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?

PHP Freelancer

What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?

That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online?

Half the attendees represented the people behind the mainstream media’s attempts to get to grips with the web – the hyperlocal sites of the Teesside Gazette; the mapping and crowdsourcing of the Manchester Evening News; the blogs of the Birmingham Post.

The other half represented what is clear is an emerging cottage journalism industry: niche news websites; local blogs; citizen journalism and news prediction services.

Rick Waghorn’s keynote speech on his experiences of establishing and expanding MyFootBallWriter set things going perfectly. In particular his negative experiences of Google AdSense found a very receptive audience: despite 400,000 page impressions over the summer, he said, his AdSense revenues were only $180, while in seven years the most popular Harry Potter website has earned only $6,500 from the scheme. Following proceedings online, Graham Holliday added: “Bang on on Adsense – I do around 50,000 per month and make $100 – $150 off of it.”

The verdict from Rick: “Clearly if anybody is going to earn a living, it cannot be through Google Ads.”

Instead Rick explained his own business model – a combination of old-fashioned local ad sales; a self-built ad service, Addiply; affiliate sales; and syndication to those big publishers looking to add more local coverage to their global brands.

This was an ‘unconference’, so after Rick’s speech the emphasis was on discussion and exchanging experiences. The group discussing community spoke of the problem of users’ “sporadic involvement“; of journalists not connecting with people online; technological barriers to instant publishing; the need for journalists to become brands. There was an anecdote about bloggers recruited by the Birmingham Post ‘scooping’ the paper by scheduling embargoed news to go live the minute the embargo was lifted. (Not that the journalist concerned felt this was a bad thing).

The group discussing business models scratched their heads at the possibility of OhMyNews’ tip jar model working elsewhere and why it didn’t make a profit from ads and syndication; whether big publishers should buy up startups; and the problems of aggregation, Martin Stabe arguing that the only aggregators that had any chance of success were those that added something, such as geotagging.

The funding group talked of the importance of five year financial forecasts; how to tackle web-ignorant banks; why there was a need for a British equivalent of the Knight Foundation; and how angel investors want to see a big existing market because the risks of complete failure are lower.

And the online news models group discussed how journalism is not just about reporting, but networking; the importance of interaction on every level rather than simply forums; and the need to get out alerts, while ensuring accuracy.

The event was covered live by a team of journalism degree students using CoverItLive at JournalismEnterprise.com, which enabled people to contribute to the discussion – and create discussions of their own – online.

In addition there was a JEEcamp aggregator which pulled together blog posts, images, video, bookmarks and tweets following the event, and a Twitter aggregator pulling together tweets from attendees. Video of the event should appear on the European Journalism Centre website. Video of Rick’s speech was live streamed by Mark Comerford.

Reflections on the event worth reading elsewhere include Azeem Ahmad’s report on the day; Alex Gamela’s online highlights; Journalism.co.uk’s reports; Charlie Beckett on community; Pete Ashton on news as a game; and Rick Waghorn’s blog posts written after the event.

The day ended with a panel discussion of some of the emerging issues. As I looked out at the people gathered it occurred to me that in ten years time one half would probably have bought out the other half.

The question is, which half will be which?

PHP Freelancer

A couple weeks ago Journalism.co.uk commissioned me to write a piece on ‘Changing tools and approaches in local newspapers’. But whereas their mental image was of the evangelical stuff I write on my blog; my mental image was of the more objective reporting they have on their site. We got there in the end – and I think the end result is better for it. But I didn’t want the original draft, with much more quotes from figures around the industry, to go to waste – so here it is. This post is part of this month’s Carnival of Journalism:

Local news is changing. Video, podcasts and blogging have been added to the scribbles of shorthand and the nib; searching YouTube and browsing the blogosphere have been added to photocalls and council meetings as part of the daily routine; and the segregations of print and online – and of writer and reader – are being broken down. Paul Bradshaw spoke to reporters, editors and publishers around the country on how their professions are changing.

Video and audio

The most visible transformation in local newspapers has been the inexorable rise of video. The looming threat of broadcasters moving into ultra-local news services online, twinned with the success of YouTube, has transformed print publishers into aspiring broadcasters.

The early results were, as many in the industry admit, often embarrassing. Experimentation with portable cameras, rushed editing and shifty presentation saw seasoned hacks fighting with background newsroom noise to read out the day’s headlines, and much mocking. But as employers have invested in training and facilities, and journalists quickly learned from their experiments, results have improved.

For James Goffin at Archant Suffolk, video means “different ways of thinking about stories and practical changes to how you do things like interviews.

“We’ve taken the view that video should be used to illustrate stories rather than produce TV-style packages, but I think everyone is still learning what works best online.”

For those who do – such as The Wolverhampton Express and Star’s Andy Toft – it can also mean being headhunted by broadcasters.

At the same time, podcasts have endured. Not one to start quietly, Newsquest’s Northern Echo launched its audio efforts with an interview with Tony Blair. This was followed up with podcasts on fatherhood, local history, health, religion, World War II, interviews, and the paper’s archives. Northcliffe’s newspapers’ initial experimentation with podcasts, however, seems to have tailed off, with only three still being produced, two of those by one newspaper: Stoke’s Sentinel. But at Johnston Press, says, Mike Hill, Deputy Editor at the Lancashire Evening Post, “We use audio a lot. We’ll record a call and put that up, and especially when it comes to celebrities – or when you’ve got a local councillor spouting off.”

Integration

For Hill the biggest change has been that of the structure of the newsroom itself. “Everything has changed,” he says. “Everybody in the room works on all platforms, from reporters, photographers through to sub editors, everybody. There is no hierarchy in terms of platform.

In some newspapers – such as those of the Midlands News Association – there is still some separation, but the online journalist has very much moved out of the newsroom ghetto, internet news editors working side by side with their print counterparts, while photographers are expected to take images for both print and web.

John Jeffay of the Manchester Evening News notes: “Different platforms talk to each other. It’s not yet perfect, but we’re all under the same roof, including Channel M, our TV station, representatives of a couple of radio stations in the group, and a link person who oversees two-way traffic between the MEN and a stable of 20-odd weekly papers. The next logical step would be shared diaries and shared technology, i.e. a proper asset management system.

“The editor is very keen on staff crossing boundaries, print people doing audio and video, TV supplying audio to radio etc. These developments tend to come on a rather ad hoc basis, but necessity being the mother of invention and journalists being inventive people, that kind of works.”

Coupled with this change in working relationships is a change in the rhythm of news:

“Midday conferences now focus as much on what will happen during the rest of the day – i.e. beyond the last print deadline at noon – as on the following day’s paper (we deadline 10.30pm for morning publication). So our concern is with what web, TV and radio will be doing in the interim.”

Archant’s James Goffin also notes the changing attitude to deadlines. “While our print deadlines are still – and will remain – important, all our reporters can file straight to the web at whatever time the story breaks and keep updating it as new information comes in. It’s now commonplace for reporters to tell newsdesk about a story and add they are filing it online in the same breath.”

Newsgathering

Just as the tools of production have changed, so have those of newsgathering. “There is a greater awareness of the web in checking stories online, comments, and message boards,” says Chris Leggett, Electronic Editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star. Comments from online readers have generated stories on more than one occasion for the paper, he says, including leads from people around the world. “If someone dies in tragic circumstances, often we will get further stories from people who knew the deceased, but who no longer live locally, posting something on the site. And in one case, a tip-off from someone in the Far East led to a front page story.”

The Lancashire Evening Post’s Mike Hill talks of a more “web-savvy” reporter, setting up feeds and email alerts, and using Outlook filters to sort them. It’s in the same vein that his namesake at Trinity Mirror, Head of Multimedia Mike Hill, talks of journalists checking YouTube and MySpace every morning, and knowing how to subscribe to RSS feeds. The group’s relaunched website template features prominently displayed appeals for readers to ‘Send your stories’, and they have plans to extend this facility to mobile phone users. “We’re looking at tools to enable anyone to send us their material as easily as possible, from any device,” he says.

Looking forward

Mobile is clearly a big part of the future for Trinity Mirror. Hill says the company are about to trial mobile reporting using text, video, audio and stills following a link up with Vodafone. Staff who are sent on the editorial leaders programme at UCLAN are being asked to produce content using a Nokia N95 phone, while those in Cardiff’s new digital newsroom are being promised access to mobiles when they’re out on a job. “The aim is that content can be uploaded to the web immediately and running stories are updated faster.”

For Archant the long-awaited geotagging-based relaunch of their news websites has meant reporters will be ‘mapping’ their stories: entering postcodes or using an online map to click on – or draw a shape over – a location. In addition to the commercial opportunities this creates, James Goffin argues it will “make for a better archive and make reporters’ lives easier in handling cuttings and follow ups.”

And Archant is not alone in looking at mapping: the Manchester Evening News made headlines recently when it produced an interactive online map of fatal shootings in Manchester, while Johnston’s Grantham Journal

used Google Maps to track a “killer heron” and the Lancashire Evening Post have mapped roadworks and speed cameras. The Midland News Association’s Shropshire Star used it to map fuel prices. And Trinity Mirror’s Teesside Gazette’s experiments with hyperlocal, postcode-based news have proved so successful the tactic is likely to be extended to the group’s other newspapers.

Archant’s Goffin says they are looking at other ways of handling information differently, including the power of databases for material such as league tables that work better online than in print. Northcliffe’s Hull Daily Mail has experimented successfully with photo slideshows, while the Wolverhampton Express and Star have turned to Flickr for their experiments with photography. The Lancashire Evening Post’s Mike Hill says the paper is looking at moving on from the one-question reader poll to more in-depth surveys of 30-40 questions on the region’s big debates, generating more in-depth editorial supplements. Blogs, meanwhile, have become part of the editorial furniture for most newspapers.

For all this change, however, much remains the same. “The traditional stuff is still the vast majority of what we do,” says Chris Leggett. “Print is still at the heart of what we do, but the web is factored in.”

“The tools are largely the same,” agrees John Jeffay. “Basic pen and pad.”

Dreams of backpack journalists, it seems, are still some way away.

To read the substantially rewritten, published version of this article, go here.

PHP Freelancer