Normally I imagined work book clubs to be about discussing the latest chick-lit novel over the water cooler or a cup of instant coffee, but to have something stimulating to get my teeth into during the commute home was a welcome challenge.

Creative Disruption is an excellent book, it grabs the digital age head on and dismantles it for all to see. It pulls no punches about how the internet has transformed our lives since the early 1990s and fundamentally changed the way we do a lot of things, most of all, how we do business.

As a journalist, the chapters which focus on the storm some traditional media companies face as their traditional profits erode and revenues evaporate was particularly poignant.

But the best thing about this book is the author’s enthusiasm for the web and that it’s not all doom and gloom. And this is a view I share.

Simon Waldman is clearly a man who ‘gets it’, not just someone who has an iPad and therefore thinks he knows exactly how technology now works because he can spend hours playing Angry Birds and converse with his teenage son about it. This is a guy who knows the goal posts have fundamentally shifted.

The book gives some great examples of corporate reinvention, with companies staying true to their core products and beliefs but learning to use technological change as a force for good inside their businesses. Waldman talks of technology rockstars tearing up the rule book inside companies which have become too comfortable with the way they do business.

Waldman seems to have really done his research and spent a lot of time interviewing the people whose views really matter to put together his book.

It’s an inspiring read and for young journalists and professionals like me it’s inspiring. It makes you realise that behind all the doom and gloom, profit warnings and bloggers taking pot shots that there are business models there – it just needs some real thought, new ideas and a hell of a lot of hard work to make them happen.

Les Cochrane, and me, chatting with Lichfield Blog at Talk About Local 09

Went down to Stoke-on-Trent yesterday for the Talk About Local unconference. It was a gathering of local and hyper-local bloggers, some community activists, people who run community websites and people who run tools that can help community websites.

There was a great mix of people. Immediately I identified a split between people like myself who had some journalism training and were setting up, or have set up, a community blog/website for their area to act as an alternative to the local media. Others had just set it up because they wanted something different.

An unconference is a great format. You arrive, eat some Staffordshire oatcakes (amazing) and put post-its on a board about sessions you’d either like to run or see be run. These sessions are then moved around, some are merged together until a session schedule becomes clear. There’s another board to put post-its about who you would like to meet at the event and another one to put URLs of your site or others you feel are relevant.

I put a post-it up offering to run a session about Blog Preston and Blog Local, explaining how we wanted to expand the Blog Local idea with other blogs. We got mashed into a session about social media surgeries and using social media to empower communities.

The first session of the day I went to was on data. The government’s Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, had come up from Whitehall to explain how the government is trying to free up public data and make it available. There was a very technical discussion about data formats but the key thing for people running community websites is that this data is searchable, with some basic technical skills, to find content about your local area. So, you might be able to query health data and find out how many hospitals offer a particular service in your area. Priceless, local, information.

The second session saw us team up with Nick Booth (Podnosh) to run a session about social media surgeries and expand on the Tweetup events that I’ve been running with Blog Preston. It was great to see people really interested in replicating what Nick and I had done, but as Nick stressed it’s important that you find the ‘social capital’ in your area. Don’t start from scratch, find people who are blogging, taking photos on flickr, using Facebook, using Ning and on Twitter and get them together. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Over lunch we mingled and I met a fair number of people who were running hyper-local websites, but wanted to be part of something bigger. This is where Blog Local could come in. While Talk About Local is there for support, advice and I think building a knowledge base/community for hyper-local blogging – Blog Local operates on a more local/regional level to run Blog [insert location] and act as an aggregator for some areas to showcase that hyper-local content.

After lunch we attended a session about comment moderation. It was a great session, with the team from WV11 sharing their experiences (after six weeks of operating) about the problems they were having with comments, there was a lot of debate about whether you should allow anonymous comments on your blog – or whether you should enforce a name and email address. We brought the discussion back to whether people felt they were journalists, and therefore wanted to have standards, guideliness etc on their sites, or whether they were community volunteers. My take on it was that we are publishers, if you hit the publish button and put an article on the web you are a publisher – and you have responsibilities and constraints like any other physical publisher. I think that for hyper-local sites to be taken seriously they need to try and ensure quality, not just in their own content, but also in the contents – and anonymous postings won’t give you that. See the Great Internet Dickward Theory for a short but sweet reason why anonymous posting is not a good idea.

The final session of the day was about collaborative journalism, with a bit of Birmingham City Council bashing thrown in for good measure. Tom Steinberg from MySociety did a quick five minutes on useful tools that his sites can offer to hyper-local sites and there is loads of good stuff, so much that it deserves a post of its own on the tools available. Nick Booth then presented Help Me Investigate that I’ve recently joined up to and this is yet another great way of getting content for your hyper-local site. Michael Grimes gave five minutes on the inspiring Birmingham City Council website sagae, and the BCCDIY site that has been built by volunteers and hasn’t cost millions of pounds – and appears to be better than the official site. Sarah Hartley finished off with a quick look at the future of journalism, and it was interesting to see the reaction in the room from people who run hyper-local sites. Are we journalists?

I think we are and all the tools that were outlined in the final session are ways to create content and that’s one of the things journalists do. Anyone running a community website, blog, forum is in a way a journalist. We ask questions, we edit content, we shoot video, we write stuff. We are community journalists and the future of journalism definitely has space for us – because we’ve always been there. In the past, with print, it was the community newsletter but with the onset of web publishing this is changing. It’s so easy to setup a village website and become the dominant media in a hyper-local area and the traditional media can’t do that.

I came away from Talk About Local with a very, very, positive attitude about what we’re planning to do with Blog Local. It was inspiring to meet other people who are hyper-local bloggers and I was pleasantly surprised at how many people had seen Blog Preston and really liked it. Plus when we talked about Blog Local and what we want to do, we found that many were with us.

Thanks to the organisers of Talk About Local 2009. It was a fantastic event and I was really impressed with how smoothly it ran, the quality of the discussions and I’m afraid to say it, I even liked the bit of Stoke-on-Trent that I saw.

See some photos from the Talk About Local unconference

Image credit to Laurence Hardy

• Why charities need to use social media

Good post about charities needing to embrace social media. There’s a lot bandied around about facebook this, twitter that, but it’s sometimes overwhelming. That’s why Rachel Beer’s guide is an excellent starting point.

• Will the web kill the high street?

It hasn’t happened. But the web does provide a way for specialist shops to take hold of a market and dominate it.

• Martyn Lewis campaigns for the nation’s young people

New online only charity that aims to get young people to reflect their views in the media. Seems like a good idea, but as young people are ‘turned off’ from traditional media brands who says they will come back to them to comment?

• 14 reasons to have a web guru on your team

Yeah! Great stuff. Any organisation that isn’t trying to understand, work with, get involved with the web and social media won’t win in the long run.

The post is here, or you can read it below:

First off, I’d rather have a million pounds (British Sterling) than dollars to save journalism with. But exchange rates aside, let’s get down to business.

My strategy would be to invest in people. Invest in getting journalists to do that saving. You can’t do things alone, you need a good team with good people. I’d probably shed some dead wood from the news room, maybe coax a few people to leave early and get some fresh blood in.

I’d keep the subs, but expand their role to include a lot of backroom stuff – like picture uploading, digital media production, video editing. I’d keep the print edition but I’d make it follow online’s lead. Maybe just have one good strong print edition per day, and throw everything into online.

I’d develop strong supplements based around local issues, and not be afraid of trying something new. I’d link these supplements with mini-sites online built around that issue.

I’d invest in training for my staff, I’d employ the Google technique of 10% time for my reporters. i.e. 10% to go off and cover what YOU want and what YOU think needs covering.

I’d put a bit of money towards having trainees in. Not expecting them to pay for everything. There would be a pot of money so that kids can come in and get experience, learn about being a journalist, in a good environment, and not be skint afterwards. You never know, they might even bring a good story in with them – and that’s got to be worth the money.

I’d invest in a CRM (customer relationship management) system for my newspaper, logging user comments, offering them personalised news updates, and beginning to build an idea of who my readers really are. So I know that Joe Bloggs in the North of the city responds well to this type of news. Then I have something to sell, I’ve got proof of effectiveness, readership and grabbing people’s attention.

So to sum up, good journalists, probably better paid, more of them, getting some 10% time, with a good online setup.

Perhaps what RSS needs it a branding exercise to make it appeal to the masses. I suggested ‘news for you’ as a cheesey brand that a newspaper could use, but it’s along those lines – RSS provides the news that you want smack into an easily digestiable format.

Dave goes a step further and says that media outlets themselves should be creating and delivering their own RSS readers and branding these up for readers. This seems like a great idea and perhaps these RSS readers could come pre-packaged with already interesting feeds built-in. For example if I subscribed to The Guardian environment news RSS feed it might already have RSS feeds to relevant charities, NGOs, and government about environment issues. A great way of making your reader more informed about a topic.

But how to let the masses know about RSS? It needs an equivalent push to what we see in newspapers these days ‘check it online, read it online, watch it online’ is what normally accompanies any story. There needs to be advertising in both the print and online editions of media saying ‘try our own reader’, or ‘be your own reader’. The personalisation of news moves a step closer.

They could also do with embedding this great video by Common Craft explaining RSS in plain English, or produce something like it (I’d like to see The Sun’s version!): (thanks to Chris Brogan for his great post about using social media as outposts for this one)