Should independent hyperlocal news operations expect ‘cashback’ from mainstream publishers who use their copy? In a guest post for OJB, Jane Haynes speaks to Marc Reeves, editor of Birmingham Live, Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post and Sunday Mercury.
“I’ve had a bit of a love hate relationship with hyperlocals over the years,” explains Marc.
“I started out loving them and then they started hating what we did,” he reflects with a smile. Continue reading
Civic engagement? Most readers spent more than 30 minutes on the liveblog
On Monday I was involved in a fascinating experiment in civic engagement: 10 hyperlocal blogs all agreed to embed a liveblog of a hustings which would give inhabitants of the largest local authority in Europe an insight into the next council leader.
The liveblog itself was to be maintained by student contributors to the Birmingham Eastside news site. The decision to offer it out to hyperlocal sites across the city seemed obvious – so why aren’t publishers doing this regularly? Continue reading
If you arrive the evening before JEEcamp next week you should take the chance to attend the Future of News fringe event ‘Entrepreneurship Special’, which features Marc Reeves, ex-Birmingham Post editor and current editor of The Business Desk West Midlands. The event is organised by The Lichfield Blog‘s Philip John, who is also well worth hearing from (and may be an award-winner by the end of this week).
It’s free.
That is all. Book here.
Yesterday I hosted a session on law for my MA Online Journalism students, which I thought I would embed below.
Some background: I teach all my sessions in a coffee shop in central Birmingham – anyone can drop in. This week I specifically invited local bloggers, and so the shape of the presentation was very much flavoured by contributions from The Lichfield Blog‘s Philip John; Nick Booth from Podnosh and BeVocal; Talk About Local‘s Nicky Getgood; Hannah Waldram of the Bournville Village Blog; Gavin Wray, Matthew Mark, and Mike Rawlins of Stoke’s Pits N Pots. The editor of the Birmingham Post Marc Reeves also came for an hour to share his own experiences in the regional press.
Two things occurred to me during the process of preparation and delivery of the session. The first is that law in this context is much broader: as well as the classic areas for journalists such as defamation, you have to take into account online publishing issues such as terms and conditions, data protection and user generated content.
Secondly, I’ve long been an advocate of conversational teaching styles (one of the reasons I teach in a coffee lounge) and this was a great example of that in practice. The presentation below is just a series of signposts – the actual session lasted 4 hours and included various tangents (some of which I’ve incorporated into this published version). Experiences in the group of students and guests ranged across broadcasting, print, photography, online publishing, academic study, and international law, and I came out of the session having learned a lot too.
I hope you can add some more points, examples, or anything I’ve missed. Here it is:
The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.
It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together – for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.
In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 