Yessi Bello continues the Hyperlocal Voices series with an interview with JesmondLocal‘s Ian Wylie, who decided to dabble in local journalism after taking voluntary redundancy from a national newspaper. Still viewed as a “pro-bono”, ” good thing to do” Jesmond Local has now become an integral part of the Jesmond Community.

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

After 15 years working for The Guardian as a reporter, features writer and finally section editor, I took voluntary redundancy in 2009, and began thinking about what I would do with the next chapter of my career. I’d been involved mostly in national newspaper and magazine journalism, so local journalism was something I hadn’t dabbled in before.

The concept of “hyperlocal” fascinated me as an area for me to explore and an opportunity for me also to “give something back”. I discovered that Newcastle University lecturer David Baines had a research interest in the subject. We met to discuss and he suggested I offer some of his students the chance to launch a hyperlocal website, which we did almost exactly a year ago.

I view Jesmond Local, at the moment, as a “pro-bono” “good thing to do”. I don’t make any money from it (yet) and have to juggle the time I spend on it with my freelance writing for the Financial Times, Guardian, easyJet, Monocle and Management Today.

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

My background is newspapers, so I approached it from the viewpoint of, if I was one of the local newspaper pioneers transported into the future to 2010, what would I do? How would I best serve the interests of a small community like Jesmond (population 10,000). And since my background is news, I felt that news had to be at the core of what we do. That “news” would provide the “stickiness” that kept readers coming back.

I found a relevant WordPress theme called “The Local” and starting by posting straightforward 200-word news stories. As time has gone on we’ve expanded our news story-telling into slideshows, video, podcasts, live blogs etc. We’ve added a local events diary, a discussion forum and, of course, a Facebook fan page and Twitter service.

3) What other blogs, bloggers or websites influenced you?

I had a look at all the usual UK hyperlocal sites that get a lot of press, and also at some in the US and Europe (I liked the idea of the cafe-newsroom approach at Nasa Adresa… before it shut).

But to be honest I haven’t taken too much notice of what other people have done because a) hyperlocals tend to be made in the likeness of their creators and b) the reasons a hyperlocal succeeds or fails depend to a large degree on the nature of the community they serve. No two journalists and no two communities are alike!

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

I don’t see JesmondLocal as running in competition with the local, traditional news outlets. It serves as an accompaniment. If I thought we were giving Jesmond people something they could already get elsewhere then, believe me, I wouldn’t be doing this!

I think we’re the same in the sense that (I hope) we have the same commitment to good, principled news values. But whereas I think traditional news organisations see hyperlocal as a sticking plaster for their commercial woes, I hope hyperlocal sites like JesmondLocal are about creating and strengthening community in places like Jesmond. There’s lots going on already in Jesmond, but the community needs to know about it if those events, clubs and activities are going to flourish and succeed.

A steady flow of information about what’s going on/available in the community might also encourage and inspire other people to get involved and/or create their own community projects. So it’s about sustaining communities.

And I think we’re also different in the way we aim to sustain local journalism. I’m acutely aware that young, aspiring journalists don’t have the same opportunities for on-the-job training that I did 20 years ago. So by taking on 20 or so student volunteers each academic year, JesmondLocal tries to help would-be journalists learn and refine their skills at a local level.

I’m also excited about helping other people in the Jesmond community do the same thing – and pass on to them the important skills of news-gathering, reporting, writing, producing etc.

My next challenges are two-fold: I need to make it financially sustainable, which means getting local businesses to pay for advertising and other services, and explore possible funding options.

And secondly, I want to get the community more involved in generating and creating the content. I feel the balance is a little too “top down” at the moment, rather than coming from the local people for whom the site has been created.

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

So far the key developments editorially have been our media sponsorship of the local community festival, which introduced us to the people who run all the different community groups in Jesmond; the May local elections, during which we ran our own live-blogged hustings, which introduced us to the political movers and shakers of Jesmond; an ongoing “local heroes” project which is helping us become more confident in our film-making skills; and our breaking of small, but locally significant stories, such as the arrival of a new Waitrose in Jesmond.

From my traditional, newspaper background I’m also beginning to understand how news can be communicated in many different ways. For example, some days our news-reporting is all done in tweets.

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

To be honest, I don’t look at our Google Analytics too often, but daily uniques range from 50 to 300. We tend to get the biggest spike when I send out an email newsletter. I’ve discovered (to my cost) that offline advertising is very ineffective.

PHP Freelancer

The Guardian has changed its user-generated comment system – moving from a client-side system to a server-side one. (This story was first published here, where you can read a bit more of the background.)

With the old system, once you loaded a story, some javascript would go off and look up readers’ comments and display them. This wasn’t terribly accessible – if you couldn’t or didn’t run javascript, you couldn’t see the comments.

It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn’t run the javascript (so couldn’t see the comments). And if your mobile didn’t run javascript (like mine), you couldn’t read the comments either.

With the new system, the comments are just part of the web page, like all the rest of the text.

This is a great change by the Guardian, and not before time. Google has already started to index the text of comments, as this search for some text I left as a comment once shows.

If you notice any problems, they’ve asked you to point them out.

PHP Freelancer

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

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

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

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

US Hyperlocal News Market –

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

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

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

PHP Freelancer

Update, 2 days later: Paul lets me guest post here (ie I wrote this, not him). It was going fairly well until I wrote this post … You can read my climbdown here…

The latest subscriber figures (see table below, and first published in my blog’s newspapers category) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds – and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.

(You can read some of the defences of RSS here and here)

The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.

And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.

Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).

Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.

The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK …

Top 3 RSS feeds at each newspaper

They didn’t all have three that showed up (full table here) …

Switch to Twitter instead

I suggest newspapers switch to Twitter instead. Twitter’s advantages over RSS include:

• Wheat vs chaff As a reader, you can see which stories other people are retweeting and so are likely to be of interest.
• Context There’s space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline (well, there is for those that have got it and don’t just stick the first few words of the standfirst after the headline).
• Promotion Followers can RT newspaper stories, promoting the paper – they can’t do this with elements of an RSS feed.
• Tracking Stories’ development can be tracked on Twitter – you can’t usually tell what’s changed in an RSS feed.
• Conversation You can take part in a conversation on Twitter. People only talk to their RSS feed when they swear at it. The journalists behind the story can tweet, too.

Newspapers agree with me …

As I say, despite poor subscriptions for many feeds, papers pump out RSS feeds as if there’s no tomorrow – the second column in the table shows how many feeds (rounded) that each paper has.

But despite this, it’s clear some papers agree with me – and have already given up on RSS feeds and no longer actively promote them.

No visibility

The Mail, despite its 160-odd feeds, only mentions them in its footer.

The same is true of the Sun.

On the page but hardly visible

The FT’s RSS link does at least have a logo – but its buried at the bottom of the right hand column on each page.

The Telegraph shows relevant RSS feeds on pages – but they’re buried in a different way: above a banner ad that no one will ever look at.

Even the Guardian, which lets you mash up your own RSS feeds (hence the 000,000s in the table), hides details of its feeds under an unusual term ‘webfeed’ in the far right of its header.

The Times still has an RSS link in its main header menu on its news page. On other pages its’s at the bottom. And it mentions Twitter on its pages much more than RSS.

Visible – but not doing them any good

The Independent is alone in listing RSS feeds on its main category pages – although that doesn’t seem to get it many subscribers.

The Mirror has an RSS link next to its search box, although it took me ages to find it. Does this count as visible – it’s not exactly intuitive …

And the Express has a link and a logo prominently in its header. But as the express doesn’t update its website often (or at all on sunday), I guess that’s why no one subscribes. And some of its RSS feeds appear to be garbage – check out this theatre one …

Caveats about the data

After you’ve started writing something about newspapers, you’ll eventually discover that Martin Belam has already written about it. Having just noticed his Top 75 British newspaper RSS feeds (written before the recent explosion in Twitter use) as I was researching Google Reader’s market share, I figured I’d just repeat his caveats about his own data as they apply to mine too:

• Subscribers don’t necessarily ever read anything.
• Numbers quoted by Google vary wildly.
• Google Reader has a large market share but there are other readers.
• Newspapers have problem with the same feed on different URLs. To quote Martin: “If the papers themselves can’t work out how to set one canonical URL for their content, why should I?”
• Google Reader search is not great. There may be mising feeds.

PHP Freelancer

I’ve been speaking to news organisations’ community editors on the lessons they’ve learned from their time in the job. In the 2nd of the series, the Guardian’s Mark Fothergill:

1. Getting the tools right for the job are ultra-important, both front end and back end:

Too many sites knock together something that ‘will do’ and it always comes back to haunt.

An oft-made mistake is spending lots of time on front end, user-facing functionality and spending no time thinking about how to moderate it.

Additionally, once users have tools/functionality, good or bad, they grow accustomed to them and when you then attempt to ‘improve’ the offering at a later date, they inevitably don’t like it and you can lose a sizeable portion of your community.

2. Define your role (and more specifically, the role of the moderation team):

If it’s not clear to other departments, particularly editorial, that the final decision on the moderation of any piece of user generated content lies with you, it can cause numerous problems. Other departments should have a say in procedures and should have a higher priority when it comes to 50/50 decisions, but they should respect the decisions of the moderation team, that are based on both experience and policy.

This is the only way to maintain consistency across your offering. Users won’t know if they’re coming or going if it appears there are a number of different moderation policies across a site that they see as being one entity.

Slight difffences between moderation on, say, Sport and Politics are to be expected, but not wholesale differences, especially when users are only asked to follow one set of community standards.

3. Deal with user complaints quickly:

If you’re not on top of user complaints within a reasonable time-frame, you’re fostering problems and problem areas. Dealing with a piece of content calling someone a “wanker” within 15 minutes, for instance, can prevent a flame war from ever getting off the ground. Deal with the same complaint after 2 hours and you’re likely to be mopping up for another hours afterwards.

Quick response times help to protect yourselves from a legal standpoint and, at the same time, help to protect the users who are much happier in the knowledge that a piece of reported content, that they deem to be offensive or inappropriate, has been acted upon swiftly. Who wants a system where you report someone telling you to “F off” and, on a regular basis, the comment is still there 8 hours later?

PHP Freelancer

Last Friday the Guardian published it’s ‘Ultimate Summer Pop Quiz’ – a typically original take on the pop quiz format with a gloriously, insanely difficult set of over 100 questions such as “The opening lines of which post-punk song were inspired by the above passage from Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky?”

Having only managed 31 answers (and 24 guesses) over the weekend, I took to the web on Monday to see who else was doing it – and if it was on the web so I could send it to friends.

The problem? The Guardian hadn’t exactly made it easy to do so. The quiz was nowhere to be seen on Monday’s Music section homepage – instead it took a Google search for “Ultimate summer pop quiz Guardian” to bring up the specific page for last week’s Film & Music section. Even then, the link to the quiz (in PDF form) was so small and easily overlooked as placed in a completely different story that it took Google’s caching option to spot it.

So, was everyone talking about this quiz? A search for webpages linking to the PDF brought… one result, from the comments on a Guardian article… and it appeared that the comment in question was no longer there.

What a shame. This was perfect viral material. A quiz most individuals couldn’t complete, where half the fun was competing with your peers to be the first to find out that the uncle of Randy Newman who received 45 Oscar nominations was Alfred Newman.

What should they have done?

• At the very least had a ‘button graphic’ promoting it on the Music section page – and pushed to have it on the main homepage as well (after all, I seem to remember it was on Friday’s Guardian front page)
• There should have been an ‘email to a friend’ feature.
• Readers should be able to bookmark the quiz, ‘Digg’ it, etc.
• Although the PDF is a nice format to email to others, there should also have been a more interactive format version where you could fill in your answers and then email the results to a friend (the answers aren’t revealed until this week’s supplement). You could even include an on-page calculator for the Maths section (“Take That claim to have sung a million love songs. If each song has an average length of three minutes, how many days would it take to sing them all?”)
• There should be a discussion forum or thread devoted to the quiz and the searches related to it, linked from the quiz page. Imagine how much traffic that might generate – and how much higher the average time spent on the site.
• Oh, and they should have twittered it, inviting people to tell them how they’re doing.
• And if you really wanted to make this an event, why not turn it into a treasure hunt and litter the web with clues? Or red herrings?
• UPDATE: Chrys Wu adds in the comments: “the quiz would have also made a terrific Facebook app along the lines of Flixster.”

I’m sure there are more examples you can think of.

But let’s focus on the really important question: how many answers did you get right? (PDF)

PHP Freelancer

UPDATE (Aug 7 ’08): The Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates suggests employment opportunities and salaries are not affected.

J-schools are generally set up to prepare students for the mainstream news industry: print and broadcasting, with a growing focus on those industries’ online arms. There’s just one small problem. That industry isn’t exactly splashing out on job ads at the moment…

The LA Times is cutting 150 editorial jobs and reducing pages by 15%; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cutting nearly 200 jobs; the Wall Street Journal cutting 50 jobs; Thomson Reuters axing 140 jobs; in the UK Newsquest is outsourcing prepress work to India, while also cutting jobs in York and Brighton; Reed Business Information, Trinity Mirror and IPC are all putting a freeze on recruitment, with Trinity Mirror also cancelling its graduate training scheme and cutting subbing jobs. In the past two months almost 4,000 jobs have vanished at US newspapers (Mark Potts has this breakdown of June’s 1000 US redundancies). In the past ten years the number of journalists in the US is said to have gone down by 25%.

Given these depressing stats I’ve been conducting a form of open ‘panel discussion’ format via Seesmic with a number of journalists and academics, asking whether journalism schools ought to revisit their assumptions about graduate destinations – and therefore what they teach. The main thread is below.

The responses are worth browsing through. Here’s my attempt at a digest:

There is a general agreement that this is just the beginning of something very serious indeed. Alison Gow, a journalist at the Liverpool Post, described recent events as the “first rattle of pebbles before the avalanche that follows”; Kevin Anderson of The Guardian doesn’t think it’s unrealistic for me to talk about a ‘worst case scenario’ in three years’ time where many newspapers fail and recruitment is zero.

Kevin draws parallels with the downsizing of IT industry and a need for multiskilling – subbing, writing, etc. Jo Geary at the Birmingham Post says “students now shouldn’t be educated for media organisations as exist now” and that they should also be made aware that newspapers are not what they think they are. My experience with students supports this: they tend to come onto the degree with a rather outdated, ‘monomedium’ view of working in journalism.

There is a general desire for the news industry to start working harder to attract graduates who can help steer it through the coming shift. Andy Dickinson says the university system and students have been underwriting the training and development of the news industry for a long time. The industry needs to make it more attractive for students to make the financial sacrifice. That includes making it more exciting to work there and “not something out of the 1920s”. Alison Gow points out that journalism graduates will have the choice between having their own website and joining a newsgathering organisation, which gives them a stronger bargaining position and hopefully better salaries. As an industry we will need these people and will need to provide packages that make it an attractive place to work.

There is also a healthy journalistic scepticism about some of the figures: Jo Geary asks how many of the redundancies are production staff, and how many content creators. I wonder whether the oft-touted stat on the decline of American journalists is so severe because it only looks at the mainstream media and at those with the ‘journalist/reporter’ job title. Does it overlook a rise in the likes of community editors, content moderators, multimedia producers and web editors?

In the light of that, there are still jobs in the industry. Andy Dickinson makes the distinction between “training people that the news industry wants, and training people that the news industry needs.” Sarah Hartley of the Manchester Evening News points out that newspapers have multimedia arms, TV stations, and radio stations. “You should prepare students for news organisations, not newspapers. They should be flexible, able to work in different formats.” She notes the biggest shift in newsgathering and news production and that the role “may be more to curate or manage content created outside of the news organisation.”

Neil MacDonald at the Liverpool Post stirred things up by asking “Why would an aspiring journalist now do a journalism degree? The industry will have been transformed by the time you graduate. What can you learn in three years that you can’t in one?” Online journalist Patrick Thornton would not hire the majority of journalism graduates and said “Most J-schools are obsolete”. Journalism entrepreneur and founder of Spot.us David Cohn said that, while he doesn’t regret studying his Masters in journalism at Columbia, he wouldn’t do it now. “The job description is changing, but universities aren’t adapting to change the changing mindset and skillset.”

Andy Dickinson and I both shared the view that the old 12-week training course just will not suffice in the modern environment; that the news industry needs to get over its snobbery about journalism and media degree graduates who have studied the theory as well as the practice, because these are the people who can ‘think outside the box’ about the industry’s future.

The increasingly diverse nature of the journalism ‘job’ presents an increasing range of elements that need to be taught – and a decreasing amount of space to do so. In this context it’s about teaching ‘mindset, not skillset’, as Kevin Anderson, Mark Comerford, Andy Dickinson, David Cohn and others pointed out.

Kevin perhaps put it best when he said:

“So many journalists think ‘If I’m a good writer, that’s all I need’. That’s bullshit. There is an arrogance among journalists about the craft of writing. Journalism students will need more than the ability to craft a good sentence.”

It’s also about separating teaching journalism as a process from teaching it as a type of production, as Reed’s Adam Tinworth put it and JD Lasica. It’s a great point – but complicated by the question that in a new media age, are the two increasingly one and the same? (This very debate is an act of the journalism process being published).

There is a general view that entrepreneurial and business skills should be taught. Kevin Anderson points out that this is the biggest opportunity for journalists to build a business. David Cohn says this hasn’t happened “Partly because news organisations have a culture similar to the military, there’s a chain of command and no leeway to make your own decisions. Journalism schools are equally structured.” Anika says universities should show students how to better market themselves. Tom, a freelance journalist in China, thinks learning other languages will be increasingly important. JD Lasica thinks we need journalists who can reinvent the industry.

And Emap’s David Cushman emphasised the importance of teaching students how to build partnerships and added the observation that “everything is in beta now” – university courses should be no different.

The conversation remains open - I’d love to know your thoughts either via video on Seesmic or in the comments below. I’ll update this post as new replies come in. You can also find comments on blog posts by David Cushman and Andy Dickinson.

Note: Kevin Anderson posted via YouTube and so his replies (and mine to his) aren’t included in the thread above, so it’s embedded separately below:

UPDATE: JD Lasica has added his response, ‘The Great Decoupling‘ separately – also embedded below:

Related articles by Zemanta

• AJC Reducing Staff By Nearly 200; 85 Newsroom Posts Included; Weekly Sections Eliminated
• Broken Revenue Model Leads To Newspapers Narrowing Ambitions, Reach: Survey

PHP Freelancer

The best thing that I took from this week’s 2gether08 event was yesterday’s announcement by blogging MP Tom Watson and Ofcom’s blogging Tom Loosemore of Show Us a Better Way.

The site (also a blog – notice a pattern here?) is releasing a range of public data and inviting people to mash them up, or come up with ideas to do so. In their words:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here. 

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.

While the US has a strong tradition of making public data available, which has enabled the likes of Adrian Holovaty to create pioneering mashups like ChicagoCrime.org and Everyblock, the UK’s public data has been much less open.

But that is changing. The Guardian’s ‘Free Our Data’ campaign has successfully heaped a lot of pressure on government to “Make taxpayers’ data available to them”, and when I was recently invited to take part in a government white paper workshop around “community empowerment”, I got the impression that I was knocking at a semi-open door when I said that public availability of data would be my number one priority (more on that workshop here).

Anyway, back to that new website. Murray Dick has already come up with some stonking ideas, and I would suggest every journalist in the country with any interest in the future of journalism should at the very least be watching this and thinking about the possibilities in their area. The Power of Information Task Force blog is well worth following for further examples internationally.

If you think FOI requests have transformed journalism in recent years, and the battle to retain those, think about this: if we don’t make the most of this opportunity, we’ll have no excuse when the government decides to withdraw the offer.

• Related links (via Nick Booth):

Bill Thompson

Justin Pickard: “This is what it’s all about”.

Shane McC: “Surely this can’t be government? But it is…Brilliant”

Guardian Tech: ” It would be fantastic if a Guardian Tech reader could win this”

Ideal Government: “we offered an OS map and a Google lava lamp”

Richard’s Kingdom: “what’s even better is that this competition is accompanied by a whole raft of new public APIs”

Ed Parsons: “I’m Impressed”

Skuds Sister: “I have more confidence in motivated geeks than in large companies”

Daveyp “does this mark a sea change”

Ideal Government: “Power of Information work is gathering pace and getting quite exciting”

Bob Piper: “My suggestion was going to be ‘Where’s my bloody post office gone’.”

Open: ” it behoves me to offer a little praise when they get things right”

100 ideas already Tom Watson: “we might have to find some more prizes.”

Personal Democracy: “Kudos to all!”

PHP Freelancer