Talk About Local Unconference: a few (delayed) thoughts

Possibly a bit later than I would have hoped to have written this - I've been snowed under at work.
 
REVOLUTION. Conflict. Opportunities. Not exactly the words you expect to hear to describe a conference, particularly about a subject such as hyperlocal blogging.
But they were among the words used by speakers at the recent Talk About Local Unconference at Staffordshire University.
For those who weren't there, it was the first - hopefully of many - to debate the issues of those involved in hyperlocal websites, whether that be blogs, hyperlocal web sites and other bodies in local communities and government.

A note to start: welcome to the revolution

The reason that the Talk About Local conference has taken place at all is because of the revolution that is fundamentally reshaping the gathering, reporting, distribution and discussion of news and information in the world.
(It's a well-reported story, although the best telling of it - and the means through which news organisations may change - that I've heard is from Chris Thorpe. He's the bloke that's helping develop the Open Platform at The Guardian.)
Essentially, the world wide web which started to emerge in the early to mid 1990s is changing. Advances in web technologies mean that websites are no longer one-way sites used to project information, but can become rich forums for communities for like-minded people to share ideas and information.
Web services Facebook are reshaping the way that people do things online and how they keep in touch with people, with 300 million people using its service worldwide.
But like with any technological or cultural change, things take time. Some people adopt earlier than others, and big/bureaucratice organisations such as big companies and Governments/councils are slower to shift their focus to embrace new methods of doing things.
As with any paradigm shift from one system of doing things to another, there will be disruption which will prompt conflict between the old and new systems, the threat of extinction to the obsolete and opportunities to the new.
The key to change will be discussion.
 

The blogger

As the bulk of bloggers running hyperlocal sites at the conference would attest, there has never been a better time to set up a blog.
In recent years, blogging tools by organisations including Wordpress and Six Apart - who developed Movable Type - mean that there has been an explosion in blogging.
Technorati has indexed 133 million blogs although as the Blog Herald points out, this probably under-represents many more million bloggers in China and the Far East. Similarly, there is a growing blog community around where I live.
And there are massive opportunities for bloggers to stay niche and get rich - as described by Revision 3's David Prager.
After all, the lack of a newspaper in Lichfield prompted ex-journalist and current Staffordshire University lecturer Ross Hawkes to set up the Lichfield Blog.
It might not be driven by cash, but the site enriches the community by serving up news to 16,000 people each month who would otherwise be struggling through Google to find out what's going on where they live.
But there are barriers and points of conflict as bloggers highlighted at the conference.
You can't rely on building a blog just to draw in an audience - especially if you're looking to generate an income.
But getting successful can bring problems, particularly with regard to the law and so-called Freedom of Speech - which is in fact governed by the laws of libel and criminal laws such as the charge of Incitement to Racial Hatred.
Pits'n'Pots - a political hyperlocal site covering the Potteries - has become a darling on the scene because of its coverage focused on the city council.
When it launched at the back end of last year, the site, run by Tony Walley and Mike Rawlins, made a great play of promoting 'Freedom of Speech' and allowing free-flowing debate on issues such as the BNP. This is when www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk moderators  took down many comments posted by readers.
However, as Tony pointed out, all it took was one poster to send a copy of the BNP membership to the site for the threat of legal action to loom large.
(As a good start, journalist and blogger Steve Yelvington gives some sound advice for anyone trying to run a community online on how to go)
Just as problematic, and certainly the subject of much debate at the conference is access to information from councils and other public bodies, particularly through press offices.
You could best sum up their views with the comment: Why won't the press office at Suchandsuch City Council recognise me/us as a legitimate journalist?
Journalist and blogger Sarah Hartley highlighted the dilemma in an article in the Guardian. On one hand, you've got the community-minded blogger who wants to have the same access to information from bodies which are funded by the taxpaper.
They're not interested in spin, they just want to get a story out.
On the other, you're dealing with press offices in organisations who want to manage the flow of information - and associated message - they put out into the public domain.
Moreover, as Dan Slee notes in his post, "press officers are used to dealing with trained reporters who know where the law is drawn."
Given fears over the lack of regulation in the blogospherre, Sarah notes that  advice from the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) is to only treat accredited journalists as journalists.
Of course, the situation will change. But until it does, the only way to deal with council press officers is to keep working at the relationship.
In many ways, of course, the barriers that bloggers can face now are only those which journalists have faced and continue to face in the course of their daily work.
During my time as a business journalist, I've found myself frequently refused access to information to make a certain story work (number of job losses, size of deal etc.).
Unlike with councils, there is no right of access to any information either - beyond that available at Companies House or on the London Stock Exchange - about companies.
If a business doesn't want to talk to the media, it doesn't have to.
So how did the business desk overcome these obstacles? By working on building the relationships which allow stories to flow in the first place.
In both cases, we continued to write stories - even if we couldn't get the other side - while trying to maintain standards of factual, accurate journalism.

Council press officers / organisations

This group was the subject of more ire than support from the talks I attended, although there is a great blog post taking in the view of press officers from Dan Slee, a former journalist who now works as a press officer in the Black Country.

Journalists

This group of individuals were largely absent from the conference, yet in some ways they have the most to gain at a time when the whole industry is going through the wringer.
Everyone knows that newspapers are in decline. Fewer people are getting their news from newspapers and increasingly using the internet.
But does it logically follow that the news organisations which produce the stories, features and articles that people read are dying also? I'm not so sure, although the organisations, and the journalists they employ, may have to adapt to the change.
Three years ago I went from being the business editor of a regional newspaper and was thrown in the unknown sphere of the web.
Since then, I've learned to shoot/edit video, record audio, create Flash-based web apps as well as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and umpteen Content Management Systems for creation and presentation of information on the web.
There's no doubt that there have been certain stories I've presented, such as a singing binman, were much better told as videos rather than articles.
And it's great when I think that a Flash package that I built for Stoke's Top Talent allowed 25,000 people to cast their votes on who they wanted to see in the finals, and more to just watch the 50 finalists.
Despite that, the most important skills I've learned are those needed to tell a story well - listening, reading, asking a good question, shorthand and writing.
Given that's what every blogger has access to, do hyperlocal bloggers present a threat to the regional journalist? No, in a word. Yes, we might compete to break a story on the web, but that helps us both sharpen our skills.
Both the blogger and journalist share the same common goal: to report what's going on and make a change to what's happening.
In many ways, the future could involve more collaboration between the two parties. (There was a posting to the Guardian today discussing one way in which the two could get closer.)
For example, when I worked at the Cheadle and Tean Times, the village contacts who used to submit weekly reports for their local Rotary club or WI were also the people who were able to stand up stories picked up on the grapevine.
Of course, some could argue that the journalists will just use the bloggers as unpaid labour for digging out stories which can then be cut and pasted into the paper.
To an extent it will inevitably happen. But it should only happen in the way that the skill of a journalist is to make contact with the best people who are passionate about their communities and want to make a difference.
The blogger should be, like the source of any story, just the beginning of the reporter's work, not the end product.
It's the extra interviews, telephone calls, cross-checks that mean reported articles do invariably take longer to put together than a subjective, passionate blog posting.
 

Developers

In some sense, the presentations made by the developers at the conference presented the most exciting glimpse for me into the next step forward in the evolution of info-gathering and presenting that information to readers.
After all, the internet has already provided a fresh opportunity to look at story-telling techniques.
Three years ago, I remember being bowled over by three reports which hooked me into the potential of the internet for telling stories.
First, there was the Pentagon Strike project, which strictly isn't journalism, although it is a compelling Flash package based on conspiracy theories around the plane which crashed into the Pentagon on September 11 2001.
Then there was the Pulitzer Prize winning Final Salute or Malboro Marine packages. Both are classical pieces of broadcast journalism brought to life using sharply-recorded audio, great pictures and subtle choice of music.
Going forward, however, I think journalists will have to start embracing tools such as databases and visualisation sites such as
You've only got to look at sites such as www.openlylocal.com, www.fixmystreetcom, and www.helpmeinvestigate.com as potentially the future of journalism.
You could argue that beneath the undoubted skill of the site, all it does is go to a whole series of different council websites, pull in a whole wealth of information and then present that in a standardised way?
But isn't that in essense what newspapers have done for decades.
Possibly, the single-most impressive thing I saw at Talk About Local 09 was the http://www.bccdiy.com website, if only because it shows how just much can be achieved with an interesting idea and some technical nous.
For those who aren't aware of it, the website was built in essentially an afternoon by a group of developers using the data from Birmingham City Council's new website, built at a cost of £2.8 million.
At launch, the city council website was buggy and wasn't user-friendly.
What Stef Lewandowski did was scrape all the data from that website, and then build a new version which is simple but direct.
Rather than present a confusing array of sections and links for the user to get lost in, it presents the user with two questions: What information are you looking for? What is your postcode?
As a journalist, I can see huge potential for reporters who are able to embrace some database skills - either by learning new skills, or by collaboration - to lever out information, particularly given the Government drive to make its datasets available to the public.
As a journalist who's keen to learn, how do I go about learning these skills?
 

Conclusion

To be honest, I haven't got any conclusions. The Talk About Local 09 event presented a mass of issues and opportunities for the future of hyperlocal news, regardless of which sector people are currently involved in.
There will be challenges, but there will be rewards for those brave enough to get stuck in.
 
 

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