Out With A Bang

For whatever reason – maybe it’s because at heart I’m a sucker for schmaltz – ‘Big’ is one of my favourite films.

The chopsticks scene in FAO Schwarz even prompted a visit-cum-pilgrimage to said Manhattan toy store when I did Jeff Jarvis’ www.newsinnovation.com gig in the way-off autumn of 2007.

The other brilliant bit is the scene in the corporate boardroom; the launch of the insect that becomes a building. And in amidst all the usual ‘Mmm… yeh, great… wow…’ Tom Hanks’ character gives it the classic: ‘I don’t get it…’ line.

‘I don’t get it… why would you deliver news on a bicycle when I’ve got the Internet…?’ would be one such wide-eyed, questioning moment for our current, desperate times.

I got one yesterday. I’ll not say from whom; spare his blushes.

But we were talking about www.mylocalwriter.com and he gave it the same. ‘I don’t get it… who’s the audience…?’

And, for a moment, he had me. Because he was quite right. The audience for www.mylocalwriter.com/loddon/nr14 cannot be his ‘grand-parents’ – those that still cling onto the pages of the Beccles & Bungay Journal as if they were tablets of stone.

This idea that we have to aim our hyper-local news thoughts at those that read a local weekly newspaper is wrong; or, at least, they shouldn’t be our starting point – not our target demographic.

Who is? Well, three years being the stay-at-home Dad who wastes his time and everyone else’s money trying to get this Internet thing to work, has given me one, little insight into a wholly new audience – the playground mums and the ‘community’ that gathers between 3.25pm and 3.40pm at the gates of Loddon Junior School.

They crossed my mind earlier in the week with a piece that popped up on MediaGuardian… the one about UK housewives being some of the biggest Internet users globally…

And then there’s the ‘Friday Flyer’.

The ‘Friday Flyer’ – for those of you whose kids don’t go to Loddon Junior – is two-sides of headed A4 paper that arrives in Little Man’s book bag every Friday, funnily enough.

I don’t know what, exactly, the sales of either the EDP or the Beccles & Bungay Journal are these days in Loddon – in fairness, perhaps the EDP tops the 180 ’sales’ mark. Perhaps.

But I would strongly suspect that the ‘Friday Flyer’ is the best read piece of ‘news’ paper in my community. Unless the 800-strong Hobart High School have a similar ‘news’ publication.

It certainly includes more information that is of both use and relevance to the way that me and my 30-something neighbours conduct our daily lives in NR14 than a Page 17 lead in the EDP about a fight outside a pub in Dereham last Thursday night…

So?

My ‘local’ news is Loddon Junior School playground news; thereafter I’ll find my national and international news elsewhere…

So, for example, Mr Graveling’s decision to launch a morning fitness club – starting at 8.10am this morning – is the kind of ‘news’ I engage with; there on Page Two of my Friday Flyer.

A ‘Fun Fitness Club’. And let’s, for argument sake, say I was ‘curating’ www.mylocalwriter.com/loddon/nr14 I’d go up there – armed with one or two new tools that befit my 21st Century trade – and I’d podcast an interview with the forwarding-thinking Mr Graveling onto my site…

Subject to the usual permission and due PC care and correctness, I’d vidcast the kids [and, fair play, there were 30 of them up there for today's launch; all regular Friday Flyer readers...] and drop that onto the site too when I got back to my kitchen table…

I’d then tell all the Mums about it at 3.25pm… who then tells Dad when he come home from work… who then tells his own parents… who then can see their grand-kids limbering up for school first thing in the morning on their own home PC… the same grandparents, of course, who are the last generation to be regular readers of the Beccles & Bungay Journal…

And, what’s more, from my Friday Flyer I gather that Loddon Junior has a ‘Healthy School Status’ – Mmm, what’s that al about? Let’s talk to the head…

She tells me that’s a central Government initiative to try and get the kids in NR14 to eat better because in their medical, postcode data mapping of the country they’ve seen a ‘hot-spot’ for obesity in Loddon and want to tackle the issue…

So, actually, there’s some highly-targettable Government messaging/advertising that I could run on a CPM-model basis alongside the ‘Healthy Schools Status’ feature I could write for www.mylocalwriter.com/loddon/nr14…

And so the moment I tell the Mums at 3.25pm that I’ve done this feature, they go home, log on for ten minutes… and earn me money cos I’m charging out my advertising space to HM Government for 50p per 1,000 views…

But can’t all this stuff be simply pulled in and aggregated? Why do we need someone to curate and content create? Do we really need someone to be the cherry on the top; the icing on the cake?

Yes.

Why? Ask Peter Preston…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/11/peter-preston

Brilliant. Where’s the beef? The grist? It’s stood alongside you at the school-gates.

‘The medium-term weakness of all the bright new websites, in short, is that they need grist as well as glitz…

Spot on.

“And the curse of the new is much like the curse of the old: Have bright, fashionable product and huge audience. Now, will somebody please pay me a living wage?”

Exactly. Can we do it? That’s the fundamental challenge.

And, for me, I think content, engagement and distribution start at the school gates. They start with that ‘Friday Flyer’.

Jamie, there’s your audience pal…

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