local_news - Yule Heibel on Diigo

Open forum: Journalism students lead way

Terrific article by Neil Henry, professor and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, about the J-School's initiatives around local news reporting. Focusing on Linjun Fan's success with Albany Today (albanytoday.org), Henry explains how the students cover local news and use cutting edge multimedia tools.
QUOTE
For nearly every story over the next two years, Linjun was first on the scene, using the most highly advanced digital tools to file her work to her site from all over town.

Most of the time she was the only reporter at any of the events she covered, a stark reality shared by most of her classmates in their own coverage of places as varied as El Cerrito, Emeryville, and West Oakland.
(...)
Today, as they learn multimedia and community-based journalism, so do all of our students practice it, providing fresh content throughout the year to our other thriving digital news sites, Oakland North (oaklandnorth.net) and Mission Loc@l (missionlocal.org), which won a national award for Internet excellence recently for its coverage of San Francisco's Mission District.

And we continue to grow. In August we will launch a new digital news site devoted to the people of Richmond.
(...)
We want to partner with other local sites run by people similarly committed to covering Bay Area communities. We envision legions of small businesses and other potential advertisers in the Bay Area finding tremendous new audiences through these ties. We are filled with excitement and purpose, fueled by the idealism and dedication of young students who increasingly are showing the way.
UNQUOTE

Tags: local_news, uc_berkeley, journalism on 2009-05-16 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Ignite Show: Monica Guzman on Being an Awesome News Commenter - O'Reilly Radar

Fabulous short video clip of Monica Guzman explaining how to be an awesome news commenter

Tags: local_news, blogging, business_model, newspapers, ignite, seattle, monica_guzman, news, o'reilly on 2009-04-18 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Everyblock's Dilemma: How Do You Open Source Your Entire Site and Survive? - O'Reilly Radar

Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Radar) ponders Adrian Holovaty's announcement that Everyblock will be opensource/ available. Some interesting comment responses.

Tags: everyblock, local_news, business_model, open_source, adrian_holovaty on 2009-02-03 and saved by 6 people -All Annotations (2) -About

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DIYcity

John Geraci's new project, DIY city. Well worth checking out: its aim is to figure out how we might use social and mobile apps to remake (or at least help) the city.

As Geraci puts it, "DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them."

Looking forward to seeing more from this.

Tags: diycity, john_geraci, local_government, local_news, cities on 2008-10-29 and saved by 8 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Voices From the Suburban Blogosphere, by Bob Tedeschi - NYTimes.com

Article that chronicles the role of blogging in the creation of new hyper local / local news eco-systems.
QUOTE:
For readers, the blogs are providing news in ways unseen in traditional local news media.
(...)
Like other journalists who run news sites, Paul Bass, New Haven Independent’s editor, does not consider himself a blogger.

“We’re a news site,” Mr. Bass said.

To underscore the difference, Mr. Bass said the site has three full-time reporters and one part-time reporter, all paid for by $185,000 in grants, corporate sponsorships and private donations. The site’s coverage, he added, helped remove a city budget director, change city towing policies and shame board of education members into better attendance, after it publicized the fact that the board’s truancy dwarfed that of city students.

“A lot of neighborhood boards weren’t covered until we came around, so we’re just showing up,” Mr. Bass said. “That’s the promise of hyperlocal journalism, as opposed to blogging.”
UNQUOTE

Tags: nyt, blogging, hyper_local, local_news, placeblogging on 2008-08-12 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Reflections of a Newsosaur: Getting local coverage in gear

Wow, lots of excellent suggestions in this blog post, and nice discussion of how the newspapers aren't covering the local news AT ALL.

Tags: newsosaur, local_news, newspapers, business_model on 2008-08-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Denver metros can't (or won't) take the steps necessary to report the news in their own backyards. And local news is the only thing they have to sell.
I can't get local news online.
I define "local" news as the type we use to see in zone sections.
We filled them with all the stuff that readers were interested in but couldn't find anyplace else: births, deaths, divorces, marriages, anniversaries, engagements, school-lunch menus, school calendars, zoning hearings, local city council meetings and meetings of the subcommittees, school news, lots of prep sports, features and “business of the week” profiles. We crammed in as much as possible. It was all relevant to readers because it happened in their neighborhoods or suburbs.
Zone sections were an invention of the ad departments, which were convinced that if you offered a small business an ad that didn't have to go ROP, they would buy in.
The sections fell into disfavor and disappeared – and all the good LOCAL stuff that readers wanted also disappeared.
To the credit of the Post and Rocky, they have tried some zoning (both print and Web) using “citizen” journalists, but the stories are what you’d expect: warm and fuzzy feature stories.
So, if I don't get my national and international news from the Post, and the paper makes no attempt to cover anything about where I live and work, then why should I subscribe to a newspaper that is not relevant to my life?

It gets worse. The Rocky Mountain News, the Post’s partner in the Denver joint-operating agency, pretty much hews to the same line as the Post in regard to what gets covered. I read the same stories in both newspapers.
I'd hate to be a newspaper editor today, but if I were. . .

Instead of spending time bemoaning how my owners are going to kill my paper, I'd make real sure that the people on my staff were covering news relevant to the communities where subscribers live.

I'd fire a third of the editors and convert another third of them to being reporters and give them a laptop. I'd send all my reporters home with a laptop. I would tell each of them his beat is now a circle with a radius of 12 blocks and the center of the circle is his house. I want to know everything that happens within those 12 blocks.
What do I do with all this news? Put it on my web site as a zone section.

reportonbusiness.com: 'Social networking for social change'

marketing / business strategies for website, recurring revenue stream tips

Tags: globeandmail, socialnetworks, socialjustice, business, local_news, revenue on 2008-08-05 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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outside.in » The outside.in Guide to Great Local Blogging

Chrysanthe Tenentes of outside.in put together a useful "guide to great local blogging" in 6 easy-to-follow points.

Tags: outside.in, hyper_local, local_news, blogging on 2008-08-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Go where big media doesn’t. Nothing is too local.
Be as specific as possible when talking about places. Give them accurate names
Connect with your neighbors and other local bloggers. Share ideas with other bloggers and leave comments on their site.
Post early and often, or at least regularly.
Be timely. Break stories. You can cover news way before local media sources pick up on stories.
Tag your posts. Use relevant subject, place and (most importantly!) location tags so that your content is easily searchable and identifiable.
When you write about local issues, places or people, tag with the most specific geographic information (address is best, but use a zip code or neighborhood name if your post is about a more general area).
Use your stats to your advantage

…My heart’s in Accra » The changing newsroom: good, bad and ugly

Ethan Zuckerman on the forces at work in the changing newsroom.

Tags: ethan_zuckerman, newspapers, local_news on 2008-07-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.ethanzuckerman.com

Geography, social media and breakfast - Feb. 29, 2008

Must-read article on how "combining social networks with geographic information was one of the big ideas at a gathering this week of uber-techies and media digirati in New York." (2/29/08)

Tags: local_news, socialmedia, socialnetworks, jeff_pulver, meet_ups on 2008-06-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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YouTube - Final Cut#2: West Seattle Blog

- great video, some interesting info.

Tags: seattle, youtube, local_news, blogs, bloggers, west_seattle_blog, hyper_local on 2008-06-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Crosscut Seattle - Neighborhood blogs: the mom-and-pop news business

- note the ref to the "instant journalist" blogging software: this could be really useful for setting up a MC blog...??

Tags: crosscut, local_news, blogs, hyper_local, seattle, neighbourhoods on 2008-06-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (p.2) (MIT Technology Review)

P.2 of Kate Green's "the Future of Mobile Social Networking" - fascinating stuff.

Tags: mit_techreview, local_news, location_based_reminders, locative_media, mobile_city, mobile_muse on 2008-06-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (MIT Technology Review)

"IPhone users will soon be able to enjoy Whrrl, software that combines activity recommendations with real-time location data."

This sounds very intriguing...

Tags: location_based_reminders, locative_media, mobile_technology, mobile_city, mit_techreview, local_news on 2008-06-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.technologyreview.com

The software enables something Pelago's chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone's map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user's friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.

"If you think about your day-to-day life and how you discover things around you and places to go, to a great extent the source of that information is your friends," Vengroff says. With Whrrl, a user can "look through the eyes of friends and see the places they find compelling." The software begins with the user's position on the iPhone's map and indicates a smattering of nearby establishments. If the user's friends have visited and rated these places, the software indicates that as well. The map also shows the positions of nearby friends who have enabled a feature that lets them be seen by others.
Whrrl may turn out to be the leading edge of a wave of new location-based applications. "I think we're going to see a lot of new players showing up in this space," says Kurt Partridge, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center who works on a similar project called Magitti. "Part of the reason," he says, "is the universal availability of GPS or access to location, which hasn't been available to application writers before." The iPhone and Nokia's N95 phone are two examples of phones that provide location data to computer programmers. Google's forthcoming Android mobile operating system may also help push location-based applications onto the market.
Whrrl, which can also be downloaded onto BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, and Nokia N95 smart phones, is commonly compared to both types of service. But it differs from either in that it combines aspects of both. In addition, Vengroff explains, Whrrl has collected details on establishments in 17 cities, which allows the service to provide fine-tuned local search, letting the user narrow down the hunt for, say, a café to one that has outdoor seating and vegetarian options and is recommended by at least one friend.

A river of news — that actually flows (warning: if you’re a news junkie, don’t try this) (rexblog.com: Rex Hammock’s weblog)

Very cool new application (Adobe Air-based) -- must check out.

Tags: local_news, rexblog, aggregators on 2008-05-18 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.rexblog.com

Site-Specific

4culture and other arts orgs in Seattle / King County have teamed up to create an online site where you can find out what's going on in the arts, site-specifically, so to speak. They have a forum (albeit still under construction), but the Schedule part seems functional, and has an "attend this" feature -- quite cool.

Tags: sitespecific, seattle, 4culture, local_news on 2008-04-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.sitespecificarts.org

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My Essential Twitter Tools

Via Tris Hussey; blog post by Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategist, SF Bay Area: listing of 7 different Twitter tools/ apps. "TwitterLocal" is particularly interesting.

Tags: local_news, tools, twitter, apps, web2.0 on 2008-04-06 and saved by 56 people -All Annotations (7) -About

more fromwww.web-strategist.com

Community Platforms | DavidCrow.ca

Found this in Mark Lise's blog -- useful compilation of different apps for this, and comment about how it's a trend.

Tags: aggregators, community_platforms, local_news on 2008-04-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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