When hyperlocal gets too local?
Posted: May 5th, 2010 | Author: Ed Walker | Filed under: Journalism | Tags: hyperlocal, hyperlocal reporting, pact meetings, reporting | 5 Comments »Been reporting on a lot of PACT meetings in the last few months. These are ‘Partners and Communities Together’ meetings, where the local residents come together in an area and raise issues with local police and councillors.
At one meeting I went to there were a group of residents from a particular group of houses in Cardiff. They complained about youth annoyance, a problem that is regularly raised at PACT meetings across the city. The Police made this group of houses one of their PACT priorities, along with other problems in the area. If something is a PACT priority then this means extra patrols will take place and resources are put into trying to stop the problem.
This issue was a big talking point at the meeting, and residents gave quotes about the particular problems they’d been having.
I wrote up an article for yourCardiff about the PACT meeting and led with the line on the youth annoyance at this particular group of houses. I included the name of these particular houses (not the houses numbers, but the overall name for that area of housing, such as Meadow Close, Finlay Estate).
I received an email from a resident of said housing area, complaining that they had been unable to sell their house due to the article. Apparently the prospective buyer had read the article and decided against the purchase.
I stood by the article, but agreed to change the name of the housing area to a more generic area name in the headline. The article was riding high in Google for the specific housing area name, because there was little else published about the area.
I also offered to add a quote from the person complaining into the article to offer an alternative viewpoint to living in the housing area.
This is an area that could cause problems in the future as hyperlocal sites populate niche and very local search terms. As far as I was concerned, I was at a public meeting which helps set policing priorities and I have a duty to report what happened at that meeting and let the public know what the priorities are for the local police.
What do you think? Can hyperlocal reporting get too local? Have you had a similar problem when reporting and what did you do?
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I would stand by the article, just as you have.
You’d be selling yourself short if you started reporting with no real specifics. The seller lives in a dodgey area, simple as. Any buyer would be able to see this when viewing, regardless of if they’d read yourCardiff or not.
Keep doing what you’re doing. You know in your heart that you made the right call.
I had a similar issue with a story about a nasty arson attack in a block of flats.
The people in the neighbouring flat to the arson target had helped to rescue the targeted family, but after the trial wanted to move away to get over their experience.
They said that they couldn’t sell their flat because prospective buyers Googled the name of the block and saw our story with all the awful details of what had happened.
I was reluctant to interfere with the integrity of our archive (though the Met police agreed straight away to edit the account of events on their site!) but neither did I want to prolong the agony of people who’d been commended by the judge for their bravery.
In the end the solution was that I agreed to prevent Google from indexing that particular page (using robots.txt) for at least 6 months. People could still find the story by browsing our archive but not Googling.
I made no long term commitment to keep this restriction in place, but it seemed to satisfy all parties.
@Squire Thanks for the support buddy
@ James Appreciate you sharing that experience. Interesting that you blocked Google from indexing the page, sounds like a sensible idea.
Was it wise for James Hatts to have blocked Google from indexing his news article. What happened to freedom of information?
Surely it’s up to the prospective buyer to make an informed decision – in this case the arson attack was targeted at the occupiers, it didn’t happen randomly in the flats because it was a bad area (maybe it was but that’s besides the point).
It comes down to the ethics of the web – should you really hush things up to suit one person or another?
As for Ed’s article, fair enough. If the prospective owners were switched on enough to check the internet for details of their possible new residential area, good for them. They had a right to know about it.