People who live in areas branded as ‘problem communities’ by the media feel disengaged with the news – but hyperlocal citizen journalism offers an opportunity to re-engage citizens. These are the findings of a piece of research from the Netherlands called ‘When News Hurts‘, which measured mainstream coverage of ‘problem communities’ then followed a hyperlocal project which involved local people.

The findings won’t be a big surprise to those running hyperlocal blogs, which often focus on practical steps to improving their area and building civic participation rather than merely telling the stories of failure. But they do offer some lessons for traditional publishers, not just on what they could do better, but on what they’re doing badly in their current coverage – especially the regional publishers who would be expected to provide more ground-level reporting on local issues:

“Remarkably, in spite of being located close to these areas, the regional press hardly differed in their coverage from their national (quality) counterparts [...] National newspapers quoted residents in 23 per cent of their larger reports on Kanaleneiland and 35 per cent of their reports on Overvecht. The regional newspaper quoted residents in only 26 per cent of its larger reports on Kanaleneiland and in 24 per cent of its reports on Overvecht. Unexpectedly, 55 per cent of all news items about a nearby elite neighbourhood (Wittevrouwen) used a resident as source.”

The effect of this, says author Irene Costera Meijer, is “social isolation and stigmatization”:

“‘‘It affects you’’, Hafida (age 25, Dutch-Moroccan) said, later adding: I don’t mind it that much, but, well, in fact I do. Simply how they talk about your neighbourhood, where you live. It makes me think like, hey, what’s going on here?

“Most residents expressed their anger about how reporters systematically reiterated cliches about their immediate environment, if not exaggerating them. As Timon de Jager (57) from Overvecht told us: When something gets into the press, it is always because of a problem in some place; it is covered widely right away, and this makes it seem as if the neighbourhood represents nothing beyond that one big problem.

“… One 54-year-old woman, working and living in Overvecht, explained how her husband had to help out every day, because she was too afraid to open her own garage doors after dark. Not until he died, she discovered when walking her dog, that her feeling of being unsafe was based on misinformation, ‘‘on ignorance and the stories by the media and stories by other residents.’”

What residents needed, it seemed, was more constructive and specific reporting:

“When the story devoted attention to crime or an alleged lack of safety, to degradation or loneliness, most residents would like to see them combined with a solution-oriented frame, a positive and upbeat tone, the use of different perspectives (instead of the conventional ‘‘hearing both sides’’) and a recognizable, concrete setting.”

Hyperlocal journalism, then, emerges as a different way of reporting, which requires non-traditional approaches. There’s a useful exploration of how we normally talk about ‘citizen journalism’ as only providing the opportunity to speak:

“Much of the analysis of mediated communication is modelled on a politics of expression, that is, of speaking up and out, finding a voice, making oneself heard, and so on … In our view, attention to the politics of listening provides a means of moving beyond questions of speaking and voice to canvass issues of dialogue and meaningful interaction across difference and inequality.”

And the research looks at the practical importance of hyperlocal media in “familiarizing the unfamiliar”:

“[It] affects residents’ feelings about their physical neighbourhood in a positive way. In line with Poletti (2011), this ‘‘life narrative’’ storytelling contributes to the prevalence of intimacy and affect in the construction of civic engagement. The neighbourhood becomes more their ‘‘own’

“… Taking responsibility for a ‘‘readable’’ neighbourhood means that residents take pains to understand others and to make themselves understandable to others. Silverstone has called this ethos ‘‘media hospitality’’, which he considers the obligation to hear and to listen and to create a space for effective communication, ‘‘obligations which are imposed both on the media-weak as well as the media-powerful’

“… Studies of hyper-local storytelling projects, we suggest, should move beyond thinking about community as a primary good and end in itself. What residents asked from neighbourhood journalists is that their stories facilitated a comfort zone, not by copying professional mediating practices on a hyper-local level, but by directing the source of the pain: mainstream journalisms’ contribution to miscommunication and misinterpretation of one’s surroundings and one’s fellow residents, which in turn contributed to a sense of losing one’s grip on neighbourhood reality. By giving the floor to everyday stories about everyday life by ordinary people living or working in the neighbourhoods, You in the Neighbourhood enabled residents to interpret each other’s behaviour, habits or responses more correctly. Becoming better able to understand their fellow residents made them in turn more predictable while also increasing the neighbourhood’s and residents’ familiarity.”

In conclusion, the writers detail both the advantages and disadvantages of being embedded in the community you are reporting on. Firstly, in terms of quality:

“Creating trust as part of a strategy of ‘‘listening’’ by violating the ‘‘producer/audience boundary’’ seemed to work out well, in professional as well as in community terms. The residents who ended up in a broadcasted TV item were all positive about this approach and had the feeling that their reality was well conveyed. The most personal, original and valuable items were often produced by those neighbourhood journalists who took time to get acquainted with the residents they wanted to interview*reports of which the editor in chief of the regional newscaster claimed to be outright jealous: ‘‘We never managed to get into the trailer camp, let alone get an interesting interview out of a resident.’’ “

But this didn’t, she says, work for every type of story:

“Although residents confided their story much more easily to neighbourhood journalists, not every neighbourhood reality could be shared just as easily. Storytelling neighbourhood seems to be limited in its range of topics (residents as subjects, not objects), news frame (constructive and solution oriented) and tone of voice (optimistic and cheerful). Residents themselves did not always feel free to discuss the seamy side of their neighbourhood, at least not on television, fearing that others would recognize them and turn against them.

“Like other residents, some felt ill at ease to uncover stories of crime or violence, knowing they frequented the same supermarket and the same schoolyards as the ‘‘villains’’. In addition, they found it difficult to present the downside of the neighbourhoods’ reality, without losing people’s trust. It remained difficult to address issues about differences in a non-racist discourse.”

Ultimately, there is a role for both ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ reporting, but a lot to be learned by local journalists both in how their work has an effect at a local level (in some cases their presence actually provoked the violent response that they were there to report) and in the absence of local ‘problem community’ voices in regional media.

There are also some practical applications in planning a productive hyperlocal project – and anticipating the holes in coverage that it is less likely to fill.

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In a guest post for OJB, Jerry Vermanen explains the background to RegioHack

The internet is bursting with information, but journalists – at least in The Netherlands – don’t get the full potential out of it. Basic questions on what data driven journalism is, and how to practise it, still have to be answered. Two Dutch regional newspapers (de Stentor and TC Tubantia) have launched RegioHack, an experiment with data driven journalism around local issues and open data.

Both newspapers circulate in the eastern and middle part of the Netherlands. In November, journalists will collaborate with local students, programmers and open data experts in a 30 hour coding event. In preparation for this hackathon, the forum on our website (www.regiohack.nl) is opened for discussion. Anyone can start a thread for a specific problem. For example, what’s the average age of each town in our region? And in 10 years, do we have enough facilities to accommodate the future population? And if not, what do we need?

The newspapers provide the participants with hot pizza, energy drink and 30 hours to find, clean up and present the data on these subjects.

After the hackathon, the projects are presented and participants will be named in the publications. That’s what RegioHack is all about: making unique stories with data, helping each other to develop new skills and finding out how to practise data driven journalism.

If you happen to be in The Netherlands on November 10th and 11th, contact me on jerry@regiohack.nl or Twitter (@JerryVermanen) for an invite to the final presentation.

We’re also searching for guest bloggers – and yes, that can be in English.

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Bart Brouwers has been overseeing the establishment of a whole group of hyperlocal sites in the Netherlands with the Telegraaf Media Group. As part of the Hyperlocal Voices series, he explains the background to the project and what they’ve learned so far. Two presentations on the project can be seen above.

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

About a year ago, I came up with the plan for a hyperlocal, hyperpersonal news and data network covering all of the Netherlands. My dream was to give every single Dutchman (we have 16 million & counting…) his own platform for local relevance.

I wanted to roll it out myself and in order to get it financed I made contact with the board of directors of the Telegraaf Media Groep. I already worked for them (as the editor-in-chief of national free newspaper Sp!ts and before that as the editor-in-chief of regional newspaper Dagblad De Limburger), so it felt kind of natural to tell and ask them before I would pitch my idea somewhere else.

What I didn’t know is that TMG was already working on a hyperlocal platform, so after a few talks we decided to combine both plans. So instead of quitting TMG and starting my own company, I’m still an employee.

What made you decide to set up the blogs?

I was convinced local relevance would/will be a strong force in media. The combination of local business and local information (news, data) could easily become the trigger for a fine enterprise.

It would be journalistic, and would at the same time concentrate on helping the local businesses and local governments find their exact audience.

Of course the problems newspapers have encountered the last couple of years helped build my ideas. Newspapers are powerful media, but they are also very inflexible: production and distribution don’t seem to fit in modern times anymore.

But that doesn’t mean necessarily that people have lost interest in (local) news. On the contrary, the internet has made it a lot easier to be informed and indeed, we are seeing a lot of traffic on news-sites and newsblogs.

Finally I was convinced that journalism itself would have to change. Old fashioned legacy newspaper journalism still has its value, but journalists will have to “open up” themselves: learn from the experiences from blogging and – most important – replace the old role as a messenger for a new one as an intermediate: break down the castle and and build a market place. Go look for the symbiosis between the professional (who still has the skills and the experience) and the amateur (who has the knowledge and could want to share it).

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

We are running several pilots momentarily, one of which has the shape of a blog. One acts more as a classic news site and one is a combination of both. We are piloting an aggregation model, a community model and a commercial model.

Apart from that we are building (not yet piloting though) mobile platforms with totally different functionality and usability.

The lessons we learn from the pilots will lead to the choice of the direction and a national rollout starting early 2011.

And as I stated above, the ultimate dream is to set up a different platform (web, mobile, whatever) for every single citizen.

With the help of technique I still hope that I will reach that goal, although I realise that it is a rather ambitious one. (on the other hand, you don’t have to actually build 16 million platforms to be able to offer a different platform for every citizen…)

The first months of this year have been filled with preparations on four levels: IT, content, business and marketing. We formed four research teams (one for each level) and from the results of those teams I wrote a business plan for the pilots. They started last august.

What other blogs, bloggers or websites influenced you?

Most influential to me is Erwin Blom (http://erwinblom.nl, @erwblo), a Dutch blogger who has convinced me that not only the old business model of legacy media companies – based on print – is breaking down (anyone could see that), but also the way journalists act within it. He has been blogging for years about the way citizens act on what used to be the journalist’s pitches. Blom’s blog can easily be compared to blogs by people like Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen. I’m not exaggerating!

Next to the ones mentioned: journalism.co.uk, niemanlab, readwriteweb, those sort of media related blogs. Not very surprising, I guess…

Of course I have been monitoring all sorts of hyperlocal websites, all over the world. All of them seem to have something special that makes it different from the rest. Most attention has gone to the much discussed American platforms like Outside.in, Patch and Everyblock. And yes, you can see elements of them in my own work.

But also English and French exemples have been helpful. One of my main lesson: don’t try to invent every wheel by yourself.

By the way, starting my own blog (dodebomen.nl) helped a lot in organising my views and thoughts.

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

Interesting question, because we are coping with it every day within the legacy media company I am working for. I am very traditional where I see the role of a professional in the selection, the filtering and the creation of quality content. I am also traditional in my ambition to tell stories that are not only interesting to read but also get as close as they can get to something you could call the truth.

But I am far from traditional when I look at the possibilities of mixing journalism with commercial activities. I am very opposed to the Chinese wall between editorial and commercial departments. These people should not only see eachother and talk to eachother, they should actually make their plans together.

One bottom line stays the same though: your audience has to be able to trust you. You should never write that a certain product is good when it is not.

I am also far from traditional when I stress the importance of finding a symbiosis with the audience. The skills of the professional combined with the knowledge of the citizen make a great basis to start from. It’s up to the professional to find this knowledge and – in most cases – curate it, but it is also a duty for this journalist to let himself be overruled by people who know better. Which isn’t easy for a traditional journalist.

And of course, it’s hardly traditional to say that journalists should get much more entrepreneurial than they have been for the last 50 years or so.

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

These moments have yet to come. I want to find out from the pilots what the ideal balance will be between news, data, utility, UGC, commercial info, etc.

Also I want to find out if it works best to publish in a traditional news-style or if a bloggers style would do better.

In fact, I want to accept the situation where one place will be treated in one way and another place in another way. It will all depend on the needs of a specific region, but also on the abilities and the strengths of the blogger/journalist/communitymanager/etc who is working on it.

Editorially and commercially this platform will be as flexible and multisided as possible.

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

Of course, as I only just started the pilots, I don’t have a lot of data yet. And as far as unique visitors are concerned, they are not very stable. One pilot has a range between 2,000 and 86,000 unique visitors per week (no data yet for one full month), another one (small village) has somewhere between 500 and 2,000. The other two are in between.

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Allison White has written this wonderful roundup of last week’s news for the OJB. But now she’s got a job. Persuade her to do this again in the comments…

Google

-Announced no desire to create content and will respect copyright.

It added face-blur technology to its Street View mapping serivce to protect privacy. Also speculation from Groves Media on whether this technology is more of a threat to civil liberties than CCTV.

Microsoft

-Looking to limit the kinds of computers that can use their low-cost OS, making them poor computers even if they could be better and still be as cheap.

-The Microsoft/Yahoo struggle is still ongoing – rumor has it that Carl Ichan is buying up stocks in Yahoo to replace board members
who will sell to Microsoft. Seems he is replacing board members but his plans are not evident

Twitter

-Poynter did a good roundup of the Twitter coverage of the Chinese earthquake. Also gave news of situation and stories in Burma.

-Twitterfone is a new app for mobiles that allows users to call and leave a voice message, which is translated to text and then posted on Twitter. Has issues like knowing how to end the call.

-Funny meme on Twitter is finishing this sentence: “When Obama wins, …” Mine was “When Obama wins, college will be free and pizza will be subsidized”

Tech

-AP trying to get a button on the iPhone

-Effort underway to make clickstream tracking opt-in only in US. Marketers say it will be the death of their industry, but will most likely be like opting out of telemarketers.

-RIAA and MPAA still insist on using DRM on content bought to limit customer .Microsoft may also be planning to use a copyright ‘cop’ on the Zune for NBC. EA backs down on using DRM after user outcry at the idea

-Wikipedia to become a print edition, some debate about if the authors should get paid but Techdirt says it is non-controversial and they should not be paid.

-The FBI backs off of the Internet Archive – they wanted records of who used it now journalists can rest more at ease

-In the case against Ray Niro, writer of Troll Tracker blog, tried to prove he was not a “real” journalist and could not claim rights as one because he wasn’t trained, was bias and that he was a corporate mouthpiece. Defense took apart the claim of what it really means to be a journalist.

Nimbuzz moving in on Skype’s territory by making an app for both mobile and PC

Comcast bought Plaxo Inc., the social networking site. It turns online address books into online networks.

Other

Bush gave his first online interview Tuesday

Adrian Monck moved to WordPress http://adrianmonck.com/

Social

Quarter of social net users are using their mobiles to be social online in the UK.

Social Networks boom in Europe, projected to reach 107.4 million people in 2012. UK expected to be largest with 27.1 million projected.

How marketers are using social media and how often

Employers continue to ban Facebook and other social media sites at work without recognizing the possible benefits from these sites.

A new social site for health issues is iMedix, and although in beta is pretty poor in the community department. The people on it now are rather ‘happy-go-lucky’ as is some of the content which may not be appropriate for the kind of users it wants to attract (people with health problems)

-Social Networking Sites are now allowing people to basically export their data to other sites: MySpace with a few other partnered sites, Facebook to anyone, and Google to anyone. Although Facebook is closing access to journalists and is looking to take off its 5000 friends limit.

Web

Two sites, Newstrust and Newscred, have set up a system to rate the credibility of Web sites. Buzz Machine says it won’t work because there is just too much bad stuff and too easily discredited good stuff.

LiveNewsCamera.com allows viewers to see the news as it’s happening, uncut. Pope speeches, Iraqi parliament hearings, and the like.

PRWeb now allows users to search for their press releases, although this may bring fewer balanced results in a search

Harry McCracken from PC World has left to start his own tech web site.

A lot of talk going on about Seesmic: consensus seems to be that it is rough now with great potential and it is hard to imbed on some sites.

MSNBC has created a new widget to scroll news and also two games to see main news headlines. Not sure if they’re effective, but they’re trying

Media

Time Warner may be looking to unload that do not transfer well to web (i.e. Coffee table mags)

Using video to truly enhance a story – not having it be a stand alone piece but a short snipit filled with things print can’t show, like emotion.

The BBC will be using the Parliamentary channel coverage to instead cover the Olympics

From Thoughts of Nigel: 3 ways China should handle Western media – give access to reporters, don’t freak out on negative coverage, and work on building a worldwide reputation

ReinventingClassifieds.com is looking to create a new business model to keep the classified section alive

Dutch free dailies are increasing circulation and so are free Italian papers

Irish paper group, River Media, appears to be in trouble and is looking for $16 million in help.

Guatemalan journalist, Jorge Merida Perez, shot dead in his home. He worked for the Prensa Libre.

From Adam Tinworth: The possibility of journalists being paid for increasing defined traffic online is being looked at, although still skeptically

The Liverpool Daily Post liveblogged the making of the paper Tuesday

The INMA drops “newspaper” from their title and adds “newsmedia”

Cablevision buys Newsweek over Rupert Murdoch, but it is also speculated Murdoch might end up with it in a few years anyways

Upcoming book Super Media has some chapters free online and discusses how journalism can save itself and the world through network journalism

Daily Mail site just pulled Flickr photos to write an article about fat pets without asking permission or attributing credit.

Boston NOW closed

Andy Bull writes on the blandness of sports journalism with the double speak and untruthfulness of players, teams and journalists

Wall Street Journal hires on chief technology officer, Sarabjit “Ruby” Walia

But London Evening just cut their media reporter, which is just the beginning of changes there they stated

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Just to let you know that the News Interactivity Index now includes newspapers from Norway (thanks Kristine Lowe), France, the Netherlands and the US. You can use it to compare any two newspapers or country averages. The following countries are now covered:

• France
• Hungary
• Macedonia
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Spain
• Switzerland
• UK
• US

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Recently my attention has been drawn to the Dutch news website www.en.nl. Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, told me he wants to see “what we can do with news, social networks, wikis and more.

“I think you might like the experiment we are doing,” he wrote.

And bloody hell was he right.

The first thing that strikes you about the site is the bar chart across the top of the page, replacing the traditional masthead. This is a newsriver:

Down the outside column is a list of articles from the past hour:

That’s culture shift number 1.

At the bottom of the page you will find recent images, social bookmark sites, most commented articles from the past 24 hours, most important and most viewed.

Culture shift number 2 is the list of incoming links to this article – something built into the very fabric of blogs (pingback) but so far either anathema to mainstream publishers (“send our readers elsewhere?”), or difficult with current content management systems.

And with one simple move the site demonstrates it’s part of the conversation.

The ‘most important’ list is also worth looking at. How did they decide what was “most important?” I asked.

“We are using around ten variables to decide what’s important news. The variables we’re using right now are pageviews, visits from external websites, unique referrers to an article, comments, votes (4 options) and the press agency urgency variable (3 options; normal, high, very high).

“By showing it next to the most viewed we can easily see how it works and adjust the settings to make it better. It’s not perfect yet, but it already works remarkably well.

“We could extend this even further (tags, edits, tag removals) or skip some. All the variables are connected to points, we can set a default amount of points to a variable and define or redefine the value for the website.

“We also made a tag sniffer at http://www.skitch.com/wilbertbaan/8733/en-tag-sniffing – it scans the text on certain names and auto tags the article.”

Wilbert’s next step is building a community that can contribute to make this website better with ideas or criticism. The newspaper is already conducting a conversation with readers on a NING social network where users can contribute new ideas and discuss the website (in Dutch), but clearly this is just the start.

“For example we could connect a popular social network to the website and use what your network reads to alter the presentation of the news. Or make section pages, or a frontpage?

And all this is possible because of a Holovaty-esque focus on the power of databases.

“The most important object is the database,” he writes on his blog. “We designed the database from a view that almost everything is possible with the data. We store a lot of information that might be valuable in the future. This allows us to experiment freely with the design and think up new features. The database is the most valuable asset of a news organization.”
And this means they can do “Almost everything. We can make mash-ups, feeds, aggregated pages. Hook in to social networks, extend the wiki functionality, and more. Technically everything is possible.”

Keep an eye on this one.

UPDATE: Wilbert writes: “We have added feeds for every tag, latest news and breaking news. We have also added a personal feed that can be created by selecting the tags you like or don’t like. Very rudimentary, but it is a first experiment with personalization (My feed: http://en.nl/en/my_rss.php?editorId=3) and you can take it anywhere you want.

“With these feeds we are encouraging developers to experiment with news sorting and make their own interface or mash-up.”

Read more posts about future newspapers here

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