Out With A Bang

We’ve long been admirers of their work; even if it was a bit grudging in the very first instance as we watched our hopes of picking up some serious Knight News Challenge funding last year disappear beneath the waves of applause that greeted some bloke called Sir Tim Berners Lee…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=70

But, with hindsight, I think me and Neil ‘got’ where they were going…

And the impact it could have upon those of us who actually made it to the journalistic coal-face and dug out fresh quotes for themselves, as opposed to those who figured they could re-hash, re-nose and repeat for a living…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=73

And having scuttled off in the midst of last year’s www.2gether08.com gathering to meet Martin Moore for a coffee, that initial conviction that those two could really be onto something merely grew.

All of which chimed very, very easily with the ‘kitemark’ thinking that lay at the heart of this story…

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=42875&c=1

Which doesn’t look a million miles away in its thinking to ‘The Transparency Initiative’ that Martin, Sir Tim and the Media Standards Trust continue to pursue with their Knight News dollars…

http://www.mediastandardstrust.org/projects/transparency.aspx

What is fascinating, now, however is how that might equally ‘fit’ with any Government thinking on how digital advertising – centrally sourced and perfectly targetted – might act as a revenue reward for locally-based independent websites; not straight subsidy; not a hand-out… but a way of both messaging specific, online communities and supporting the new, digital delivery platforms that they rest on.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=225

But if, as you would expect, a queue a mile long starts to wind its way through Whitehall in serach of said Central Government advertising, how are they ever going to distinguish who is deserving of their advertising grace and favour?

For whilst I initially saw Martin’s ‘Fresh from source…’ labelling thinking as proof of my content’s value – and thereby enabling me to sell-stroke-syndicate my content on all with the buyer’s knowledge that the quotes therein were straight from the horse’s mouth…

Now that same ‘labelling’ thinking – be it kitemark, digital watermark or whatever – could equally serve as signpost to Central Government; that Will Perrin was, indeed, the one that spoke to the put-upon busker outside King’s Cross tube – just as much as I was the only one to speak to new Canary first team coach Ian Crook before he boarded his plane home to the UK…

http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/full_article.asp?i=4476

There’s my ‘value’; evidence of me being at the quotes coalface; working my journalistic beat.

For which, IMHO, I deserve a kitemark rather more than any of the re-hash and re-nose shops out there.

So as we start to think ever more about what kind of ‘tools’ do we need to make a platform fit for a 21st Century journalistic living, I’d weave Sir Tim and Martin into my thinking from the start.

Whatever is popping out of the end of their ‘Transparency Initiative’ I’d bolt into www.mylocalwriter.com/loddon/nr14 – just as we’d always hoped to weave it into www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity

It proves that ‘I was there…’

And that’s a big, big thing if we are ever to make sweet music from all that noise of the web.