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.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Two events happening shortly in Cardiff which look interesting and will hopefully ask questions about openess and transparency in both central and local government.
The first is the Senedd 2011 event. It’s a bit vague on what the discussion will actually be on – the general theme of the web and transparency and the Welsh Assembly. The panel has some people with a track record of lobbying and opening up debates on issues, so what they have to say will be interesting.
There’s more details about the event, which is free, on the Vote 2011 website.
Then the Talk About Local Unconference comes to town. An unconference is a cool format where instead of being shoe-horned into a set programme of workshops and seminars, the attendees decide them instead. So, if you’re interested in a certain topic – e.g. making local councils more transparent – you put a post-it up at the start and see if anyone else is interested. If they are, you get a session and people share their knowledge and thoughts.
I’ve been to a Talk About Local Unconference before, and wrote this report – featuring Staffordshire oatcakes – in 2009 about what I learned from it. If you run a hyperlocal, community or blogging site it’s a really useful event to attend and I know it’s given me a lot of ideas and enthusiasm for what we’ve been doing with Blog Preston.
You can find out more about the event in this post I did for yourCardiff and sign up for free on the #tal11 Eventbrite.
I’ll be tweeting from both events, so follow me on Twitter @ed_walker86 and the hashtags #senedd2011 and #tal11 for all the latest.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not easy running a local site by yourself, constantly producing reports on the village council or covering the local town’s football club as it battles yet another relegation threat.
However, there’s a quick way to relieve yourself of some of the trials and tribulations and also add a whole raft of different voices to your site and really help live up to the tag “voice of your community”.
Get other people to post on your site. It’s an old trick newspapers have been doing for years, let the local MP sound off about something or give the ex-football manager a column to vent his spleen. Columnists are often why people buy their Sunday paper, and there’s no reason why your local site can’t steal a trick or two. Here’s some tips on recruiting and keeping guest bloggers. Read the rest of this entry »
That’s the question I posed in a guest post over on Hyperlocalblogger.com. Matt very kindly allowed me to explore the subject as I looked at what I’d done with Blog Preston when I moved away. Here’s an excerpt:
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
Been reporting on a lot of PACT meetings in the last few months. These are ‘Partners and Communities Together’ meetings, where the local residents come together in an area and raise issues with local police and councillors.
At one meeting I went to there were a group of residents from a particular group of houses in Cardiff. They complained about youth annoyance, a problem that is regularly raised at PACT meetings across the city. The Police made this group of houses one of their PACT priorities, along with other problems in the area. If something is a PACT priority then this means extra patrols will take place and resources are put into trying to stop the problem.
This issue was a big talking point at the meeting, and residents gave quotes about the particular problems they’d been having.
I wrote up an article for yourCardiff about the PACT meeting and led with the line on the youth annoyance at this particular group of houses. I included the name of these particular houses (not the houses numbers, but the overall name for that area of housing, such as Meadow Close, Finlay Estate).
I received an email from a resident of said housing area, complaining that they had been unable to sell their house due to the article. Apparently the prospective buyer had read the article and decided against the purchase.
I stood by the article, but agreed to change the name of the housing area to a more generic area name in the headline. The article was riding high in Google for the specific housing area name, because there was little else published about the area.
I also offered to add a quote from the person complaining into the article to offer an alternative viewpoint to living in the housing area.
This is an area that could cause problems in the future as hyperlocal sites populate niche and very local search terms. As far as I was concerned, I was at a public meeting which helps set policing priorities and I have a duty to report what happened at that meeting and let the public know what the priorities are for the local police.
What do you think? Can hyperlocal reporting get too local?Have you had a similar problem when reporting and what did you do?
Hyperlocal blogs vary enormously in terms of audience numbers. Some such as the Ventnor Blog on the Isle of Wight are long established and attract a huge audience while others are fledgling outfits that may only have readerships in their tens every day.
But getting beyond the Google Analytics is important, especially if anyone who runs a hyperlocal blog is thinking about making some money for it. With Blog Preston, the hyperlocal venture I setup in January 2009 to cover the Lancashire city of Preston, I wanted to find out a bit more about my audience.
We ran a survey and asked people what they thought about the blog, the content and got a big of demographic information from them. Here are the findings:
The age group – they aren’t young
The largest age of people reading Blog Preston was 36-50, with 37.% putting themselves in this category. No one over 51 was in our readership.
Where they lived – they are richer than most
We attract readers from opposite ends of Preston. The two wealthies suburbs, Fulwood and Penwortham featured as the most popular places for our readers to be from. These places are mainly affluent, middle class and have strong broadband penetration. They are also home to lots of ‘community minded’ people who are likely to look beyond the newspaper headlines. We do not attract readers from areas such as Ribbleton and Larches, the more socially deprived areas of the city.
What they liked reading about – events and the arts
It seems there is a big gap in events coverage in Preston, as that’s what people were coming to our site for. To find out what events were on, read reviews and get ideas for what to do in the city. Our coverage of the arts was also popular, covering music, comedy and other arts events that were happening. There was lots of love for our opinion articles, our readers liked to read informed articles from members of the community.
What they wanted more of – more of the same
As above, the things they liked reading about they wanted to see more of. So we know our core audience is happy and wants to see even more done on these areas.
Do we reflect the city in our content? Why yes, we do
This is what I’m most proud of. From starting up Blog Preston on the kitchen table all those months ago, we got 93% of our readers saying our content reflects the city of Preston. If you’re a hyperlocal blog and you’re not doing that you might as well pack up and go home!
Lessons learned
We need to hammer home our advantage on arts, events and opinion coverage and perhaps highlight this content so it’s easier to find for readers. Our success in the more affluent areas of Preston gives hope for attracting advertising but is also a double-edged sword as we should be attracting visitors from all over. To do this we need to cover local events in these areas, get contributors sending in articles and building relationships with people in those communities.
I’d encouraged other hyperlocal blogs to do a readership survey, it’s a great way of finding out whether you’re hitting the right notes with your content and also gets you underneath the website stats.
Have you done readership research for your hyperlocal blog? What did you find? How do you think we can expand our readership with Blog Preston? Any tips in the comments below would be appreciated.
The man on the street. The man on the street right? He wants to know what the candidates are going to do for him. Well, you can go out and talk to 10 people on the street, or you can talk to the man behind the screen.
Plugged in every day at work are thousands of workers, people at home and more on the web in your area – and some of them might want to ask an election candidate a question.
On Blog Preston, the local website I run for Preston, Lancashire, instead of assuming we knew best on what to ask the candidates we put a call for questions out via our website and Twitter.
We got a great response and these questions certainly gave the candidates a tough time. Local people asking local questions on local issues. It was all done via email, so certainly gave candidates time to do their research and consider their opinion – but I think that’s good and gives the reader a better idea of who this person is that they might vote for.
I’d strongly recommend doing this for your hyperlocal blog, source the questions from your audience and drill them direct to your candidates. Democracy in action.
The next Talk About Local Unconference is fast approaching and I thought I’d jot down a few things I’m hoping to get from the event.
The general election
How can hyperlocal’s cover the general election? We’re looking at running coverage on Blog Preston but with limited resources and candidates not seeming interested in being interviewed – it’s looking like a different task. How are other hyperlocal blogs planning on covering the event itself? Will they be asking people to volunteer? Or linking up with initiatives like The Guardian & The Straight Choice’s partnership? I’d like to think that local candidates would see local blogs as a great opportunity to get their message out to the community.
The big money question
Is anyone making money? How are they making money? It’s the big question for a lot of people as although the local blog might be a labour of love there needs to be a business model of some sort. Providing good, quality, local, content is time consuming and labour intensive. Will advertisers take local blogs seriously? Let’s hope there’s a few people there who can shed some light.
Taking it to the next level
You’ve got the blog up and running, you’re getting traffic, you’ve got contributors. Where next? How do you find more content? How do you expand? Should you expand or keep to your current level? There’s so many questions for those who run hyperlocal and local blogs and have been running them for a while. Keep it as a hobby, try and make money, invest more time.
Getting offline
Are hyperlocal and local blogs running events? What are they doing offline? Are they organising tweet-ups, bloggers meet-ups and other events that get their community together away from the computer screen. I’d like to think they are but let’s see how many are actually doing it and what tips they’ve got.
That’s just three topics. I’m hoping to meet some interesting people and decided I don’t want to run or help run a session this time, but just participate, take some notes and contribute to the discussions that are happening.
Recent Comments