Everyone is always on the lookout for the next big thing on the web but over Christmas I reflected on one social network which is standing the test of time, Flickr.

The photo sharing site was launched in 2004 and Yahoo! soon snapped it up in 2005. It allows anyone to upload their photos, add detailed information and share them with the world. In the last 7 years it has grown to claim more than 51 million registered users and in August last year it claimed it hosted more than 6 billion images.

The key thing for me is that Flickr has built a smaller, niche but very engaged network of photographers – accessible to professional, amateur and wannabe professionals.

For me, Flickr is a perfect fit with the growing area of hyperlocal news sites and existing local news sites and 2012 should be the year, eight years after it started, that we re-connect and re-consider how we work with it as journalists and media organisations.

Despite the shift to mobile, multimedia and even more impressive download speeds – it is still words and pictures which drive the web. Just look at the 2011 most shared stories, it is the picture which very much makes the story and I suspect increases the ‘WOW!’ factor and makes people want to share it with their friends.

So how do you improve your Flickr offering, here’s a few examples and ideas;

Create your own group for your location, and keep at it

Some news sites have been constantly working with Flickr over the years, and are still on it doing what they do best – offering Flickr users the chance to reach a bigger audience.

The Liverpool Daily Post is a great example of this (disclosure: I work for Trinity Mirror Regionals, the parent company of the Liverpool Daily Post on their digital team). They have established a fantastic Flickr community where they set a topic every month and then users enter their photos on this theme. The best entries are then displayed on the Post’s website and also in print, with full credit and links back.

Although the paper is shifting to weekly publication, the Flickr group is something they should definitely keep going and make use of (and they will, according to William’s update to the group’s members). It fills pages, builds trust with their community and also produces some absolutely stunning photos of Liverpool.

The key to their success is the effort William, Neil, Jo, Sean and Dan put into the community. You see them liking photos, adding comments and responding to comments in the discussion board – they also take the time to connect with users of the site. This can only benefit the Post and it’s brand online.

Partner with an existing location-based group

I run a community news site – a hyperlocal news site if you must – for the city of Preston, called Blog Preston. When I started up I needed access to lots of photos, and immediately found the Preston flickr group.

I had a dilemma, I could start up another group for Blog Preston and make it clear any photos of the city uploaded would be used on the site or I could work with the existing group to use their photos.

They already had lots of members, photos and a very influential group admin called Tony Worrall. Tony has been one of the big reasons for Blog Preston’s continuing success, he is a one man image bank of Preston and in return for us promoting his Flickr group we are able to have access to a huge stock archive of brilliant photos of the Lancashire city.

You only have to look at these two brilliant images of the sunrise this morning over Brockholes and the city centre to see the benefit of this partnership.

What’s crucial is that any image used has a link back directly to that photo on Flickr, which helps promote the user and the Preston group.

If you’re a community news site I would strongly suggest partnering with an existing group, or if there is one and it is struggling – promote it and offer to get involved in running it.

Create groups around events or themes

As a media organisation we have the power of promotion, our existing promotional channels be it in print or online can be leveraged to get people involved. So I’ve been watching with interest the approach The Guardian is taking with Flickr, as well as having branded groups they’ve been increasingly creating one-off Flickr groups and curations around Bonfire night, The Shard in London and more.

It’s a cool idea, as you give your users a very clear brief for photos and are able to tap into the Flickr community – a very kind and generous one when you play it right – to have access to some absolutely stunning photos to compliment your staff photographers. Sending out a Guardian tog for a day around London to take photos of The Shard from all different locations would be expensive and time intensive, why not ask your readers, who might have half-decent cameras, to do it for you?

It’s never too late…

A lot of local media will have existing Flickr groups and it’s never too late to get them back on track. You’ll be surprised how quickly a dormant Flickr group can be brought back to life.

WalesOnline – my former site – has picked up the baton with their old Flickr group and the brilliant Andrew Wilcox is now guiding it towards a very good place. They will follow the model of offering publication in print, which still holds a lot of kudos for photographers, as a hook, and Wilco (as he’s known) is the perfect man to run the community.

The interesting thing is Wilco is not a journalist, he’s a web developer. But he’s got an interest in photography, a strong Flickr profile and the right, slightly grumpy and Welsh, mannerisms to make the community work. And it also helps that Wales is one hell of a great place to take photos.

Photos drive readers to your site

This week has seen some incredible sunsets across the UK, proper winter red glow sunsets which really have taken people’s breath away. The Manchester Evening News even live blogged and broadcast the sunset in Manchester, using the excuse that it is usually raining. It just showed how you can tap into what everyone on Twitter is talking about but offer up something great in return on your site – and with a strong Flickr group the sunsets can be made even better.

So, in 2012, maybe it’s worth instead of reading about the next big thing or how we’re all doomed, media organisations should plug back into the communities they already have or are already producing very valuable and great photos on their doorsteps. Flickr is local by its very nature, and we as media should be helping to promote and encourage more photos to be taken of local areas and subject areas.

You can find me on Flickr here, and here’s some more interesting reading about Flickr:

The official Flickr Blog | Providing insight into what is coming up on Flickr and spotlight on different photos and challenges

Flickr promises new features in 2012 | The Next Web report about product changes in 2012 for Flickr, and the challenge it faces from Instagram

Top Ten Tips for getting attention on Flickr | Useful guide from Thomas Hawk

What examples have you seen of great Flickr management? What cool ideas have you seen for using Flickr? Let us know in the comments below

Image credit of sunrise over London to pixelthing

We’ve recently been opening up our archives on WalesOnline, well pictures-wise anyway and our stats have revealed something – our readers really, really, really like looking at old photos. It doesn’t matter what they are of, places, people or events – the appetite for the past in the digital age is well and truly alive.

You only have to look at the success of websites such as Ancestry or the release of the Victorian crime files to see people have an insatiable hunger for consuming things from the past. With this in mind it wasn’t a surprise to see how well a rather simple idea did. In the South Wales Echo we did a ‘Cardiff then & now’ spread based on photos of Cardiff from yesteryear, with new photos of how the places look now. Simple. But incredibly successful.

This got me thinking, why weren’t we calling on our chief librarian more? We’re blessed with archives going back a hell of a long way in history – so anything we’re doing we should look to include the archive team in our discussions and see if there’s anything they can do.

This spawned the through the years of Charlotte Church gallery as her birthday approached, a look-back at Welsh footballing wizard Ryan Giggs’ career and shortly a whole host of archive St David’s Day celebrations.

So, should the archive/library team be honoury members of the online team? I think so. We could be doing regular ‘From the archives’ galleries and articles, get them blogging about key events in local history and much more.

Blow the dust off, fire up the archive search and see what you can discover amongst your library team. The most under-used resource in multimedia journalism?

What great examples have you seen of media organisations using their archives? Do you work in the library and wish you could do more with the website? Let me know your views in the comments below

Working the patch, an age-old skill in journalism. You might as a reporter know your patch – but how many people know you are their patch reporter? Are you tucked away on page2 in a little box with a list of other names?

We’ve re-introduced patch reporting for Cardiff and South Wales at WalesOnline and I created the map above to show where our reporters cover. The great thing about a google map is if people aren’t sure they can find their road, click, and the friendly face of their local reporter pops up.

The best thing about the map is it humanises the reporters, makes them quick and easy to find and we can display plenty of contact information. It’s better than a dull list (we also made a PDF list available to download though, in-case people or organisations wanted to print it off and stick it on a noticeboard.)

To make one you need to know who covers where, make a list of everyone’s phone number, get their mug shots, their email address’ and twitter names (if they want them on). Then use the ‘shape’ drawing tool on a standard google map to create it. Click here for a ‘how-to’.

The map proved a hit with over 1,000 views, so, after much discussion in the newsroom, we created a full Wales patch map – showing where our reporters cover across the nation. I’ve learned a lot about places I struggled to pronounce and now can probably name all our district reporters and know what they look like (being in a central newsroom like Cardiff you don’t get chance to meet everyone!).

View Wales – find your local reporter in a larger map

We also had some interesting discussions about whether to include a reporter’s twitter username as part of their contact details (if they had one of course). Some were eager to have their twitter handle included, others set up new ‘professional’ ones and others didn’t want it put on.

So, I’d encourage all newsrooms to take a few moments setting up one of these maps (patchwork quilt style) and it’s an easy thing to have embedded on the contact us section of your website to show who covers where.

What ways have you used to show who your reporters are and where they cover? Let me know in the comments below

In this time of ‘hyperlocal business models’ and ‘how the heck do we fund this journalism business’, I think I might have found a way to earn a few extra pennies. An Amazon Affiliate store.

It’s fairly basic. We create a store, on Amazon, with Preston-related products in them, and embed this on our site on a ‘Shop‘ page. People buy stuff, and we get a percentage.

I was searching on Amazon for something over Christmas and it got me thinking, how many books or products are there related to Preston? As casual search found a few. So I got a piece of paper out and brainstormed everything I thought I might be able to find on Amazon related to Preston (celebs, sports, history, DVDs, films that were shot in and around Preston etc).

I explored the Amazon Affiliate store and signed up. It was relatively easy to use but a bit clunky as the easiest way to find products is to record their ISBN/Amazon ID number, and enter these one at a time.

So, we’ve now got a shop where we don’t need to worry about receiving orders, sending out stock, worrying about delivery times. But, what we can do is drive traffic to the store by whenever we do a story about Freddie Flintoff, embedding the relevant products from our Blog Preston store in the article.

It’s not going to make us mega-bucks, the percentage isn’t massive from Amazon (about 5% of every product), but it is a new revenue stream and can help bring in some cash. I guess the next step would be to go towards what the Lichfield Blog has done and create products based around the local area e.g. VivaLichVegas t-shirts.

For all hyperlocal and niche blogs having an Amazon store is a simple and easy way to make some money, but let’s just hope it doesn’t snow again or we definitely won’t be making any percentages! I’ll report back in a few months and let you know if it’s worked or not.

What do you think? Onto a winner or a non-starter? Have you made an Amazon store? How is it going? Let me know in the comments below

Having a strong set of blogs on a media website is essential these days for being a successful one. It’s ticking those boxes of the ‘converged newsroom’ when you’ve got your reporters blogging alongside the stories they are producing – using their blogs as a way to expand on their areas of expertise. It’s also a good way of a reporter expanding on area they are passionate about.

There are numerous types of different software out there – from in-house solutions to Moveable Type – and each one has its advantages/disadvantages. Some of the biggest barriers I’ve found in discussing blogging with reporters are:

• finding the blogging software clunky to use, which puts them off because they think it’s going to take ages
• they still want to write 300-400 words when sometimes just 50 will do

I’ve recently been experimenting with Tumblr as a blogging platform. I love this blog (the one you’re reading now) and using the hosted wordpress solution – but I wanted a place to expand on my thoughts and inspired by the ever excellent Dave Lee I saw Tumblr as a way of doing that.

I wanted to keep this blog about journalism and communications but have a ‘dumping ground’ for interesting things that caught my eye, things I experienced and wanted to share. I didn’t want to mix the two.

Twitter is a good way of sharing, but sometimes you need more than 140 characters to fully get your point across.

Tumblr is perfect. Its interface is quick and easy to use – want to post a photo? Just hit the photo button. You don’t even need to have your own image, just shove a URL in from Flickr and it’ll scrape a photo to go on (just make sure you provide a click-through link to avoid rights issues). Same with videos. Same with just a link.

I like the way it’s easy to customise your layout, colour scheme and give your blog a more personal feel – while still not making it inaccessible and hard to read.

So, in busy newsrooms across the country, if Tumblr was installed as the blogging engine would we see better responses and take up? I believe so, especially on the features desks. Think about how many bands, clothes, styles, tid-bits come across the desks of feature writers in regional papers. Want a dumping ground to share your highlights? Tumblr would be perfect. That cool new band you heard the other night, a quick link to their Myspace and your content creation is done.

As John Rostron, who runs the Swn Festival in Cardiff, said to me once: “I always used to pick up the Echo, once my parents had finished with it, to find out about local bands.” Well, with less people’s parents taking a local paper, we need to make sure we can still offer the place to signpost people to what’s good in their local area.

Tumblr also has the social networking element of being able to follow someone, like a post etc. My biggest criticism of Tumblr is that it doesn’t seem to allow comments on posts? Update: You can add comments, as pointed out below in the comments on this post, by integrating DisQus. Just register with DisQus, add your site, and away you go.

Image credit to buyalex

What’s your experience with Tumblr as a blogging tool? Do you use it? Did you use it and not like it? Let me know in the comments below

But away from the pay walls, how can money be made online out of the Generation Y’s who like browsing around in their spare time? There’s three ways media organisations can make money from online. The first is mass audience, the second is niche content and the third is location.

Mass audience

Traffic. Traffic. Traffic. Some advertisers are only interested in the big numbers. They are the ones trying to build a brand and gain recognition. They want the pre-roll ads on the videos, the skyscrapers down half the damn site. They just want their name out there. Media organisations need to work to deliver big traffic to their sites through unique content, good stories and building loyal readerships. The same way they need to build readerships for their print products to prove they’ve got the reach to their advertisers.

Niche content

We’re in a world where niche interests can be satisfied like never before. Into rock climbing? You can join a club, get an app for that and join an online rock climbing network and share your tips with other rock climbers. The world is becoming more and more niche. This also means advertising is starting to splinter and get more accustomed to niche. Look at the rise of the middle-class white male cyclist, chances are he’s going to have some cash to splash on stuff and is interested in any stories involving roads, cycling, cycling championships, Tour de France etc. Media organisations need to be aware of their niches, and build on them. Build ‘clubs’ around your content, build a readership that comes back to that specific landing page and is pushed to return by interaction through email newsletters, twitter feeds, facebook fan pages and more. Maybe even use some offline marketing to get these people together for an event? Like a debate on cycling rules if we use the cycling analogy.

Location

Media organisations have always sold by location. Different editions of print products, different radio stations for different regions. Online is no different, people will always be interested in the area they are living in or from. I still glance at the pages of the Lancashire Evening Post website because I used to live in Preston. Build location-based content and you’ll build a local audience, and with online it’s a lot easier to track the location of these readers and what they like/don’t like.

If media organisations can satisfy these three targets they’ll have happy readers and happy advertisers. Get those two things and you’ll see higher revenues and potentially some happier journalists.

And a final thought, whatever happened with Johnston Press’ plans to charge for access to titles in the North East? I never heard a peep about it after it was announced.

This post originally appeared on journalism.co.uk as part of the Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists blogging ring.

Howard from Halifax advert

There’s been a lot of buzz and discussion about Johnston Press’ decision to make users pay £5 for three months access to a group of titles. If it works, everyone will do it. So, ignoring the ‘should they, shouldn’t they’ debate I’ve taken a look at what I’d be beavering away doing if I was charging people to access a news website and inspired by Howard from those old Halifax adverts, I’d be giving extra:

Give me a log-in

Basic stuff, give me a username and password and then when I log-in, track what I like. Start to personalise my experience, let me pick what I want to see when I log straight in. I want the sports feed, I don’t like politics. I want to see the photo of the day. If you’re sticking stuff behind a paywall, make use of the opportunity that brings for giving me the news that I want to see when I log-in. Don’t make me click around like a mad man trying to find it.

Send me a weekly digest

I might forget I’ve paid for your service, I did it, it didn’t cost a lot and I’ve forgotten. Send me a weekly, or if it’s a big title a daily digest, of the best content and then I’ll be clicking through, using my log-in and feeling sorry for the poor bastard who hasn’t bought his subscription. Then he’ll buy one so he’s not a step behind me anymore.

Give me premium content

Let me press an exclusive red button and get ‘extra’. Let me supersize my news coverage, let me get stuck right into the detail of a general election, let me see the extra blog, the extra map, the extra content. Don’t let the freeloader see it.

Auto renewal

Once I’m signed up, make it a direct debit. Remember my card details and I won’t even remember it’s coming out of my account every month, week, quarter or whatever. It’s just another one in the list of ‘essential services’ alongside my broadband, mobile, car insurance etc.

Upsell me

I’m paying already, but what else might I want? Learn what I like and then work with the advertisers/PRs/marketing gurus to give me stuff I want. I’m always reading about travel, maybe I like travelling? Offer me a holiday, a competition, travel stuff. I might just bite. Upsell the service itself, add bolt-ons and upgrades. There’s my bog standard access fee and then there’s archive access, there’s live streaming access, take the McDonalds approach – ‘Sir, would you like fries with that?’ instead it should be ‘Sir, would you like archive access with that? For just 50p extra a month it’s all yours’. Remember many 50ps make a bigger amount.

Ask my opinion

I might be commenting on posts, I might not, but if I’m paying for it then there’s a good chance I will care about it. Send me surveys, if you’re making changes ask me in advance. Get me involved, ask for my ideas – and you’ll be surprised what I will come up with.

Show me where the money goes

Charities do this well, they show me that if I pay money, they will build a well in Africa and stop people dying. So, what does my £5 do? Am I helping to shore up local democracy? Am I making sure that the council bigwigs aren’t screwing me out of council tax? Tell me stories of what you’ve done and keep reminding me why this £5 is the best £5 I’ve ever spent. I didn’t buy a foot long Subway, I bought a foot long of local news, information and always being in the know.

There’s loads more that could be done, but in true paywall fashion – you’ll have to pay me to find out more. The days of ‘giving it away for free’ are numbered online.

At the Talk About Local Unconference there was a lot of talk about creating a network of hyperlocal blogs. Talk About Local are doing a superb job of getting people started in blogging for their local community – but what about those people already underway or who have bigger aspirations?

I have learned through working on Blog Preston since January 2009 that there is a real thirst for community content about the place where you live. The local media is fixated on scandal, car crashes and the like and misses the community content. There is a real space and it needs to be filled.

The Talk About Local Unconference has convinced me that Blog Local can work. Our idea is to create a network of local blogs, some of them will be created under the ‘Blog [insert location]‘ brand and we will support these centrally with technical help and guidance on creating good and interesting community content. Others will be established blogs that are already happy with their technical stuff and their content, but would like to opt in to a wider network of local blogs.

We would use the powerful WordPress Multi-user platform to create this network, and be able to create powerful plug-ins for local blogs that deliver relevant local information. One thing we’ve learned from the failure of local media groups at trying to fit standard templates is that it doesn’t work, Blackpool is different to Preston, Preston is different to Harrogate and Harrogate is different to Southampton. Each of them has a different audience the the website for the ‘Blog [insert location]‘ site needs to reflect that and it also needs to take into account the skills of the person updating it. If they are better with a camera than they are with words, it needs to be more of a photojournalism blog. If they can’t take a good picture to save their life, it’s more of a wordy affair but with a design that compensates for this and keeps it interesting.

One of the struggles for anyone running a local blog is content. Not everyone who starts or wants to start up a community blog is a recent journalism graduate or unemployed graduate. They don’t have the legal training, they don’t know how to knock out 250 words into 10 minutes and they don’t often know where to look for stories. Often local blogs wither and die after a few months when they think there’s nothing left to write about. Wrong. There is always information, events, opinion, gossip, news, photos, in your local area – you just need to build a network and tap into it. Blog Local will support its network to do this and to keep producing good content.

Add to this that Blog Local is not-for-profit, so the content is driven by the community and not by shareholders and it creates an interesting concept. Taking the new technology and tools available to create a mix-mash of community blogs across the UK, producing local content and information.

Is there a business model in this? I’m not 100 per cent sure yet but I do know that over the next few months we’re going to be working with some very exciting new people to help create a network of local and community blogs that can help lift the lid on their local communities.

Image credit to Aishihik

Borrowed a copy of ‘Getting Real‘ by 37 Signals from Les Cochrane recently. It’s billed as the smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application but there are lots of lessons that can be applied to business and life in general.

The main one that they focus on is to just get on and do it. Too many times people come up with ideas and then don’t follow through, if you’re a person that delivers you’re going to succeed. This doesn’t just apply to web apps, it’s everything – if you say you’re going to do something, you damn well need to do it.

The book covers:

• how to start out and attract funding
• how to stay lean and avoid the corporate bloat
• how to prioritise and what’s really important when working on a project
• how to select what should be part of your service/application/product
• how the processes should run within your organisation
• how the organisation should be in its outlook
• how you should recruit and select staff, and what people you need
• how to design
• how to code successfully
• how to write the best words that help sell your service/product/app
• how to price and how to increase the amount of people signing up and getting involved
• how to promote your service/product/app in a web 2.0 world
• how to support people once they have your service/product/app
• how to keep the buzz going after you’ve launched

One of the key things that 37 Signals point out is that you should always hire good writers. I think this is vital in any organisation, because people who can write and speak properly will be able to communicate better – not just with customers but also internally with co-workers. A well-worded email with clear instructions is priceless, a quick conference call and good notes from it can make all the difference. Plus, when you do have people with good writing skills communicating with customers it will show. I’m convinced that sloppy grammar can sometimes lose you a sale.

The 37 Signals book is definitely worth a read, even if you’re not in the web app business, as the lessons they impart can be applied to plenty of other circumstances. The way 37 Signals run their business and their ethos, well bits of it, are what I would like to apply to Blog Local as we start out into the business world.

Image credit to Move The Cloud’s

Me presenting at Preston Tweetup

The first Preston Tweetup that I organised in March 2009 was filmed and now the edited video has appeared online. It shows how twitter users in Preston got together to discuss how the web could be used for the Preston Guild in 2012.

The Preston Guild is a big celebration that happens every 20 years in Preston, Lancashire, UK to celebrate the city, its organisations and its professions. Everyone gets involved, but the last time the Guild was celebrate – 1992 – the world was a very different place and the Internet was not as widespread as it is now.

The tweetup was hosted by myself, through Blog Preston, and had support from Stage 9 Marketing, a local marketing agency, and They Eat Culture, Preston’s arts organisation. The venue we used was the New Continental, in Preston, which has free wi-fi and great drinks.

The videos are in sequence as the night was in four parts, the introduction (from me!), the break-off groups coming up with ideas, the feeding back from each group and finally the summing up. It’s a great chance to see what happened at the Tweetup and if you’re planning to go to one, wherever it is in the world, it gives an insight into what it’s like.

Watch part one – the introduction to Preston Tweetup