post to the submission please add a link to one of the OJB posts – a linkback will be added at the end.

Opportunities for “ultra-local” media services

Over the last few years one of the few, if not the only positive development in the regional press has been the dramatic growth of “ultra-local” or hyper local news. Often this is in the form of online participatory journalism, mixing traditional professionally produced news with a wide range of user generated content.

This has two major benefits. It grows significant traffic to newspaper websites, offering vital opportunities for revenue generation and develops the civic and democratic role of the media by allowing new avenues for discussion and debate, enhancing the local public sphere and maintaining a plurality of perspectives. It also widens and flattens the ‘market’ of news production, creating a new environment that integrates citizens as news producers in an entirely original and empowering way.

Looking at the existing geographical franchises of most regional publishers it is often the case that the local newspaper website is the only local digital platform that offers both participation and discussion of issues of civic interest. As well as the independent coverage of issues of relevance and significance to the citizen.

By and large regional newspapers have successfully extended their brands onto the web and created viable arenas of news, comment and discussion. While in no way perfect, they do represent a relative success in relation to other possible local participants such as other traditional media producers or major local institutions. While social websites such as Facebook and Myspace offer significant community development around areas of ‘interest’ and ‘self’ this is rarely configured in geographical terms at the scale of activity seen in local newspaper websites.

This is even more pronounced when it is considered in terms of the neighbourhood, post-code or ‘ultra-local’ area. Many regional newspapers are now creating new, vibrant and popular micro-editions that cover previously impossible to represent communities, communities that were simply too small to serve in an analogue print economy. While much has been made of the ‘global’ in terms of the impact of digital technology and the internet on people, it is quite clear that by looking down the other end of the technological telescope it is possible to see the empowerment and growth of ‘local’ identity in an entirely new and significant way.

For most people in their daily lives, ‘life is local’ and the importance of news and information at a highly granular level should not be underestimated. The re-engagement of people with their communities may to some degree be based on the notion of the vibrant imagined ‘local’ identity. One that is far smaller than the region, the city, the town or the borough.

The growth of the ‘locavore’ movement around sustainable living suggested that the needs for local information and knowledge may in fact be increasing as people try to live more low carbon lifestyles. An important part of such sustainability may be based on well informed, well connected local communities who can make efficient decisions based on their digital access to a wide variety of local knowledge and opinion.

It would be naïve to say that this immediately compensates for the overall decline of important civic news coverage by professional local journalists that is presently occurring. But it does suggest a possible way forward that could represent a new ‘turn’ in local media production and consumption. One that recognises the structural need for both independent high quality journalism and citizen engagement in a win-win situation. As such a development of this sort could be seen in the public interest and a growth in public service that should be both protected and nurtured.

The regional press is the only institution with enough professional journalists to really cover civic Britain successfully. They are also the only group who has successfully developed digital platforms that have any real meaning in most people’s geographical consciousness. The possible demise of any regional newspapers will create a massive hole in the democratic fabric of the country. A hole that would presently be impossible to fill by other media organizations and which would represent a dangerous loss of plurality. Citizen engagement in news production, discussion and debate is a wholly good phenomenon which should be encouraged and supported.

The question is how to model local arrangements that satisfy public service and business aim, whilst successfully stimulating and embedding engagement by local communities in news production? As such, there are two issues that should be considered;

1. Support for the regional press in this role.

Can local newspapers be recognised for providing a public service and if so, how can this be reconciled with their revenue generating status and the position of the BBC as the existing major public service provider? Can a partnership of differing missions be developed?

2. Empowerment and encouragement of participatory journalism.

Can the same partners work together to develop the skills of citizen journalists at such a scale as to become a sustainable model of participatory journalism that genuinely builds on the potential of digital media and technology to enhance local democracy and citizenship.

The Digital Britain report is presently being critisised for its emphasis on technology over content. Government support for the development of a national response to the challenges to local participatory news production could be one way to answer this criticism. If the regional press, the BBC, educators and the public could be brought together as partners to look at this challenge the idea of a Digital Britain of active participants rather than simply consumers may be possible.

Some news sites get a last updated time stamp in Google – and some don’t. It’s a bit of information next to the URL that says XX minutes ago and shows when the most recent story was published.

Not all news sites get it – although I can’t see any rhyme or reason (originally posted here).

Sites that do have it

The sites that do have it are: Times, Telegraph, BBC News, Express, ITN, Guardian. (Click the picture for a bigger version).

News sites with a time stamp

The Express could probably live without it, as I recently showed that they don’t update their site after 8am on a Sunday.

Sites that don’t have it

The sites that don’t seem to have it are: FT, Sun, Mirror, Manchester Evening News, Dail Mail, Metro and Independent.

News sites with no time stamp

The following is the first in a series of responses to the government inquiry into the future of local and regional media. We will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This post, by Alex Lockwood, looks at the first:

“The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information”

The final views of the committee will depend on how much the inquiry sees local newspapers responsible for local journalism – a little, a lot, or completely.

Writing in the Observer on Sunday, Henry Porter pretty much called them the same thing. For many who work there, the death of newspapers is disastrous for access to local information, not least due to the historical positions those papers have held.

The closures of the Glasgow East News and Ayrshire Extra, the Black Country Mail Extra, Wolverhampton AdNews, Daventry Post and Ashby Herald, the Lincoln Chronicle, the Northallerton, Thirsk and Bedale Times, and dozens of others that have either closed or felt the swingeing impact of mergers and office cuts, are devastating for their communities. These papers have been the homes for ‘hard’ journalism – reporting of the essential court and council stories that really matter to local lives.

Los Angeles Times reporter, Joe Matthews, quoted widely on this, has made clear the dire implications for democracy of the loss of quality journalism. Matthews wrote: “Much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can’t be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom.”

Those trained ears may have left the newsroom – but are they the only ears open to the whispers of local corruption?

Active participants, not passive recipients

The problem for existing traditional newspapers is that it is not part of their business model to innovate ways for local people to engage directly with the democratic process. The newspaper model is one of a journalist doing the work – being the eyes and ears of the local community. But the online model is one of seeking out direct democratic action. Of having direct access to information, rather than waiting for someone else to report on it. To report on it yourself (not simply to have an opinion, but to fact-find, and fact-check).

Other (and often better) ways to access information within local communities, including news and issues of local democracy, already exist. It was not a local newspaper that developed www.theyworkforyou.com, which, with its team of volunteers and email alerts, is perhaps the best way to keep track on what your local MP is saying and doing.

And every day innovators are opening up access to information – just last week, MySociety launched ScenicOrNot, which took a crowd-sourced image project and put it to local democratic use.

One impact of the closure of local newspapers could be to open up the space (and revenue opportunities) for media organisations based, from the outset, on community engagement and crowd-sourced gathering / production / distribution. Where the local community are active participants in, rather than passive receivers of, the local information that matters to them.

Does that explodes the idea that a patch has no ears if it has no ‘newspaper’ journalist? People are on that patch. Innovative, passionate and entrepreneurial, and nosy. The people for whom that information matters – a geographical community who wants to hold local powers to account over planning decisions, education provision, bins and holes in roads.

Some of them will be journalists. The future of local journalism is so pressing that it’s persuaded Roy Greenslade to go back to basics and cover his neighbourhood – Kemp Town in Brighton – for the local paper, as a community reporter.

Most of his fellow community reporters won’t be trained journalists. But all of a sudden they are all in the same category: the people who want access to the information and who are willing to work for it. In this, and many other cases, such as the award-winning Teesside postcode hyper-local sites, the community reporters are producing local – quality – journalism.

Journalism need saving, not newspapers

What is important here is not the newspaper’s historical position. It is not the paper’s brand that make this local journalism worthy of the stamp ‘quality’. It is the standards of journalism itself, which can exist independent of the structures of a local paper: the fact-checking, the transparency, the reporting for the public good. And that can be done by Roy at No.53 on his own blog, or by a crowd-sourced MySociety project. (So what about the money…? There’s a post coming on that, this Friday.)

What is important is that it offers a structure to innovate and create community. Although, very little of what the community contributors produce actually gets printed on paper itself.

This new-newspaper activity must be supported. One of the worst impacts of the closure of local newspapers would be the end to this support of hyper-local communities, the empowering of engaged citizens with tools, in local democratic action. It would be a blow to the work done in encouraging journalists to see news as a conversation with readers, rather than as a one-way flow.

Where this work is developing, local newspapers should be given as much support as possible to survive. That’s because journalism is crucial to local communities. It needs saving. Whether in the form of large organised publishing groups is up for debate.

Local newspapers hold a privileged position. As the guardians of democracy and access to local information, but also as established competition to potential new initiatives, new ways of approaching democracy in local communities. If their demise is to be seen as a disaster, it will be because they found ways to make sense of journalism as a participatory process, engaging with and opening up access to information, and not a static product.

What are your thoughts on the future of local journalism?