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.

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

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.

Image credit to Michael Gwyther-Jones, showing the Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay

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

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.

The types of guest post

I’d divide the guest posting into three categories. The expert. The passionate campaigner. Them doing stuff for you.

The expert – writing about stuff you don’t really know about

Local history is a great example of this. If you’re covering a story about the old hospital that is being turned into flats and there’s a campaign group wanting to save it – see if they know about the history of the place. Maybe there’s a former doctor who was working there for 40 years and knows tonnes of stuff about the place, far more than the 100 words of quotes you’ve given him in the story. See if he’ll write a guest post about the history of the hospital. You’ll also be surprised what old pictures people will have and random facts as well, make sure you get those in the post.

The passionate/campaigner – the opinion bit

You’re working on a story about a playing field being sold off. The local community is “up in arms” and there’s a big campaign group meeting. Now is the time to offer your community blog up to their services, invite the leader of the campaign group to write a guest post. I find a good tip is to pose a question to them to peg the opinion piece to – in this case “Why should the playing fields be saved?”. Watch them fly and watch the comments roll in as those for/against come to your blog to give their views.

Them doing stuff for you – this covers things like reviews

You can’t be everywhere at once. And you need to have a life of some sort. Start getting guest contributors around different subject areas, for example someone might be really into the local music scene. Ask them to write about local gigs, or get the chairman of the local hockey club to submit a short write-up of the club’s latest game.

The technical stuff – length, submission

Try to keep guest posts to around 600 words. Anymore and people lose interest, any less and the writer struggles to get their point across.

If you’ve got WordPress or another content management blogging tool, create user accounts for them. So they can login themselves and post content. But, you can always take submissions via email and post it up for them.

Include a bio

People will start to learn who you are, but who is Mr Jones from the campaign group? Make sure you’re including a short bio about the person, either at the start of the guest post or the bottom. Include a photo of the guest poster as well if possible.

Encourage interaction

Ask the guest blogger if you can put their email address or link to their website at the bottom of the article. Also get them to come back to the article and respond to any comments, you’ll probably need to nudge them to do this. Tell them to share the article, if they have a Facebook account, an email list, whatever they have ask them to use it to spread the article out onto the web.

What’s in it for them?

Make sure you sell the benefits to them of guest posting. More exposure, chance to have their say, a link to their website, recruiting people to their cause, a chance to share their knowledge, improve their employability. Whatever is the right reason to tempt them, say it. Also, after a few weeks let them know how many people have looked at their article and this always gives them a lift.

Image credit to Heather Phillips

What are your tips for guest blogging? Have you guest blogged for a website? How did you find it? What would you do differently? Let me know in the comments blow

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?

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.

Image credit to BillFromSpokane

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.

Image credit to Doktorbuk

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.

You can read my report from the last Talk About Local Unconference in Stoke-on-Trent in October 2009 – it was a very inspiring event – and I hope this event will be just as good.