Many, many moons ago – long before OWAB was born and whilst we still had one eye on the KnightNews Challenge funding our MyLocalWriter.com dreams – I took a deep breath and pinged over an email to Mr A Rushbridger of The Guardian fame.
As a one-time reporter on the Cambridge Evening News, I kind of figured he’d have more of an idea of local than most.
Whether he remembers said exchange, I’ve no idea. His reply was courteous and encouraging, if memory serves. But we both then went our seperate ways.
The point is that in it, I drew this clumsy analogy with the Titanic; that if the ice-berg was the web, so ‘big media’ was the ship… And from the moment that Sir Tim Berners-Lee got a-thinking and Craig Newmark started a-selling, so way beneath the waterline, one rivet after another was starting to go ‘pop’.
And me? Having read Mr Shirky’s thoughts on my 40th birthday, I’d been the idiot who threw himself into the icy waters as I fled the Archant state cabin.
And was vaguely hoping that if I waved wildly enough, so the SS Guardian could play the role of the Californian and pick up survivors before they all froze to death.
Clearly I wasn’t the only one who decided that we might be better served trying to swim for it; even if most of us came from ‘below decks’ – the steerage classes and the oiks from the No8 stokers mess for the most part.
There was Craig with his www.thisfrenchlife.com; Mark Potts with backfence.com before he tragically ran out of track; and then there was the plucky Ms Record and her spirit of the Old West…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=252
The only trouble was, of course, that you soon started to twig that Mr Rushbridger – as much as he has long known that the bulkheads won’t hold; that the watertight doors were impoding with every passing week – had little or no option but to stay on the bridge. And he wasn’t on the Californian.
He was on the Titanic – albeit it was the Newspaper Society who were re-arranging the deckchairs and getting the band to play on; elsewhere in the ballroom ITV were up to their necks in freezing water and were starting to shivver uncontrollably, whilst JP and TM were last seen huddling together outside the door of Lord Rothermere’s state cabin – desperately hoping to be let in…
Amongst the well-heeled American passengers, the picture was even grimmer. The Hearsts, the Tribunes and the Tierneys were all fighting for their last breath – any hope of a rescue long lost.
Out in the water, the rest of us continue to cling grimly to our life rafts; making the best of the little tools we can find; learning how to survive the hard way.
And it is hard. ‘You kill yourself trying to get it off the ground,’ were the words of Ms Record, as she refuses to draw her final breath. ‘We have been dismissed by people saying, ‘You’re going to burn out.’ No, we’re not…”
I say all this, because on the back of the disappearance of the Rocky Mountain News last week and the impending loss of the San Francisco Chronicle, you wonder whether or not the secret is now well and truly out.
The ship is going down.
And within months, not years, big media could be swimming for their lives like the rest of us in these little, hyper-local seas.
After all, Mr Jarvis now has the man from Google with him in his particular life-raft…
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/02/28/the-times-cuny-and-others-go-hyperlocal/
The real danger, for me, is that we all get trampled under-foot; that our little, carefully-built life-rafts get swamped by ‘big media’ trying to save themselves… that in the mad rush to abandon ship people fail to heed our warnings; won’t listen as we warn them of just how cold the water is; how hard you have to work for a web living.
Even now, one or two people don’t seem to think that we offer a ‘credible’ opinion on the future of new media. They’d much rather invite Capt Smith round to tea.
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=244
Still, at least we’ve learned how to swim….
Now you try.
�
All the people that are already swimming need to get together to make a big raft out of the bits they’re clinging onto. Whether the rafts are geographical or niche-interest doesn’t really matter I don’t think. ‘All aboard the SS non-Premier League Footy.’ Would Addiply be your sail or Jolly Roger?
Tim,
I hesitate to say ‘Jolly’ anything; cos as we all know, there’s nothing remotely jolly about swimming for your livelihood in these freezing seas, but, yes, decent suggestion.
So, if we continue on our Titanic theme, what role would we suggest for the ‘Local Media Alliance?’
I’m quite keen on the idea of the mobility of content where a writer can write and make a living from that writing. The piece needs to be given the opportunity to get out of the hyperlocal pool and into the wider world but take the ads with it and have other ads attach to it as it surfaces in a different context. In a network of sites using common metadata and structure this ought to be possible.
Your piece would be like a shark with a flotilla of ads feeding off it as it moves around. Or something like that.
There needs to be a standard way of marking up a news story. A microformat where the common elements would conform to the style of the site they were placed in (a kind of souped up RSS I suppose). This would also make them easier targets for aggreagation by other sites. The challenge is to make the revenue from the places they are published.
You will already find tools for Firefox and others that read currently standardised Microformats like hReview, hCard and hCalendar. hNews next.