How to get involved with the Guardian’s latest venture into hyperlocal

Six months ago the Guardian Media Group called time on its regional news pilot Guardian Local, but it is continuing to experiment in the local market, its latest venture being n0tice, a location-based online notice board to share and read news and notices.

The hyperlocal website and mobile site is currently in private beta, with a team of three at GMG along with an army of contributors helping to shape the online version of the village notice board. Others who want to get involved will soon be able join.

n0tice was born out of a Guardian hack day and has SoLoMo, a trend towards social, local and mobile, at its heart, but as it does not currently have Guardian branding it feels more like an independent start-up than a child of the news outlet.

The platform is a space for people to buy and sell, like the classifieds section of a local newspaper, and can be used for general notices, local news and liveblogs or updates posted by citizen reporters as community news breaks.

It is like a reverse Foursquare, where rather than checking in to a business or venue, you allow your computer or mobile to grab your location information and the site finds the community groups, items for sale and news near you.

How is it going to make money?

Listing on n0tice is free but users get the option to pay for a featured post. Pricing is yet to be confirmed but the figure currently being worked with is a charge of £1 for each mile radius from the seller’s location per day.

The site, which can be used worldwide and white labelled, will be given free to hyperlocals and sold to commercial ventures, such as anyone who wants to use the technology to set up a location-based site, according to community strategist at GMG Sarah Hartley, who was head of online editorial at the Manchester Evening News and later launch editor of the now defunct Guardian local experiment.

And of course, being a Guardian platform, it has an open API.

Along with Hartley, who this week spoke about n0tice at the Brighton Future of News Group, two others are working on the development of the platform: Matt McAlister, who is director of digital Strategy (who in May announced n0tice with this thorough explainer) and developer Daniel Levitt (whose blog is here).

One of the areas the team is looking into is how to best reward users who contribute, with a current system in place of an ‘Editor’ badge which goes to the first user in an area.

The next round of users will be invited into the platform soon soon, with a planned release of the site next year. You can sign up to be one of those by entering your email address here, you can follow @n0tice on Twitter and get involved by joining this Flickr group and “celebrate noticeboards” by contributing photographs.

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Journalisted Weekly: Liam Fox, Occupy Wall Street and BlackBerry

Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations. Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

Liam Fox, Occupy Wall Street and BlackBerry

• Coverage of the Liam Fox and Adam Werritty scandal dominated this week’s news
• ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests and BlackBerry outages covered lots
• Fitch ratings downgrade, Burmese political amnesty and US troops deployment covered little

Covered lots

• A torrid week for Liam Fox, ending in his resignation after questions about his relationship with friend Adam Werritty, 332 articles
• Occupy Wall Street protests continue and are mimicked worldwide, including London and Rome, 141 articles
• Research in Motion apologise to BlackBerry users after several days of outages, 112 articles

Covered little

• Credit ratings agency Fitch downgrades two UK banks, 15 articles
• Burmese Government releases comedian and dissident Zarganar along with hundreds of others, 13 articles
• President Obama deploys nearly 100 US soldiers to central Africa to combat insurgency by Lord’s Resistance Army, 11 articles

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

• David Cameron: 720 articles (+8% on last week)
• Liam Fox: 466 articles (+235% on last week)
• George Osborne: 221 articles (-49% on last week)
• Tony Blair: 111 articles (-5% on last week)
• Ed Miliband: 108 articles (-40% on last week)
• Theresa May: 107 articles (-48% on last week)
• Andrew Lansley: 93 articles (+98% on last week)
• Nick Clegg: 91 articles (-16% on last week)
• Chris Huhne: 90 articles (+67% on last week)
• William Hague: 90 articles (-27% on last week)

Celebrity vs. serious

• England Rugby player Manu Tuilagi fined for jumping off ferry, 71 articles versus Care Quality Commission report sparks condemnation of elderly care, 55 articles
• Bruce Forsyth receives knighthood, 26 articles versus former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko jailed for seven years, 25 articles
• Couple from Cambridgeshire win £101 million on Euromillions lottery, 33 articles versus UK and US naval forces rescue Italian ship hijacked by Somali pirates, 25 articles

Arab spring (countries & current leaders)

• Gaza and Hamas: 50 articles (+1150% on previous week)
• Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu: 41 articles (+173% on previous week)
• Syria and President Assad: 40 articles (-44% on previous week)
• Libya’s National Transitional Council: 40 articles (-34% on previous week)
• Iran and President Ahmadinejad: 31 articles (+417% on previous week)
• Egypt’s Military Council: 23 articles (+188% on previous week)
• Yemen and President Saleh: 11 articles (-67% on previous week)
• West Bank and President Abbas: 11 articles (+22% on previous week)
• Turkey and Prime Minister Erdogan: 5 articles (-50% on previous week)
• Bahrain and King Al Khalifa: 2 articles (-78% on previous week)
• Jordan and King Abdullah: 1 article (up from 0 in previous week)

Who wrote a lot about… the Joanna Yeates murder trial

• Tom Morgan – 9 articles (The Independent)
• John Coles – 7 articles (The Sun)
• Steven Morris – 7 articles (The Guardian)
• Rod Minchin – 5 articles (The Independent)
• Anil Dawar – 4 articles (Daily Express)
• Simon de Bruxelles – 4 articles (The Times)

Long form journalism

• 4,279 words: ‘It’s still going to plan for Sinn Fein’ – Sarah McInerney and Stephen O’Brien, The Sunday Times, 16 October 2011
• 2,840 words: ‘The ‘silent taboo’ of suicide among young men in the UK’ – Catherine O’Brien, Daily Mail, 15 October 2011
• 2,478 words: ‘Mexico’s cultural revolution’ – Gemma Bowes, The Guardian, 14 October 2011

Journalists who have updated their profile

• Liz Vercoe is a freelance journalist for AgeUK, Travel Telegraph, Sunday Times, BBC Worldwide and Reader’s Digest. She was previously deputy editor at the Radio Times and associate editor of the Sunday Mirror Magazine, as well as launch day editor of the Sunday Magazine. She has written several books, including editions of ‘Where to Live in London’ and ‘Managing Your Home’.
• Harriet Hernando is a trainee reporter at the Stroud News and Journal. She was recently a freelance features writer for St James’s House Media and feature writer for the Argentina Independent after interning at the Financial Times. She was educated at the University of Leeds and later the University of Sheffield. You can follow Harriet on Twitter: @harriethernando

The Media Standards Trust, which runs journalisted, last week won the ‘One to Watch’ category at the Prospect Think Tank Awards

Read about our campaign for the full exposure of phone hacking and other illegal forms of intrusion at the Hacked Off website

Visit the Media Standards Trust’s Churnalism.com – a public service for distinguishing journalism from churnalism

The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

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App of the week for journalists – Capture, a single-click video app for your home screen

App of the week: Capture [iTunes link]

Operating systems: Apple (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad). The app only works with a device with a video camera and running iOS 4 / iOS 5.

Cost: £0.69

What is it and how is it of use to journalists? Capture is a single-click video recording app that is worth having on your home screen.

Tap the app and it automatically starts recording, making it ideal for capturing breaking news.

Videos save to your photo album, where you can trim and email, MMS or send to YouTube.

Reviews: It gets five stars in Apple’s App Store

Have you got a favourite app that you use as a journalist? Fill in this form to nominate an app for Journalism.co.uk’s app of the week for journalists.

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Apple’s Newsstand results in 2m downloads for Future Publishing

Apple’s new Newsstand app resulted in two million digital downloads of Future Publishing titles in the first four days, resulting in consumer spending well in excess of normal monthly revenues, the magazine publisher has said in a release.

Newsstand, which provides iPhone and iPad users who have updated their devices to iOS 5, released last week (12 October), with a dedicated portal to download magazines from the App Store, “creates an amazing opportunity for publishers”, Future UK’s CEO Mark Wood said.

Future Publishing, which has titles including .net, Procycling and Digital Camera, released 55 digital magazines to Newsstand on the day of launch. It has since released more and now has 65 UK and US digital magazines available, some free and some paid-for.

Wood added:

We plan to include more sampler issues in every magazine container in coming weeks, as well as uploading high price-point bookazines and premium one-shot titles.

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Tool of the week for journalists – ZeeMaps, for interactive maps

Tool of the week: ZeeMaps

What is it? A free mapping tool that allows you to create interactive maps with videos and photos. ZeeMaps would be a great way of telling location-based visual stories such as of rioting, Occupy Wall Street protests and severe weather.

How is it of use to journalists? ZeeMaps allows you to create maps by uploading data sets or plotting the information using marker points, much as you would using the My Places option in Google Maps. You can then embed your map in a blog post or save as it as jpeg or pdf. It is free if you allow adverts, you can pay to go ad free.

Wired Digital is among the news organisations using the tool, according to a testimonial on the ZeeMaps site.

ZeeMaps takes the plotting marker points idea of Google Maps several steps further, allowing you to add photos, video and, using the wiki option, to collaborate and ask others to add information.

You can either upload data, such as from Google Docs, CSV, KML or Geo RSS feeds, or you can plot the information with markers, as you would using Google Maps, and then export the data as a CSV file.

In this example I added markers by hand to show newspaper offices, adding a photo and YouTube video for each. By setting a password I can ask others to contribute.

Another example is this one, which shows the location of electric vehicle charging points in Brighton. Rather than adding markers by hand, I uploaded a CSV file. Processing large data sets takes some time but ZeeMaps will helpfully send you an email to alert you when your map is ready.

Adding photos and videos of electric vehicle charging points may not greatly enhance this visualisation but creating a map for the UK riots, the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the London Stock Exchange protests, or for a severe weather event would provide online readers with an interesting way of exploring such stories by location, viewing photos and watching videos attached to the marker points.

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Sydney Morning Herald: The Australian to reveal paywall details this week

The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that News Limited (the Australian arm of News Corporation) will officially announce its paywall for the Australian this week, after it outlined plans for a ‘freemium’ subscription model for its online content back in June.

It had already been announced that the model will offer access to some content for free, but others will require payment.

According to the SMH report the site will charge $2.95 a week to access all content across the website and its phone and tablet apps.

It will be the first paywall for a general newspaper in Australia, an experiment that has achieved mixed success overseas by newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, the Financial Times and The Economist.

It will follow the approach of News Corp stablemate The Wall Street Journal. Some stories will be able to be read for free while others will need a subscription to be read, most likely to be its analysis and specialised sections.

At the World Editors Forum last week, three publishers – including the New York Times – outlined their paywall strategies and lessons they had learnt along the way.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – covering the occupy protests as a digital journalist

Are you covering the Occupy Wall Street protests? Or Occupy London Stock Exchange? Maison de Ville? Porta San Giovanni? Or any one of the many others springing up around the world? 10,000 Words blogger Elana Zak has some tips for digital journalists on some of the formats and tools that could bolster your coverage, including data maps, liveblogging, and Storify.

See more on 10,000 Words.

Tipster: Joel Gunter

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Guardian: Lessons from our open news trial

It’s been a week since the Guardian began publishing it’s newslist online for all to see. The unorthodox experiment seems to be going from strength to strength, with the introduction of new sections and a calendar for upcoming news events.

Writing on the Guardian’s Inside blog today, national editor Dan Roberts says any advantage ceded to competitors, including the Independent’s Archie Bland, has been outweighed by a growing number of ideas and tips submitted by readers. Initial interest from other journalists has also reportedly given way to interest from the Guardian’s audience.

We had a surprising amount of interest from around the world, including this in Le Monde, and I gave interviews to a Canadian radio station and US technology website Mashable. But gradually, the interest from readers began to eclipse the interest from other journalists and a subtle shift began to take place in our newsroom priorities.

Read Dan Roberts’ full post here.

See the Guardian open newslist here.

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News International: ‘no decision made on Sun paywall’

News International has responded to reports that it has decided not to introduce a paywall at the Sun, as it has for the Times, Sunday Times, and did for the now-defunct News of the World site, denying that a decision has been made over charges.

A report today by paidContent suggests that new chief executive Tom Mockridge has decided against a paywall.

The Sun will introduce a paid mobile content app imminently; it is currently consulting with readers on the appropriate fee. But it will not be following Rupert Murdoch’s edict in which he appeared to say that all his news titles’ websites should charge.

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Citizen journalism site Blottr expands into France and Germany

Citizen journalism breaking news site Blottr has launched in France in and is due to follow with a German site next week.

Blottr, which launched in the UK in August 2010 and received £1 million in funding to expand six months ago, relies on a network of more than 1,000 citizen reporters, non-professional journalists and bloggers who report on breaking news and provide comment and get paid by how many clicks their story receives.

The official launch of the French site, which will focus on Paris, Lyon and Marseille, takes place in Paris today; the German site, with news from Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich, is due to go live next Monday (24 October). Blottr aims to expand into 50 cities in 10 countries within the next six months.

Country managers from France and Germany have been brought in to lead the French and German sites, both working from the London office, which now has 12 paid members of staff.

The UK site has citizen journalist contributors in eight cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Leicester, London and Manchester – and totals 1.4 million unique users a month in the UK, growing around 20 per cent month-on-month, Jerry Boston from Blottr told Journalism.co.uk.

Blottr founder Adam Baker said:

We are really excited about bringing citizen journalism to France, a country with a deep-rooted, passionate and traditional set of values when it comes to publishing and the consumption of news.

We enter France at a time when the appetite of the public to report news, coupled with technological advancements that enable people to report it, has never been so great. We look forward to giving the people of France a voice and a platform to report news they witness for the betterment of all.

Blottr’s French site can went live last Wednesday (12 October) and the German site can be viewed from next Monday (24 October).

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