Category Archives: MLW

Not for the first time we walk into this revolution with the thoughts of Mr Shirky in one hand, an Apple iPhone in the other. It’s 1500 all over again…

OutWithABang celebrates its first birthday on Monday; we threw our very first pebble into this deep and dark pond of ours on March 16th, 2008 – two nights after me, Paul and Tim all heard we’d been bombed in the Knight News Challenge. Beaten by some bloke called Berners-Lee.
I mean, for f*ck’s sake, what did [...]

So what would a Guardian OpenPlatform do for me? Well I’ll have a BMW ad please, Alan, and you can have a Hatters match report by way of return…

As anyone who has ever had the misfortune to sit through one of my flip-chart scribble shows… Paul and Co at JEECamp, two boys from Barclays, six people at www.2gether08.com and four people in a Guardian office in Farringdon Road among them… I’m a fairly simple soul.
I do all my scribbles on the back of [...]

The NYTimes joins Jeff’s flock ‘doing local’. Empowerment to the people? Or big business and their top-down thinking…

As the penny appears to be finally dropping that the world doesn’t do mid-range news – just global and hyper-local…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=56
… so The New York Times has today thrown its own hat into this particular ring; or decided to try and launch its own little life-raft into these freezing waters of ours.
http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com/
They are, of course, just [...]

Me, Mr Rushbridger and an e-mail about the Titanic as the world finally begins to twig that big media is going down fast….

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 [...]

A new tiny toy for everyone to play with as I sit in the cafe at Morrisons (Beccles)… #OWAB. Tis, after all, the ‘Age of Participation’.

The trouble with our AOL being down – and it’s now BT’s fault, apparently – is that I’m now having to work from a new ‘office’, aka the cafe at Morrison’s, Beccles.
Cos Loddon being a conservation area, we don’t do mobile phone signals either. So the 3G data card doesn’t work either…
Put the two together [...]

A new business model for journalism? Well, you start with Evslin’s Law and work from the bottom up…

As ever these days there is much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing to be had as to which way next for the business models for news. Down the nearest pan, is all too-often the general conclusion.
Mr Shirky was at it the other day…
http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2008/10/02/aop-op-2008-todays-television-may-not-be-worth-sitting-still-for-says-us-author-clay-shirky/
Given that this was the man who launched a 1,000 hopes and dreams on my [...]

What would be a subject dear to an NR2 heart? The arrival of Tesco’s after seven years of trying…

Want to know what a www.mylocalwriter.com/norwich/nr2 story would look like?
It would be the all Videoboo-ing, all Audioboo-ing, backchat-ing version of this…
http://new.edp24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=NewsSplash&tBrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=News&itemid=NOED29%20Jan%202009%2016%3A29%3A50%3A770
Slap bang in the heart of that postcode ‘patch’, Tesco versus the Unthank Road locals – and the threat that the supermarket giant brings to the delis, the butchers, the florist and the fish shop [...]

What did our very first VIP Club meeting do last night? Well, perhaps, it started to answer the question that Lord Carter has yet to find…

The much-trailed ‘Digital Britain’ report thumps on everyone’s desk tomorrow and from the snippets that are already emerging it looks like the Government have decided that the future of local news provision lies in the hands of TrinityMirror, Newsquest, Johnston, etc…
Cos it ain’t going to be ITV. And it can’t only be the BBC. But [...]

What does ‘Backchat’ do? It re-thinks the way that I service my public’s media needs.

There is a real danger that me and my No1 fan could ‘enjoy’ a tennis match here, so I’ll say no more.
http://www.4ip.org.uk/blog/4ips_first_project_out_the_door_ncfc/
In fairness, it did get me to thinking about why we were able to tick a few of 4iP’s boxes this winter. And I think part of the answer lies in the title.
Sorry, their [...]

There’s a sign of the times. My old job goes down the Newsquest toilet. Serving local communities or abandoning them? Moot point, I’d suggest.

As I might have mentioned before, I first cut my journalistic teeth on the wonderful weekly newspaper series that was The Wiltshire Gazette & Herald…
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=44
Then owned by Westminster Press, there were six editions; each with their slip pages and four with their own district offices – Malcolm in Malmesbury, our Mickey (now of BBC Match [...]

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