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

Just thought I’d flag up this video from the Media Trust, which gives an overview of Blog Preston.

The site was started by myself in January 2009 as a place for news and information about Preston, after the Preston Citizen (weekly paper) withdrew from the city.

Joseph Stashko is co-editor of the site and gives an insight into what his role involves, how we live blogged the general election, cover stories and much more.

It’s worth a watch to help understand how a community news site goes about operating and how ‘hyperlocal’ is measured by us.

A wall of Private Eye front covers. Editor Ian Hislop has picked his favourite one from each year of publication

The Friday Late event celebrated independent publishing, everything from zines, to tumblrs and typography.

The Victoria & Albert Museum threw open its doors until 10pm for amongst other things an analog tumblr, arty readings and the opportunity to create your own magazine.

Placing my 'thumbs up' in the analog tumblr. This was at the entrance to the event and allowed you to vote for pieces of typography you'd seen around the museum, or submit your own via your phone that you'd seen.

But the set piece, in my eyes, was a room dedicated to 50 years of Private Eye.

The magazine, currently edited by Ian Hislop, has been poking fun at the aristocracy and political classes for 50 years now and so the V&A felt it was time to recognise how the design of the magazine and the cartoons within it had played a major part in its success.

I took part in a tour around the exhibition with Elizabeth James who helped put the displays together. She was very engaging, explaining to everyone just how important the magazine is for cartoonists to get their work out there.

The cartoons on display include the work of Willie Rushton, Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe.

A cartoon from a recent Private Eye taking on the government on graduate unemployment and the new housing strategy

The Private Eye exhibition perhaps best sums up why it’s important to have such a free and independent media in this country today, poking into the corners of life where others would not dare.

The wall of front covers in the photo at the top of this post best sums up the impact the magazine can have, with its admittedly low-tech solution to publishing.

And there’s a good point. Often we’re focused on the new technology, the new way of doing something, when actually its about harnessing the technology to do something you want to do. As Elizabeth pointed out during the tour perhaps it is The Eye’s low-tech and low-production values which perhaps make it even more readable and has become an important part of its brand? It’s not over-designed and relies on very simple display methods, like cartoons or speech bubbles, to put across its witty message.

I would strongly recommend getting along to the V&A to check out the glorious 50 years on display, including the fascinating libel section with letters from The Eye’s lawyers refuting claims.

It runs until 8th January 2012 in Room 17a and 18a at the museum. More details on the V&A website.

Earlier this year I was at a journalism conference in Perugia and on one of the panels was a chap from the Huffington Post. He described how during the 2008 Presidential campaign they’d had a massive scoop when one of their contributors caught a candidate gaffe on video, it was uploaded and within hours it was leading most international news sites and the talk of the day on Twitter, Facebook and more.

Our panel discussed the implications of this on the media, and I said we’re living in a golden age of social media stupidity. Why? Because at the moment you can find copious amounts of information on people, their activities, and much more – but you can also find it very quickly.

I was reminded of this by Alison Gow’s excellent post on How to (Not) kill Journalism and how the web represents such an opportunity, particularly being able to crowdsource direct with your followers.

Sadly, I was also reminded of it by the university where I did my degree as X Factor reject Frankie Cocozza came to perform at the student night club.

Lots of excited youngsters queued to see Mr Cocozza and one young lady decided to ask for her ass to be signed by the man himself. She found herself on the Daily Mail and quickly saw tweets and Facebook messages about the offending incident, and a Facebook photo album, which was completely public, became a hunting ground for people to leave downright abusive comments about some of the people having their photo taken with Cocozza (Interestingly, the photo Daniel Bentley tweeted, which drew nearly 400 comments about a certain girl, has now been removed.

The comments were, as Dave Lee has previously pointed out in his post about YouTube comments, rude, abusive and wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else (see terms and conditions etc). So why do we unleash and let forth a torrent of “what we really think” online?

To me it is all about education. There’s not many who can say they’ve grown up with social media, for my generation (growing up around the turn of the century) it was MSN, AOL, ICQ and chatrooms when we were teens – oh and email. But these tended to be 1-2-1 chats, usually not able for use afterwards unless someone saved the chat and printed it out.

For the generation after it was MySpace, Faceparty and Bebo. But these weren’t discussed in school, there was no how to, we were being trained in Excel, Word and Access. The curriculum was Microsoft and how to “do things” on computers.

Journalists are nearly always early adopters, we worked out how to do things with mobile phones earlier than most, same with the internet and computers. We might not be the best, but we know how to make technology do what we want it to do in very creative ways. And it is the same with social media, around 2009 there was always the complaint that the only person you’ll find on Twitter is a journalist.

But as the population have mainly taught themselves how to use social media, and used it as something akin to a hobby, they perhaps don’t think too carefully about the real-life implications.

The amount of personal information available on Facebook is stunning, and yet these people might be X-Directory because they don’t want their home phone number being found. A quick search can reveal nearly the exact location you live in, who all your family are, your phone number, numerous photos of you (which are often dated and located), and very quickly a back story can be found on who you are.

Twitter acts as an archive of what you say. They aren’t deleted after a certain time, there are thousands of tweets stretching back, with their conversations available so context can be placed.

Journalists have been quick to the party, the number of “and he said on Twitter” stories has been growing. Especially as more and more people with authority or celeb status take to the service to use it as a communication channel. If it happens on Twitter, it will be on the mainstream media websites within hours and in the papers the next morning, and the magazines within a couple of days. The media amplifies the Facebook and Twitter spats, announcements and stupidity to whole new levels.

Before if you did something stupid, your friends knew it and would (most of the time) never let you forget. Now if you’re filmed naked and running into a window on holiday you are that bloke off the YouTube clip, forever and on your CV.

So, why is this so great for journalists? Because it is real. It’s moments we just wouldn’t get to see otherwise, it’s the angry opinions of someone unleashed directly and it’s an insight into what people really think and do. It’s lifting the lid off life itself, and that’s what shifts page views and sells papers.

Until the right education on social media privacy is given at an early age to the masses, this boom time will continue. I guess it will be anything you tweet may be given as evidence, and as we’ve seen with the Facebook riot inciters – it rightly can be.

Image credit to charlessc

Took a trip over to Portcullis House last night for an event titled ‘Parliament and Online Communities’ (part of Parliament Week) – it brought together a mix of people who run independent local news sites in South London, large online communities and messageboards like Mumsnet and interested government open data types.

The question we had to mull over was essentially how can Parliament engage more with online communities, and both make itself more open and also get good quality information from its select committee inquiries on a whole range of different issues.

Parliament faces a big challenge, as outlined by Matt Instone – its head of online engagement – how does it take the mass of information which is being produced by the institution and make it accessible to the general public, and at the same time make people aware of what Parliament is and what it does. And crucially, how it is different from the government.

He was essentially saying, how can Parliament serve a million and one niches?

How can local media, both hyperlocal and big media, engage with Parliament?

We were given an example of how Parliament had started working with an online community – The Student Room – on one of its select committee inquiries into service provision for young people. Sounds dry when you put it like that, but Jamie O’Connell, marketing director for the student site which attracts 4.5m visitors a month, said they had worked with the outreach team at Parliament to clarify the aims of the inquiry.

He described how the chair of the select committee had recorded a video asking people for their opinions, this had been embedded on the site on a special page on the Student Room with four discussion threads underneath all built around the four key questions they wanted answering – such as ‘are the youth services in your area good enough?’.

The inquiry ran for two months, the video was viewed 3,000 times and they had 80 posts on the threads giving all manner of opinions and some very forthright ones. As they discussed this an idea popped up in my head, if you can do this on the Student Room, surely you could do it on local sites?

There’s sites from Greenwich to Preston which have engaged readerships who would relish the opportunity to input directly into inquiry that can make a difference, on a topic they are interested in. Communities tend to be grouped around geographic area or subject area, so I my call to Parliament is come and talk to local sites – where the audiences are – about doing these kinds of consultations.

Parliament should be easier to filter

The second part of the night saw everyone split off into groups to discuss questions around how Parliament could do online better. The general feeling was that there’s lots of interesting information contained within the Parliament website, but its just a nightmare to find – especially if you’re accessing it for the first time with no idea of how it works.

Our group discussed how the Parliament website should be easy to search via location, topic area or date. It should show how related information is grouped together, and for me I said they needed to open up and allow us  to embed video, audio and documents from Parliament in the content we’re producing. If I’m writing a piece about the BAE Systems job cuts and the debate in Parliament, it would be great if I could time stamp the video of the debate and embed it into the content I’ve created about it.

Likewise with documents. We’ve seen when covering council business in Preston for Blog Preston how readers, well some of then, want more detail. So they want to read the full report, and then comment on it. If we were able to take the full reports and embed on our sites this would be a big step forward – rather than just constantly linking to PDFs which then get moved around and don’t exist anymore.

All of this relies on Parliament opening up its information and becoming more accessible, and it needs to create jargon busters to reduce the barriers to entry.

Widening access, but unfairly?

There was a warning made at the end of the event, and a good one too, about how the push for online engagement could leave offline forgotten. There still needs to be real-world consultation done, because there is still a digital divide. While everywhere you look in London there’s a smartphone, you go to more rural areas and you can barely get broadband. Consultations and information should not become the preserve of the digitally savvy, young, urban elite. It should be opened up to one and all, and that’s something Parliament should keep in mind and be working to achieve.

How do you think Parliament can engage better online? If you’re a local blogger or news site, what information would you like to see provided? Would being able to embed video clips or documents relating to your community be of interest? Would you run a consultation in conjunction with Parliament? Let me know in the comments below

Image credit to E01

While the figure of just over 6 million referrals should be applauded, and it’s promising it’s going up, I question what the BBC’s policy is for inserting these links?

Steve Herrman writes on the BBC News Editor’s blog, and discussed at News Rewired last week, about how they are doing and points out the top destinations:

The top destinations for external click-throughs in any month depends largely on what the top stories are for that period, for example in February this year there was news of the street-level crime maps being published (www.police.gov.uk) , ITV footage of an elderly lady confronting armed robbers (www.itv.com) and stories about tickets for the Olympics in 2012 (www.london2012.com). Those sites all showed up high in our list of onward referrals.

I understand the BBC has the auto-generated box at the bottom which links to other – and sometimes random sources – for ‘more on this story’, and like Google News the website which breaks the story doesn’t often get featured here because they aren’t seen as ‘current’.

But how does it decide to credit a news source within a story, when it writes ‘as revealed by The Daily Telegraph’. But what, as with a lot of the more human interest and quirky stories, they’ve started out on page 7 of a local weekly paper? Will the BBC still link to the Daily Mail’s rip-off version or will it seek out the original source to link back to and reward the media organisation who sourced that story in the first place?

It’s a problem we now face in the age of the battle for online supremacy, as soon as a local news source covers a story and it goes ‘viral’ so the feeding frenzy begins and every news site under the sun covers the story, doesn’t provide a link, and the site which actually broke the story is left way down the Google News pecking order.

Is the equivelent of sending an invoice in the online world now going to be sending an invoice for the amount of page impressions missed out on by that hard-working original site? Although Paul Lewis said at News Rewired the age of the scoop is dead, yes he’s technically right, but discovering a story and putting it out there first before anyone else still holds a lot of value.

We need to see more linking, better linking and news organisations making an effort to give credit to the source. The way Google is structured, it will always try and reward the original source – but unless everything links back to that original story, how will Google know how to credit?

I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on this issue. Has the BBC got it right? How can we flag up the origination of content on the web? Give me your views in the comments below

In reading Will Perrin’s excellent post about the continuity of hyperlocal blogs and the ‘hyperlocal life cycle’, it also reminded me of a post I wrote about handing over Blog Preston to Joseph Stashko and Andy Halls in May 2010.

Twice I’ve tried handing over the reigns of Blog Preston – a site I set up in January 2009 to be a hub of community news, views and information about Preston in Lancashire – to someone else, and twice I’ve had to get back involved. I thought I’d expand on Will’s points about how you can find continuinty for your hyperlocal site and keeping it going.

The first is not to rely too heavily on students. They are great because they’re enthusiastic and do have plenty of time, and in the case of Jo and Andy I was incredibly lucky to have two of the best young journalists in the UK wanting to work with me on the site.

They are incredible and very, very, hard-working – constantly finding new content, working with the community and doing everything you’d expect a local news reporter to do while also studying for their degree (and no doubt doing the stereotypical things that 20-year-old lads do while being at university). But would the site be better off with a local Preston based student doing the site? And you always find yourself back in the situation of having to re-recruit when they inevitably move on (in the case of Andy to much bigger and better things – well done lad).

I think the move by the likes of Richard Jones on Saddleworth News is interesting as it brings students into the fold, but also has it structured as part of a course. Should more universities follow suit?

Getting guest contributors for a site is vital if you’re to keep it going when you’ve disappeared. It’s amazing what people will offer up an informed and well-written viewpoint on, and you can use this as a way to fill the gaps in your content schedule while you’re finding someone to take over.

Taking on a hyperlocal site is a big challenge and can be a huge time sapper, so I definitely think I should have done more to make those taking on Blog Preston aware of just how much they were taking on. I should have put more effort into a proper handover, offering more guidance on finding content, running the site and keeping it full of fresh content.

But, at the same time, Blog Preston has proposered when I’ve handed it over – regularly increasing traffic and with this comes expectation. Not just from readers but also from yourselves that the site will deliver the same levels of content, traffic and interaction as during that ‘golden week’ you may have.

So in short:

- Find someone to take on the site if you know you’re going to be moving away
- Still keep a hand in, I’m still amazed at how much I can still do on Blog Preston even though I’m based in London
- Prepare a proper handover with the person taking on the site, have them spend a day with you and see what goes into a typical week on the site
- Build a huge army of guest contributors
- Don’t be disappointed if it takes the new kids on the block time to figure out how to do everything and let them run the site their way

Image credit to Will Perrin

What advice would you give about keeping the hyperlocal flame burning? Would you just shut down your site and walk away? Or let it involved under new ownership? Let me know your thoughts below in the comments

It was only a matter of time, but a London theatre group are going to be putting on a show inspired by the phone hacking scandal.

There’s no Murdoch’s in sight but it’s an interesting concept they’ve come up with, their team of writers will listen to a volunteer’s voicemail and spin a tale based on what they hear.
At the end of the show the original voicemail messages will be played to the audience.

The blurb for the show reads:

All across London, phones are being hacked. Only now it’s playwrights stealing the stories of brave volunteers. Will they score a scoop, or will they have to use a little artistic licence? And which will make the better story: the facts or the fiction?

It’s on at Theatre503 in Battersea from September 27th to October 3rd. You can apply to be ‘hacked’ here.

While having breakfast last week I was leafing through a copy of my local weekly paper, the Wimbledon Guardian. I’ve read this paper since I was about 10, my mate used to deliver it and I did some work experience there a very long time ago.

One story in particular caught my eye, a full page dedicated to how the paper had been refused a press pass for the Olympics. And not just the Wimbledon Guardian but it seems many more across South London.

The story on their website has editor Richard Firth lamenting:

This was supposed to be the ultimate local event, but the local media have received a collective slap in the face.

The BOA says it received thousands of accreditation applications from all over the world but we believe the local media should be allowed in to cover the Games from a local perspective.

It seems they’ll have to rely on syndicated Press Association content, and watch on TV when a local competitor is playing – the Wimbledon Guardian lays claim to Laura Robson (future British female tennis star).

Personally, I think it’s a crying shame that the BOA couldn’t find room for at least a pooled pass for a few local reporters from London. While I understand the pressures they are under for giant allocations for BBC, Sky etc, not to mention the sport media, it is often the small, local, stories which can have the biggest impact in showing how successful the games have been – in the eyes of local people anyway. It’s the local schools in the opening ceremony, the volunteers in the clay pigeon shooting and the unexpected youngster from Tooting who suddenly has a shot at a medal – these are the local stories of the Games.

It’s a given that there will be complaints about parking, the general busy-ness of the capital during that time and strain on local council resources but to shut out the media serving those communities most likely to be affected by the Games seems a daft decision. I wish the Wimbledon Guardian and other local media all the best with their efforts to appeal the decision.

It will only add to the feeling a lot of local people are starting to have about the Olympics, “we’re on the outside, looking in…”

Image credit to Jeff Van Campen

My previous post about the Local TV plans proposed by Jeremy Hunt caused quite a debate and as the plans move forward and Mr Hunt takes his roadshow around the country I thought it would be interesting to hear from someone on the ground who is actually making some of this ‘hyperlocal news’ on a regular basis.

The blog post below is from Richard Jones who runs Saddleworth News, a consistent and quality local news site in Saddleworth (that’s near Manchester for those who aren’t too good on geography). He’s tried doing local news video, in partnership with a local college, so is well placed to analyse what Mr Hunt’s plans really mean for small communities and larger urban areas.

A lot of people seem to be having trouble knowing what to make of Jeremy Hunt and his idea of setting up dozens of new local TV stations around the country.

London-based commentators have been predictably sniffy, querying why the ambitious Culture Secretary, as likely as anyone to become the next Prime Minister, would bother spending so much of his personal political capital on delivering local news to Keighley, Mold and Elgin. Meanwhile, those already involved in the local and regional media appear rather conflicted.

Local TV could mean more jobs and potentially more revenue, two things which have been increasingly hard to come by. But (and there are plenty of buts) how best to deliver local TV? Will we really be able to attract enough advertising? Why does Barnstaple get its own channel but Barnsley and Berwick and Bury don’t? And does anyone in Barnstaple really want to watch Barnstaple TV anyway?

These and other questions and grumbles were raised last week, when Mr Hunt came to Manchester for a second time to speak to local media folks about his proposals.

The government’s current thinking is for new channels in up to 65 locations, put into your telly using existing digital terrestrial technology, with assurances they’ll be guaranteed good places on the electronic programme guide. Licenses will begin to be awarded next year, with the first channels broadcasting in 2013. The channels will lead to improved scrutiny of councils and other public bodies, Mr Hunt said.

They’ll also provide another outlet for small businesses to advertise, and boost the creative industries outside London.

Lurking behind all this, as in just about every sector of the media, is the internet. More specifically in this case IPTV or, in other words, the thing that will put programmes into your TV set using broadband rather than transmitters. Proponents of this approach say that, while superfast broadband isn’t superfast enough yet, it soon will be, and suggest internet telly will leave the digital system looking all rather old-fashioned and expensive. Better then, that argument goes, to invest everything we can in IPTV. Then, one day soon, 65 stations will be superseded by 650, or 6,500. Besides, why would one station for Greater Manchester be enough?

If you’re living in Stockport, a murder in Bury or council scandal in Salford is still not likely to be especially interesting to you. That’s one reason why the existing regional news programmes zip through all their proper news so they can get on with the magazine items, sport and weather. Mr Hunt told the Manchester seminar that IPTV is still too far away.

“We don’t want to wait,” he said, adding that his proposal could be a “transitional phase” and provide a “headstart” for local TV.

However, he acknowledged that in a decade or so, Greater Manchester might well have ten or more local TV channels, delivered via IPTV.

In the meantime, the kind of local video service that I produced over the past year at Saddleworth News, in partnership with media production students from The Oldham College, might be as close as many places get to truly local TV. It was only one bulletin a month, hosted on YouTube, but it was video news about Saddleworth which you could access anytime, something Saddleworth has never had before.

It actually generated enough local interest that I found myself being stopped in the street and asked if I was the bloke off Saddleworth TV. If nothing else, the whole experience demonstrated to me the excitement and power that TV still has. Getting your picture in the paper or going on the radio is one thing, but there is a certain magic about seeing your own village or street on video.

I believe tapping into that appetite for very local TV will be crucial to the success of any operation, and that the on-demand capability and flexibility of IPTV will do a much better job of delivering that than DTT ever can.

Looking ahead, and contrary to all the scepticism, I predict Mr Hunt’s proposals will come into being. His enthusiasm for local TV is clear, and as long as he remains in his job I’ve no doubt he’ll make the project happen. Lots of existing media companies will be involved one way and another, along with new players.

Some channels which learn how to provide distinctive programmes on a tiny budget, probably using the existing facilities of university and college media departments, may succeed. Others, run along too-similar lines to traditional and costly news operations, will probably collapse in spectacular style, owing money all over the place.

Eventually, technology will allow the variety of local services that Mr Hunt wants. But whether his desire to get channels up and running on DTT first proves a help or a messy and expensive hindrance, we’ll have to wait and see.

What do you think? Can local television work? What do you think about Richard’s comments? Let us know your views in the comments below