Out With A Bang

I’ve never met Jason C Fry. Quite like to; think me and him could have a ball.

http://reinventingthenewsroom.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/this-is-broken-from-game-stories-to-well-everything/

I have met Nigel Barlow on a couple of occasions; I was slightly non-plussed to discover that, in his eyes, I was the ‘Godfather of Hyper-Local’; particularly given the fact that in oh-so many ways, we ain’t done anything yet.

All we’ve ever done, really, is sat at our kitchen table and wondered aloud how www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity might get to work and whether or not we could get to somewhere approaching a ‘not-for-loss’ position via www.addiply.com

On both counts, the jury remains out.

But, nevertheless, it was nice to be mentioned in Nigel’s latest despatches…

http://thoughtsofnigel.blogspot.com/2009/11/journalism-models-and-rick-waghorns.html

Both pieces had a thought in common – re-invention.

How would we do this journalism-thing if we started with a blank piece of paper? If we knew what we know now, in 2009, how would we do it? Be it beat sports writing in the case of Jason – or local news in the case of Nigel.

And, in fairness to both, they appear to come to the same conclusion. That you’d start from the bottom up; work with what was once your audience and try to start over again with the smallest forms of journalistic life; or else, try and find something that was fresh and analytical with which you might once again win favour with your former newsprint fans.

Which is all what Evslin’s Law was about; start from the very bottom and (re-)build your way up.�

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=238

And what is the lowest form of news life? What the lad from Wired once described as the ‘news’ that his daughter had scraped her knee in the school playground that afternoon. That’s the very first molecule of news life; that’s where we should start… from the bottom up.

On the streets. Or rather at the school gates – and the news that matters to me.

NOT with the news that News International thinks matters to me.

Today and it was the turn of The Times editor James Harding to tell us what the future of news will look like as he delivered the tablets of stone carved out by His Master to the Society of Editors.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/17/times-editor-james-harding-online-charging�

“We are going to rewrite the economics of the newspaper, newsgathering and delivery business,” he said.

Really?

From on high. You are going to impose a solution on this great, moveable feast that is the web and drop so many pay-walls down in front of our eyes in the sure and certain knowledge that we won’t all just ebb and flow our way around you…

For reasons that aren’t too hard to fathom, I’ve had cause to wander up and down the highways and byways of Northumberland of late as Addiply launches out of TrinityMirror’s micro-sites.

And because we’re open, we’re transparent and we’re accountable, so we can all see the kind of numbers that these micro-sites are delivering.

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&r1=1&r2=1

I’ve never been to Allandale. Put ‘Allendale’ ‘Northumberland’ and ‘population’ into Google and you come up with the figure 809.

Or 2,120. Wikipedia appears a bit confused.

But either way, in that context I don’t think TM’s numbers for Allendale are that shabby – in terms of penetration; in terms of the relevance of that particular news platform to that particular community.

It probably beats the penetration level achieved by The Times.

And, in that regard, I think it ought to be deemed something of a success. A model, almost. Because you’re delivering news almost to the school gates; the BBC can do the rest…

All we need to do now is re-populate the rest of the UK with similar micro-sites for the news that really matters to you… and we might be onto a winner.

Just.

But the answer will come from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Whatever Rupert and his many minions will claim.

The Age Of Imposition is over; the Age Of Participation has only just begun.