Foursquare. Gowalla. And now Facebook Places (although at the moment this is only available if you’re an American). Location apps for mobile phones seem to be the ‘in-thing’ on the web at the moment but is there any use to journalists in them?

Twitter clearly has a use as it can help us to find out where news is breaking, connect with contacts and promote our content. The same goes for Facebook, although that seems most useful for building communities around your fan pages of your media brand.

I recently tried out Foursquare for two months and could find absolutely no use for it. It was buggy and didn’t seem to get on with my laptop. I checked in at a few places and became the mayor of my local swimming pool (yay!) and synced up my account with my Twitter. However, I found it annoying. I often forgot to check in at places or when I checked in I had absolutely nothing interesting to say. Likewise I tried out the screen where my friends were checking-in. Cool. But again no use.

I did put in it where I was reporting from, so I could say ‘Checked In at County Hall’ and then put the message ‘Covering an environmental scrutiny meeting’. But I could just post that on Twitter without bothering with Foursquare? I suppose it might reassure people that as a journalist I’m out of the office scrutinising democratic functions but how many people would really care? Although I never managed to achieve my goal of becoming the ‘Mayor of Cardiff City Hall’.

I could see tabloid journos using it if they ever befriended a celebrity who was using the service. Ordering the papparazi to the Pizza Hut where Charlotte Church was tucking into a vegetable supreme – but how many of us are going to befriend celebrities?

Location services seem more for building on your existing friendship networks rather than finding stories and seem a waste of time from a professional viewpoint for journalists.

The only use I can see for journalists is if they make a personal contact and add them. This allows them to see where the contact is and if the journalist knows where they are they could ask that contact to contribute something to a story – if, and only if, there’s something happening at that location at that exact moment. For example, if I saw a contact of mine was at the Cardiff City Stadium I could ask them to shoot some video of the fans outside the game cheering on Craig Bellamy after his winning goal. This could then turn into user-generated content for the website.

Image credit to nan palmero

So, I’ve left my Foursquare account to stagnate and I’m hoping I’m wrong. Is there a way these location-based services can be useful for journalists? Have you been using them for journalistic purposes? Let me know your views in the comments below.

It’s been three years since I was editor of the student media at the University of Central Lancashire. Blearly eyed, cold pizza and a whole lot of fun is how I remember it – but I thought I’d offer some advice for all those about to begin what will be one of the best year’s of their lives.

Being in charge of the student media is a tough role. You will be working for an average of £1.50 an hour for all the hours you do, you’ll never really be able to switch off but you will sit back one day and go ‘Shit. Yeah. That was good.’

So, here we go, here’s my far from definite guide for how to have a good year running your student media (this is general advice covering radio, newspaper, TV and online).

Don’t get too attached

You will only be there a year. Don’t get too attached to the idea of doing it. If you seek re-election, good luck. But your maximum tenure can be two years and by the end of that you’ll be ready to leave. Don’t treat each issue like a baby, as soon as you send to print you need to be thinking about the next one. Once the station shuts down for Christmas, you should be thinking about January. The team focuses on the issue or the show, you look beyond and offer something more long-term.

Listen to your team

Your volunteers are the most important thing to you. They will be the ones to pull you out of the shit. If you’ve graduated, you’re not a student anymore. You get paid money, they don’t. They are still students, you’re not. Things can change very quickly on campus, new trends, new issues and you’re not going to be involved in the same way. Be a friend to your team, have an open door, advice some life advice on stuff like money/housing/course problems.

Also remember what a wide audience will consume your media. Students aren’t just 18-year-old-beer-loving-away-from-home-for-the-first-time-freshers, they might be returning to study for a top-up degree or doing a postgraduate degree and completely focused on their career. Appeal to a wide audience and make sure your team reflects this diverse readership.

Be fearless…

You’re only there for a year, so grow some balls. Got a splash? Make it a damn good story. Go the extra mile, put in the extra two hours. Find the extra contact. Is it going to annoy someone? Then it’s probably news.

…but make friends with a law lecturer

Your team won’t respect you if you take risks and leave them exposed. Make sure all bases are covered. You are responsible for what goes on those pages or out on the web, so check the hell out of it. Make friends with a media law lecturer, ask them to informally look over anything contentious. No one wants to get sued do they? Least of all your cash strapped Students’ Union that is facing the biggest financial challenge it’s ever faced with the impending higher education cuts.

Get ready for feedback

People will be reading/listening/watching what you’re producing. Always remember that and make sure you respond. The letters page should be vibrant, don’t find yourself having to make up letters to fill it. Respond to queries, explain your decisions and defend your team. Be prepared to invite disgruntled readers into your office to discuss a story, be prepared to have a blazing row with the owner of the University book shop in-front of the rest of the team. Don’t be a wimp, make your case but if you do make a mistake there’s no harm in apologising.

You find the leads, let the team do the rest

Don’t write anything or do your own show. Hopefully you’ve put the time in previously as a reporter or show host. But, you will in your position be privy to information and contacts your team don’t have. You’ll attend meetings, get reports and other things that make good stories. Give them to your team, don’t keep everything that’s half-decent for yourself to try and build up a portfolio. You’ve got the whole paper, radio station and a lot more to run. However, if there’s an editor’s blog or column make sure you do a good job of it and keep it up-to-date and on the bleeding edge. If you speak often people get bored, if you speak occasionally but hitting the mark with what you say then people will listen.

Be a stickler

You want everything to be the best. You’ve got 12 issue, you’ve got 36 hours of programming, you’ve got 12 programmes going out on Internet TV. It might be student media but that doesn’t mean it needs to be shoddy. Pull out all the stops, don’t just nick an image from Google Images get a proper one with a proper camera. Get good kit and argue about the budget until you’re blue in the face. Check everything, spelling, facts, names. Don’t get anything wrong.

Distribute

What’s the point in producing the damn paper if no one is reading? What’s the point in broadcasting if no one is listening? Go out of your way to promote the student media. Distribute it yourself around campus, as soon as the delivery truck arrives get it out their. Give the team a bundle to take on their way to a lecture at that far off campus building (they’ll need the exercise, all student journalists end up piling on the pounds). Hassle the printers if it doesn’t arrive on time, bring delivery forward an hour. Up the print run for good issues. Push it outside the campus boundaries. Get your radio station streaming online, promote it in the uni library, push for money for a two-week FM licence. Put the website address on t-shirts.

Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!

You can never have too many volunteers. Why? Because the numbers will dwindle as the year goes on. It just will. Do talks at the beginning of the year, promote people if they are good. Encourage people. Put up posters. Create a big email list. Hold an end of year awards. Do anything and everything you can to get people involved and keep them involved.

Use the summer

The summer is quiet. If you’re going to change the design around, do it in the summer. If you want to improve the website, do it in the summer. Create a calendar and put key events in it. Spend the summer meeting with contacts who will give you stories. When the crunch time arrives in September you want to be so prepared so you know exactly how the next 12 weeks are going to play. If you sit around doing nothing during the summer you will have a rubbish year.

There’s some advice, I’m sure there’s plenty more. I’m certainly not saying I was the best student media editor, I made plenty of mistakes, dodgy calls and there’s so much more I could have done but I do know our work won awards and we caused quite a stir with some stories.

Image credit to makeyougohmm

If you’ve got advice for student media editors, memories from your time in student media or you’re about to start a year running student media and have questions then leave your comments below

Paul Bradshaw profiled me and my experiences as part of his ‘New Online Journalists’ series and I got a very complimentary comment from Duncan Higgitt who runs WalesHome about what I’m doing at Media Wales.

Then I was featured on the journalism.co.uk ‘J-List’. People nominate journalists who are out there doing it and innovating. I was chuffed to be featured and it’ll definitely be the only time I’m alongside Ian Hislop! Thanks to whoever nominated me.

The Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists blog ring has re-started, so I’ll be imparting some journalism related blogging over there. It’s well worth checking out and seeing what the young minds in journalism are saying.

I’ve also been interviewed recently on the World Update show on the BBC World Service about local journalism and hyperlocal websites, skip to 34 minutes to hear it.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has ever helped me out, trained me, encouraged me and worked with me. Now, back to doing journalism…

Got up ridiculously early on Friday 16th July to head up the motorways, with Joni Alexander in tow, to take part in the ScraperWiki Hacks and Hackers event in Liverpool.

Despite feeling as though we’d stumbled into the middle of a Liverpool Daily Post & Echo school outing, we soon found ourselves immersed in trying to use data to tell a story and do something useful with it.

Media organisations have access to, possess and make use of a lot of data. But how much they make use of it, is limited. The Guardian is certainly leading the way with the DataBlog, to give you the numbers behind the headlines but particularly in regional and local journalism there isn’t a lot of spewing out of data. That’s mainly because there just aren’t the resources or the time.

However, we enlisted the help of master programmer Julian Todd, the man behind The Straight Choice, to get us up and running. Our team (me, Julian, Joni and Jo Kelly) had a big interest in local information, so we trawled through the Liverpool Echo’s website in the districts section. Huyton. Toxteth. These are the places where our readers live and what do they care about? With talk of public sector cuts and ‘frontline services’ being protected we thought it would be interesting to show how scraping data could help expose any cuts to ‘frontline services’. So ‘Plod Watch’ was born – complete with a rather rubbish hand drawn logo.

We scraped the data from the Merseyside Police website about PCSOs and PCs. We were able to pull contact information for each officer and a photo of them as well. We then set about attaching the Merseyside Police areas to the Liverpool Echo’s areas. Very different as we discovered.

Eventually we came up with a page that showed all the officers who policed that Liverpool Echo district. Now the clever bit. Everytime Merseyside Police update their website and remove an officer, a big red X will appear across that officer’s face and an email will be sent to the journalist who covers the patch to find out why. Officer promoted? Officer left for better things? Or have the ConDem cuts come swinging their way into a frontline service?

We also scraped the Echo’s website itself to show the story count in a graph for the district. This could then be filtered down to show the story count for crime stories in the Echo website. We could also look at embedding the faces of police officers in the relevant district pages to as a ‘your local police’ widget allowing people to click through directly to their local officers. No more the faceless, car driving, bobby. They’d be on the virtual beat.

The day itself showed some amazing things could be done with data, and showed how when programmers/developers are paired with journalists they can do some great things. It reminded me though that despite all this great data, you still need journalistic minds to interrogate it and find the stories and pick out what’s important to people.

So, keep your eyes peeled as Plod Watch might be coming to a local newspaper website near you.

You can read some great write ups about the day from Alison Gow and Mike Nolan

How do you or would you use data? Have you seen any examples of regional/local websites publishing data? Let me know in the comments below

Image credit to guinavere

The Freedom of Information Act was great for journalism, opening up a world of information on public authorities and definitely very useful when it comes to squirreling away stories (getting stories ready ahead of a holiday period such as Christmas).

While I don’t dispute the great stories that come from FOI requests, just see David Higgerson’s weekly round-up ‘FOI Friday’ for some superb stories across the UK media, it’s worth remembering what can come from sifting through council documents that often contain data as controversial as that in FOI requests – it’s just not as straight forward to find.

There’s a few ways you can find stories from council documents:

- Scrutiny committee papers

- Executive business meetings

- Councillor’s questions

Scrutiny committee papers

Most councils have specific committees for certain topics, these range in bigger local authorities to extensive meetings delivering in-depth reports on subjects such as transport, education and social services. The smaller the council, the less the number of scrutiny committees but they produce a phenomenal amount of paperwork. However, in amongst all the long-windedness and acronyms you’ll find things like the number of rough sleepers increasing on the streets or how many restaurants in the city will have ‘no stars’ in a new hygiene rating system.

You’ll also find at the scrutiny committee meetings themselves senior council staff will give presentations to councillors, these normally include Powerpoint presentations and sometimes contain extra data and information that’s not in the report.

You may find special scrutiny committees setup for certain projects, e.g. city centre redevelopment, so it’s worth keeping an eye on these. Each committee will have a councillor who acts as chairperson, it’s worth getting to know them as they can often provide clarity or explanation on certain points, plus give quotes about the work of the committee.

Plus, don’t forget that councillors themselves may ask questions and from this extra information may come to light (Note: some councillors ask insightful questions, or challenging questions, others are downright useless. But that’s democracy, we elect not appoint)

To get hold of scrutiny papers you can check the council website or a lot of local authorities have a scrutiny officer (sometimes there will be separate officers for each committee) and they will be able to provide papers. Don’t be afraid to call council staff to ask for a copy of Powerpoint presentations or to ask for explanation of acronyms in reports.

Just a note, journalists can’t ask questions at scrutiny committee meetings – but there’s usually some comfort breaks  so you can nip in and ask questions of individuals then.

Executive business meetings

A small body of councillors will sit on the executive, they are the leader, deputy leader and portfolio leaders in the council (people in charge of transport, environment and other large areas that the council operates in). You’ll find lots of reports going to the executive and these normally involve more forward-thinking projects and changes, rather than reflective reports. The meetings themselves won’t normally be that insightful as the executive are normally all wearing the same political colours, but giving community and pressure groups a heads up on the content of some executive reports will give you a good story.

Executive business reports are normally published on the Council website in advance of the meeting, and the clerk of the council should be able to provide hard copies. A lot of executive council members have PAs who will be able to provide copies of portfolio specific documents.

Councillor’s questions

At full council meetings (held monthly), councillors have the opportunity to ask questions of the executive. These are usually quicker than Freedom of Information requests and the executive are hard placed to refuse a question from a fellow councillor. It’s worth making contact with those councillors who ask the most questions and get them to let you know what they will be asking in advance so you can prepare for the answer. The responses to the questions are always published, split by portfolio area (e.g. transport, education), normally at the council meeting and sometimes a few hours before – so it’s always worth having a copy.

The clerk of the council will be the person to see about getting a copy of the council questions.

Keeping abreast of it all

Setup folders on your computer, save the PDFs of reports into scrutiny specific folders and label them by year/month so you can quickly go back and find archive copies. Don’t rely on the Council website archive. Also pick up hard copies at the meetings, as sometimes there are additional reports, charts or pages. You can never have too much information.

Subscribe to Openly Local RSS updates or if the Council website allows it, their RSS updates, to alert you to new documents or meetings.

Pick up the phone and keep in touch with the chairs of scrutiny committees, they’ll learn that you’re interested and let you know when interesting information is coming up. By making contact with scrutiny officers and staff members, you’ll find they might flag up documents for you as well. Opposition and independent councillors might also alert you to questions they are asking of full council or in scrutiny committees.

There’s a great resource over on WikiSplash for budding journalists and hyperlocal sites about covering local authorities, including explanations of structures and committees etc.

Where Freedom of Information comes in…

Sometimes figures in executive reports or scrutiny committee summaries might give you a sniff of a story that an FOI request can help build into something bigger. You might find parts of reports withheld, or numbers blanked out. This is where FOI comes in, go for those numbers and your story based on the scrutiny report can then have a follow-up.

So, while the 78-page report on the future of adult care in your city might not look like the most enthralling read – you can be guaranteed there will be figures, comments and questions in there that your readers will want to know about. The meeting itself might spark debate, pressure groups may become involved and then follow-up questions at council meetings will provide extra insight. When the report comes to the executive for a decision, you will have depth, arguments on both sides and a good, solid, story.

How do you go about covering Council information? Any tips? What’s the best information you’ve dug out of a council report? Add your thoughts in the comments below.

Image credit to sonrisa electrica on Flickr

Here’s the full story as the former Lord Mayor cranks up the heat on supermarket giant Sainsbury’s

Got any Council meeting crackers? What is the juiciest economic and culture scrutiny committee you’ve covered? Let me know below.

However, the stories about a new block of flats or a new air quality management area aren’t always the most exciting. So, how do you spice them up a little? The web allows us to quickly and easily add maps into our stories to give a sense of scale for readers.

Recently Cardiff Council declared a section of a busy road running through the city as an ‘Air Quality Management Area’. This means that the levels of toxic fumes are above the recommended amount. However, this road is a large one and trying to describe the exact area is difficult. Buried away in the documents is a map of the area, but it’s not got local landmarks on it to help people make sense of it.

Embedded below is a quick google map I added to the story to show the area and also the amount of people who live in the affected area. It localises the story, humanises it and adds context. Plus it will hold the attention of the reader on the story page for longer.

View Stephenson Court Air Quality Management Area in a larger map

How to make a google map and embed in your story

1. First of all get hold of the document from the Council, be it the planning application or scrutiny committee report. Find the map. Get it clear in your head where this area is, and if you’re not sure check the boundaries of the area. There’s nothing worse than an incorrect map.

2. Sign up for a Google account. Easy to do, once you have a Google account you can then use their Google map software.

3. Click on Maps in the Google top bar, and then click My Maps. Hit ‘Create new map’ and give it a title e.g. Newport Road Air Quality Management Area and write a short description.

4. You can then create points on the map, markers, and shaded areas or draw lines. The image above shows what’s available to you when creating the map. Think about the best way to display the information you’ve got, if it’s a series of locations you’ll want to use markets. If it’s a new traffic route, you’ll want to draw lines. If it involves zones or areas you’ll want to create shaded areas. Some maps may use all of those tools, for example the Air Quality Management Area includes a shaded area and markers.

5. When adding areas/markets make sure you include a title for each of them and some added information e.g. don’t just put ‘Marker 1′ make sure it says ‘High Cross’ and in the description ‘High Cross will be the main terminal for the new bus station’.

6. Once you’ve added all the information, click the ‘Link’ option and you’ll then be able to get an embed code. This allows you to put the map into your story, so people can see the map while reading the story. When you click the ‘Link’ option you’ll see two bits of code and an option to say ‘Customise’, click this and a screen will pop-up and allow you to edit the size of your map. Plus very importantly where it is centered and the amount of zoom. For council stories the zoom in on maps is likely to be very high, as they relate to a specific area – there’s no point showing the whole of the UK in a google map that’s about a street in Nottingham.

7. Get the code and embed it into the HTML part of your content management system. You may need to ask your technical team for the best way to embed Google Maps, you may need to request it is ‘white listed’ as a widget, or you may be able to access the HTML code for stories. Either way, check with them the best way. Make sure the map is the width of the story – just as if you were putting a photo in. Also, include a title above your map so that if it doesn’t display – people at least understand it’s there. Something like ‘View a map of the new traffic layout for Reading’ and make the ‘view a map’ a link to the Google map itself (you can grab a http://www…. link to the actual map by clicking that ‘Link’ button in the Google map options).

There you go, you’ve added a Google map to your story and helped put it into context for your readers. It’s also a timeless piece of content, so you can re-embed it if you run a similar  or follow-up story.

Here’s some other examples of maps being used in local reporting to good effect: YourPonty does a good planning application round-up map and Blog Preston used a map to show the location of old railway tunnels that run under the city.

Do you use Google Maps as part of your reporting? Got some examples of excellent Google Maps that you’ve seen on news websites? Let me know in the comments below.

I was recently away from work for a few days, some lieu days needed taking (use them or lose them as they say) and the combination of a Bank Holiday and the chance to visit the girlfriend back up in the North of England was too good a chance to miss.

So, I returned to my desk the other day and found an over-flowing inbox, many missed calls, voicemail messages, twitter messages, an RSS reader full to the brim. I felt a bit overwhelmed by it all.

I’m a pretty organised person, I use Remember The Milk for my tasks, I’m good at responding to emails and phone calls and I’m generally good at not forgetting stuff. But how do journalists deal with the information overload? How can we sift through everything when we come back? Especially when your role is as someone in the community that people want to speak to.

This post from Chris Brogan, ‘Your Blog Is Not Your Job‘ made me think, with the advent of social media and easy communication tools – it seems to be becoming even harder for a journalist to take a break.

What tips have you got for coming back off holiday and dealing with the deluge? How do you sift through everything and decide what to do first?

Image credit to dylanroscover

Hyperlocal blogs are all about location and are generally run by people who live in the area they seek to serve. But what happens when you’ve built up a local blog and move away from the area?

I don’t think many of us would stay in an area just to keep up a local blog. We have relationships, job opportunities or other reasons for moving to pastures new. Building up a hyperlocal site takes time and dedication; you build a community around your content and, to a certain extent, yourself, but what if you’re not there?

To read the full post head on over to HyperlocalBlogger.com

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?