Monthly Archives: September 2010
Regional papers bounce back through hyperlocal news
There is a very interesting article in todays Independent by Ian Burrel that outlines the recovery in the regional press in Britain over recent months.
Avertising revenues are up and new titles are being published. It is claimed that this is in no part due to a strong emphasis on local and hyperlocal news and surprise, surprise growing digital revenues!!
All I can say is well done to everyone involved, lets hope there is more to come.
London Neighbourhoods Online Unconference, some personal thoughts
Jason at Onionbagblog has done a very useful overview of the London Neighbourhoods Unconference at Ofcom last weekend.
I like Jason’s style and he gives the impression that a very informative and helpful event took place. I am particularly interested in how this is going to map onto the developing localism agenda.
Fwix Creates Hyperlocal News Feed To The iPad
As a user of Fwix in North East England I’m not too impressed at the moment by its coverage in my area. But I was interested to see that Techcrunch report that they have developed a hyperlocal news aggregation tool for the ipad. Lets hope it helps them successfully go global.
A local TV landscape soon?
Local TV is set to become a big issue in Britain in the next couple of years.
After the abortive IFNC (Independently Funded News Consortium) bids that the last government initiated, Jeremy Hunt the new Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport has asked Nicholas Shott, Head of UK Investment Banking at Lazard to look into the issue of local TV with the aim of DCMS to set out a local media action plan for autumn 2010.
This is on the back of the report he commissioned by Roger Parry when in opposition on the potential for local TV in the UK (as reported here in the Guardian). It all adds up to some potentially serious changes to the media landscape in the UK, particularly as it strongly fits with the bigger political issue of the Governments, more localism.
Roy Greenslade, as usual has some well informed points to make on the issue
Heres Mr Hunt announcing his thoughts on local TV and the intended relaxation the cross media ownership rules that the big players want to make it work.
NY Times to launch East Village Hyperlocal site
Lostremote reports that the NY Times is to launch another in its series of hyperlcoal sites, this time in the East Village on the 13th of September.
Interestingly this will include access to a “virtual assignment desk” providing an “editorial work flow system” that any registered user of the NY Times can access. This sounds a really interesting development and like Lostremote I look forward to seeing it in action.
Fron shovelware to scaperware
Scraperwiki are holding another event for info hackers, journalists and other interested parties in how to successfully build apps to find, collect and interpret freely available information on the web.
It’s on Friday October 15th 2010 from 9.30 am to 7.30 pm at the MadLab, 36-40 Edge Street, M4 1HN Manchester and comes on the back of similar events in Birmingham and Liverpool. Anyone interested in hyperlocal journalism could do worse than take the opportunity to familiarise themselves with these tools and techniques.
