Hull Daily Mail launches ‘community conversation’ site

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 January 2008 at 08:00
Tags: Associated Northcliffe Digital, Hull Daily Mail, geotagging, hyperlocal

The Hull Daily Mail has launched an user-generated local web site that incorporates a number of social media features and could, if successful, be rolled out across Northcliffe’s regional newspapers.

The site, ThisisYourMail, combines functionality found on social bookmarking and social networking sites with mapping and geographically-localised of content.

Hull Daily Mail editor John Meehan told Press Gazette: “I wouldn’t describe it as citizen journalism or as social networking. There are elements of it but we needed another description and we have coined the phrase community conversation.”

Registered users of the site can select up to seven locations from a list of towns and other areas in the region, and can then submit text or pictures about those places. This section of the site, called YourPatch, will also be seeded with stories from the main Hull Daily Mail site, ThisisHullandEastRiding. The resulting selection of locally-relevant items will be displayed on a Google Map.

Most of the site, however, will consist exclusively of user-submitted content. In the “YourSay” open forum section on the site, users can add text or images and tag them with keywords.

Users can also form public groups with other users with similar interests (in a section called AllYours) or private groups with their that can only be accessed by invited friends or family members (YourFamily).

Throughout the sections, each submitted item has its own comment thread and a voting tool to allow users rate the quality of other users’ submissions.

Northcliffe Media content strategy director Robert Hardie said the site was the outcome of a new approach within the company to encourage local newspaper centres to innovate new digital products that could be rolled out across the group if they succeed locally

“We are more focused on empowering editors to develop ideas that, if they are successful, can be rolled out across Northcliffe,” Hardie told Press Gazette. “We can’t be afraid to fail.”

The site, which aims to attract around 12,000 monthly unique users in its first year, was built entirely by local developers and will be managed by Hull Daily Mail team, but has been designed so that it can be adapted to other sites in the future.

Because it is a completely open forum, ThisisYourMail will allow readers to raise local issues even where the paper has decided not to cover them, Hardie explained.

Often, he said, editors had found that the most commented-upon local issues in their communities were not the ones they had devoted the most coverage to.

“It represents a shift in the balance of power between the publisher and the reader,” he said.

More Southside hyperlocal websites planned for Glasgow

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 January 2008 at 10:02
Tags: Drupal, Scotland, Southside Media, hyperlocal

Southside Media, a not-for-profit citizen media project in Glasgow, is planning to launch five hyperlocal websites covering the G41 and G42, G5, G44 and G45 postcodes of the city, AllmediaScotland reports.

Since 2005, the company has published newspapers for the G41 and G42 postcodes. Drupal-powered web sites are live for those two postcodes.

Last July, the company launched free glossy magazines in the Bearsden and Milngavie districts of the city. The paid-for G41 newspaper has also branched out into podcasting.

News values in hyperlocal journalism

Posted by Martin Stabe on 8 November 2007 at 10:50
Tags: Outside.in, geotagging, hyperlocal, localisation, personalisation

In hyperlocal news, one reader’s banality is another’s vital intelligence.

Writing on the first anniversary of his geotagging and hyperlocal news project Outside.in, Steven Berlin Johnson provides a great annecdote about how hyperlocal news coupled with geotagging can create enormous value for readers, even where individual pieces of information available may seem trivial to users who live just a little bit further away.

In the course of some maintainance work, a friend discovered that the foundation of their 19th-century house was compromised. After some emergency work an engineer advised that the building temporarily stabilized — assuming that there were no abnormal vibrations or earthquakes in the vicinity. A few months later, the owner of the house heard through neighbourhood gossip that the city was about to stard a major sewage pipe replacement project on their street — a jackhammer-intensive process that would have resulted in “abnormal vibrations” for weeks.

“What I think is so instructive in this sequence of events is the news value of that information about the city’s construction plans for the street,” Johnson writes.

“For my friends, that little nugget of information was arguably the single most vital headline they could have possibly read that week, far more important than anything going on in Iraq, or in the U.S. campaign season, much less in Britney Spears’ custody battle,” he adds.

The problem for hyperlocal news sites, Johnson continues, is the “Pothole Paradox” — street repairs on your own road are interesting to you, but “news about a pothole repair just five blocks from your street is the least interesting thing you could possibly imagine.”

The whole essay is worth reading for anyone interested in the importance of news personalisation and localisation.

@Newstec: Chicago Sun-Times to expand hyperlocal offering

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 June 2007 at 12:37
Tags: Chicago Sun-Times, hyperlocal

The Chicago Sun-Times is planning to “aggressively roll out” between 20 and 30 hyperlocal web sites in suburban Chicago by end of the 4th quarter of this year.

The Sun-Times has been running its NeighbourhoodCircle.com hyperlocal sites in the Chicago suburbs of Mongomergy, Oswego and Yorkville for just over three months.

The areas had been picked as high-growth areas where house-building was happening faster than community-building, with the hope of giving users a way of developing communities online that do not yet exist offline, Sun-Times’ senior director of new media operations John Cary told the Newstec conference in Brighton. The three sites are test-beds for the Sun-Times’ theories of community development, Cary said.

Cary said citizen participation exists in all parts of the sites’ news gathering process, slowly creating community and loyalty to the brand. Schools, churches, clubs and local politicians have all been given areas on the site to provide information about their activities. Initially, these sections were seeded by Sun-Times’ journalists before being turned over go to the groups. However, Cary said, all the sections are edited by the three three Sun-Times journalists who administer the sites before being published.

The sites aim to increase loyalty to the Sun-Times brand and create a new platform for local classified advertising.

Bank Holiday catchup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2007 at 15:11
Tags: Blogs, Business 2.0, Die Welt, Outside.in, Photography, Santa Barbara News-Press, Santa Barbara Newsroom, The Register, Washington Post, hyperlocal

Best Easter-related wacky headline over the Bank Holiday perdiod goes to tech web site The Register, which graced RSS feeds with “Godless North Korean commies ate my monster rabbits“.

Other things we learned over the past four days include:

• Journalists at the Business 2.0 received their first blog bonuses. Since late last year, editor Josh Quittner has required reporters to blog at the monthly technology business magazine, but also announced that they would earn a chunck of the additional revenue generated by their blogs. The top earners in Quittner’s incentive scheme took home “several thousand” dollars. Others received less than $100 and a suggestion that it might be a good idea to change their blog’s topic.
• ACPO guidelines on the treatment of photojournalists that currently apply in London are to be extended nationwide, according to Amateur Photographer.
• Germany’s Die Welt went web-first earlier in the year. New figures show its web traffic up 40 per cent — month-on-month.
• Journalists sacked from the Santa Barbara News-Press in California have started a rival local news web site, the Santa Barbara Newsroom. Other online hacks are underwhelmed with the site’s riveting headlines like “Measure D Vote Could Impact County’s Share of Bond Money”.

Also worth reading:

• Wharton analysis of WashingtonPost.com. To the business school academics, the site’s success raises more qustions than it answers, because it generates 14.5% of total ad revenue. “Washingtonpost.com … is an enthusiastic tail on a very large dog,” they argue.

  (Update: The report also reveals that Washingtonpost.com is set to launch social networking functions later this spring. Readers will be able to set up their own pages and possibly upload their own audio and video at some point in the future.)

• Steve Outing’s look at hyperlocal news models, particularly the ideas underlying Ouside.in.