User generated news service Blottr has launched an iPhone app called Paparappzi. It is to follow with the release of an app for Android devices next week.
The app is designed to encourage people to submit news stories covering their local communities. Its challenge now is to encourage people to upload and share news.
Blottr, which launched in August, focuses on seven cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, London and Manchester.
Paparappzi has an intuitive design, allowing users to write a short news item, add a photo and a geolocation and submit it to Blottr.
The Blottr app has the potential to fundamentally change the way news is gathered and reported. The UK has the highest number of smartphone users in Europe at 11m, and growing.
Over time, we hope a high preponderance of smartphone users will be using the Blottr app to report news they are witnessing from the scene.
Baker added: “We hope this will be the catalyst for millions of ordinary people to become citizen journalists and through our app, we expect to create a powerful network of people and content that will transform the ability to break news as it happens.”
Jon Anthony, leading the build, said: “One of the biggest challenges we faced when architecting the app was enabling real-time integration with our CMS. The app integrates fully with the user layer of our CMS, allowing stories to be posted directly to the site and viewed straight away on both mobile and web.”
Live video streaming will be introduced in the coming months.
A pioneering Swedish newspaper that involves its readers in the daily editorial decision-making process says the new approach has been a massive hit with users and advertisers.
The blog is monitored by a senior journalist throughout the day. The newslist and minutes from conferences are published online and readers suggest possible angles and ask questions.
Editor-in-chief Anette Novak said Norran had completely overhauled its image by involving readers and being more transparent.
Speaking at the WAN-IFRA summer university in Paris today, she said: “I realised that if anybody asks: ‘do we need Norran?’ they would decide: no we don’t. We had to stop it before the question even occurs in their heads.”
She said web traffic and Facebook referrals were up – and key motoring and property advertisers who deserted during the recession had come back. The experiment has also allowed the paper to broaden its coverage.
“We believe that we have strengthened our brand,” Novak said.
“Transparency is the new objectivity. We post the job list – the stories we are working on today.
“The instant feedback and the personal reply is extremely important. It’s the feeling that there’s somebody there live now.
“You have to answer in a good way, a polite way and a knowledgeable way, or you can lose trust.”
Novak said some news organisations were so focused on getting a return on investment from digital projects that they lost sight of their readers’ needs.
“If we follow the money… that will make us go for projects that we know will make money and we will keep doing the same thing over and over again. We have to experiment.
“Get readers involved with your brand, engage them with their hearts and minds and the money will follow.”
Online survey tool QuickSurvey has relaunched after a full makeover.
The tool, developed by market research firm Toluna, offers news organisations the opportunity to carry out market research using an online community of people who are ready and willing to respond.
It has obvious uses for businesses, including media organisations, and potential for PRs, but our review of the software struggled to see how it can assist journalists.
Testing out QuickSurvey
I decided to create a sample survey to test out the technology by asking QuickSurvey to find out how often people buy a local newspaper, why they buy one, how often they read local news online and what they would like to see from their local newspaper. Within an hour I had received 250 responses at a cost of around £200.
Click here for the results of my example QuickSurvey on local newspapers. You can play around with the data, graphs and pie charts and see a long list of things people would like to see from their local newspaper. Lemon Casino has recently become very popular among players in Poland. Players are attracted by generous bonus payouts, a large selection of games and excellent customer service.
How does QuickSurvey work?
When I started playing around with QuickSurvey I thought of surveying a hand-picked group of respondents. For example, I thought I could ask 20 news sites what percentage of their web hits came via Twitter, which had the potential to result in a news story.
QuickSurvey is not the best tool to use for this as it doesn’t allow you to enter figures as an answer, such as percentages. I soon realised that QuickSurvey’s main strength is the community of online respondents who willing to answer your questions.
You decide on how many people you want to complete the survey, what type of person (you could pick an all-male survey, for example) and, if carrying out a survey with your own respondents, you can ask them to include an email address (information which, like the research carried out, is yours to keep).
You can embed the active survey on your news site, email it to particular contacts or, if you want to use the Toluna community, you can allow it to be displayed on Toluna only.
If you are asking your own respondents to answer questions QuickSurvey is free, but if you ask the Toluna community you pre-pay for credits and are charged for the number of clicks from the community. One credit is deducted for every one person who answers one question.
I had 250 respondents answer four questions costing me 1,000 credits. A pay-as-you-go deal for 1,500 credits costs £240.
Results were returned in minutes and it was interesting to see people responding in real time. The company has a million poll rates a day globally and 2,000 responses can be gathering in eight to 12 hours so it offers a fast response to market research.
When your survey is completed, in less than an hour in my case, you can download reports, including word clouds of the answers.
The verdict: QuickSurvey is incredibly easy to use and within an hour you will have some very usable feedback and market research at a cost of around £200.
Not allowing people to respond using percentages was slight problem, as was not being able to select a very specific geographical area, like a newspaper’s distribution area. Another obvious problem is the respondents, who are all web savvy by nature, which skews results when asking a question about whether they read news online.
Is it of use to the news industry? No doubt there are uses in gathering data by using QuickSurvey.
Is it of use to journalists? Probably not, unless they have the money to pay for large surveys to provide research for a story.
Is it of use to PR professionals? Almost certainly. I can envisage a press release starting with the line: “A new survey shows 90 per cent of women think…”
Tips on creating a survey using QuickSurvey
Be short and relevant:
Give your survey a name that speaks to the audience. ‘Local Newspaper Survey’ is better than ‘Sarah’s Test Survey’, for example;
Ideally opt for three to eight questions (although you can include up to 15);
Short questions, ideally 10-15 words or less.
Keep answers simple:
Fewer than 12 answers – longer answer lists are a turn off;
Give options to answer ‘none of these’, ‘other’ or ‘don’t know’;
Use logos, videos and images where possible – all can be seamlessly integrated into the tool.
Randomise answers for brands, products or services (this stops the top brand or option being overly represented in the results, as people have a natural tendency to pick the answers near the top);
Use generic questions as screening questions when targeting specific profiles – for example if you’re looking to talk to Toyota drivers, don’t ask ‘Do you own a Toyota? yes/no’ but ask which of the following cars do they own – and give a list of manufacturers.
Always test your survey:
Get someone else to check your survey makes sense and spell check it.
Northcliffe Media is to sell off a number of its regional titles to Staffordshire Newspapers, part of Iliffe News and Media Limited.
In March it was reported that Northcliffe Media’s new managing director, former Metro director Steve Auckland, was planning to launch a review of the division’s 115 regional newspapers.
Parent company the Daily Mail and General Trust had previously ruled out buying or launching any more local newspapers, but had said it was interested in any approaches for its regional newspaper division.
Titles affected by the latest announcement are from its Leek Post & Times Business, including the Leek Post & Times, Uttoxeter Post & Times, Moorlands Advertiser and South Cheshire Advertiser. Kosmetinis makiažo staliukas su LED apšvietimu ir veidrodžiu moterims mybeautycorner.lt
In a statement Northcliffe Media said the sale is subject to the appropriate legal consultation with the employees of the Post & Times.
The sales will give the publisher “a greater opportunity to concentrate on developing our Stoke portfolio”, a statement added.
No one from Staffordshire Newspapers was available to comment at the time of writing.
Meporter is a location-based iPhone app for reporting local news by sharing geolocated text, photos and videos.
It is just three weeks old and this week is launching a social media and advertising campaign to gather the critical mass of reporters – or Meporters, as they are known – needed to make the start-up a success.
Meporter was launched at TechCrunch‘s Disrupt 2011, a technology competition in New York, after being chosen as one of the 26 companies, out of 1,000 applicants, to be showcased.
Since then Meporter has set up in several countries, including the UK, China, Australia, Japan, Spain, Italy as well as the US, according to CEO and founder Andy Leff.
The kind of stories being reported are not just breaking news events but restaurant, theatre, festival and art reviews.
A quick check for Meporter reports for London reveal “fat lady gets arrested” in Hackney, “roadworks” in Lewisham and “sun shining in Wanstead”.
It is obvious what is needed now is an increase in the number news stories filed, plus if it is used for news gathering, journalists need to know how to verify reports coming in.
When he spoke to Journalism.co.uk Leff said he had not checked Meporter iPhone app downloads for a few days but said the number was “in the tens of thousands”.
So, how can it be used by journalists? So-called citizen journalists can report news and if enough local reporters sign up in an area, it can be used as a news gathering tool as Leff explained:
We’re actually in discussion with number of local publishers, regional publishers, national publishers and international publishers about incorporating Meporter into the news-gathering programmes.
We’ve got interest from a lot of newspapers here in the US, television broadcast companies and we have been contacted by some media publications in Germany to see how they can integrate Meporter.
What they’re saying is that they don’t have the resources or the manpower to get all the news in their local areas but they’re always having people ringing them on the phone saying “nobody’s covering the high school football game”.
News outlets are losing readers because they can’t cover everything.
That will no doubt resonate with local news organisations in the UK and the idea that they can crowdsource local news, including photos and videos, vet the incoming stories, verify them and publish is likely to be appealing.
But for this to work it will require huge take-up and the addition of an Android app, which, along with a BlackBerry app, is due to be launched soon.
Leff is now focussing on spending money to gain that critical mass.
The initial $300,000 cost of launch he gathered by “scrounging through my wallet, couch cushions, begging family and friends” and is now in further talks with investors.
A social media and advertising campaign called the Million Man Launch will see cash give-aways of $27,000 with thousands of dollars being rewarded when milestones of active users are reached.
Meporters are also being incentivised through a badge system, similar to that used by Foursquare, with users able to trade in badges for prizes gathered through sponsorship deals.
The start-up has a long way to go. According to the geolocated app there are just three Meporters in Brighton and between 20 and 30 in London. However, this is an increase from no Meporters in either city a fortnight ago.
Meporter has the potential to reopen a debate on citizen journalism. But what Meporter offers is not that far removed from how local newspapers have always used village reporters to crowdsource and gather local stories. What has changed is the reporting method and thus the demographic of the reporters.
Jeff Jarvis keeping an eye on City professor George Brock. Image: Wannabe Hacks
Journalism is labouring under a business model based on entitlement and emotion, not economic reality, said leading media commentator Jeff Jarvis today at City Unversity’s Sustaining Local Journalism conference.
We need to understand the business model. I’m tired of the argument that journalists ‘should’ be paid, what successful business model was ever built on the word ‘should’?
Virtue is not a business model, just because we are doing good things that doesn’t mean we should be paid.
He said it was a model in need of disruption.
Some of my colleagues don’t like it when I use that term, disrupt. But welcome to the jungle.
We are a business that has to add value to the community in order to extract value back.
Jarvis set out three ways he thought that hyperlocal sites could make money in a difficult market space:
Developing new products and services to sell
Events (he cited US blogs running flea markets and buying club events)
The creation of sales networks
He only elaborated properly on the last of these, saying that individual bloggers are usually too small to interest city-wide advertisers but grouping together in a network can make them much more of a force to be reckoned with. “When it comes to journalism, he said, “we are better off doing things together”.
Philip John, director of the Lichfield Blog, blogged in March about the need for hyperlocal sites to build networks, writing that they bring about “a sort of collective consciousness whereby an improvement to one site is an improvement to all”.
With the likes of Addiply founder Rick Waghorn and Talk about Local’s Will Perrin acknowledging earlier in the day that just turning a profit as a local or hyperlocal blogger in the UK was rare, it was surprising to hear Jarvis talking about local blogs in US cities of 50,000–60,000 turning over $200,000 a year.
Jarvis admitted that is was a hard slog for hyperlocal sites to bring in ad money, but argued that there was a return in building networks. Giving AOL’s huge hyperlocal network Patch as an example, he said Patch was hiring a journalist for each of it 150 sites and paying them $40,000 a year. AOL wouldn’t be doing that if it didn’t think there was ad money there.
Asked whether journalists should be concerned about conflating journalism and sales – a recurring theme of the conference – Jarvis cited the example of Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent, who he said “had to go out and sell the ads at first, but retained his own moral compass”.
“It is probably our job as educators to guide students in these things”, he said, adding that in the end it is all down to credibility, which can be maintained even if a journalist is pitching in with the business side of things. Maintaining credibility is vital, he warned.
Community participation is key to selling ads around local and hyperlocal content, Rick Waghorn told the audience at today’s Sustaining Local Journalism conference.
Waghorn, who founded local ad sales platform Addiply, cited the example of Howard Owens, publisher of New York hyperlocal site the Batavian.
Owens, he said, was a “hyperlocal superman” for turning a profit from ads on his site. The reason for Owens’ success? P2P. That’s “person-to-person”. Waghorn praised Owen for participating in the community that he covers, knowing the people, and knocking on doors to get ads.
It’s P2P that will make hyperlocal ad sales profitable, said Waghorn, not algorithms.
Borrowing a term from Emily Bell, he said that we are in “the age of participation”.
Editorial is participative and local, why shouldn’t advertising be?
But Owens’ is a rare case, said Waghorn, stressing that hyperlocal publishers in the UK need to get more comfortable with participating in the community for ad sales.
We can’t all be Howard Owens. You look around the hyperlocal scene in the UK and the art of selling is lost on most people. Is is a different, different trade craft to finding a story.
It strikes me as odd that most people would be more comfortable doing a death knock than going into a local pizza parlour and asking for a 10 quid ad. Why? That seems odd to me. I know what I’d rather do.
Waghorn’s said his own ad platform, Addiply, could help publishers reach out to their communities to make ad sales.
It’s a bottom-up ad solution that, in our tiny, tiny way goes into battle with the adsenses and all the big betworks.
And bottom up solutions are what works, he said, “the world is turning upside down”. Citing Howard Owens again, Waghorn claimed that the door-to-door salesman is the missing link for hyperlocal ad sales. He contrased Owens’ approach with that of the big hyperlocal networks like AOL’s Patch.
I’m not Patch, descending down to you from on high, I am the one knocking on your door. Knocking on your door seven or eight times before you give me an ad.
Waghorn’s message? Journalists will knock on doors to ask about deaths, and will knock on doors looking for stories, and if they want to make hyperlocal pay they will have to start thinking about ad sales the same way.
If you are reporting on the referendum on the voting system, the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies or from one of the 305 town halls across England and Northern Ireland with local elections, how are you going to present the results?
As a text only story which reports how many seats have been lost or gained by each party? Or are you going to try visualising the results? Here are five free and easy to use tools to liven up the results.
Many Eyes is a free data visualisation tool. If you have not tried your hand at any data journalism yet, today could be the day to start.
A. Create a Many Eyes account;
B. Create your spreadsheet using Excel, Open Office (free to download) or Google Docs (free and web based);
You could follow my example by putting ward names across the top, parties down the side and the number of each ward seats won by each party. You will need to include the total in the end column.
C. Paste the data into Many Eyes, which will automatically read your pasted information;
D. Click ‘visualise’. In this example I selected the ‘bubble chart’ visualisation. Have a play with other visualisations too;
E. Copy the embed code and paste it into your story;
OpenHeatMap is a way to visualise your results in a map. It is free and very easy to use. You start by creating a spreadsheet, uploading the data and you can then embed the map in your web page.
A. Go to OpenHeatMap (you don’t need a login);
B. Create a spreadsheet. The easiest was to do this is in Google Docs. You must name your columns so OpenHeatMap can understand it. Use ‘UK_council’ for the local council, ‘tab’ for the party and ‘value’ for the number of seats. In this example, the tab column indicates the party with the most seats; the value is the number of seats;
C. Click ‘share’ (to the right hand side of your Google Doc), ‘publish as a web page’ and copy the code;
D. Paste the code into OpenHeatMap and click to view the map. In this example you will see the parties as tabs along the top which you can toggle between. You can change the colour, zoom in to your county or region and alter the transparency so you can see place names;
E. Click ‘share’ and you can copy the embed code into your story.
Anyone can now join Storify (it used to be by invitation only). It allows you to tell a story using a combination of text, pictures, tweets, audio and video.
A. Sign up to Storify;
B. Create a story and start adding content. If you click on the Twitter icon and search (say for ‘local election Kent’) you can select appropriate tweets; if you click on the Flickr icon you can find photos (you could ask a photographer to upload some); you can also add YouTube videos and content from Facebook. When you find an item you want to include, you simply drag and drop it into your story;
C. The art of a good Storify story is to use your skills as a storyteller. The tweets and photos need to be part of a narrative. There are some fantastic examples of story ideas on Storify;
D. Click to publish;
E. Copy and paste the embed code into the story on your site.
C. The video will be automatically posted live to your Qik profile but you’ll need to add the code to your website before you record (you can also live stream to your Facebook page, Twitter account and YouTube channel).
D. To do this go to ‘My Live Channel’ (under your name). Click on it to get your embed code for your live channel.
E. Paste your embed code in your website or blog, where you want the live player to be.
How did you get on with the five tools? Let us know so that we can see your election stories.
The National Union of Journalists has called on Johnston Press shareholders to encourage management to work with the union.
In an open letter, published on its website, being presented to the publisher’s shareholder’s at an AGM today, the union criticises cuts at Johnston Press.
The Johnston Press annual report boasts about ‘local content’, ‘teams of local experts’ and proclaims that ‘Content is King’. Yet behind the corporate jargon, the company has reduced staff in its editorial teams dramatically in the last 12 months, with so-called ‘back-office functions’ – which include newspaper content creators – being moved sometimes miles away from the communities they serve.
The much-hailed new content management system is ‘operational’ across the business. This is purely down to the hard work of journalists. The company’s failure to invest in new hardware made the shaky implementation of the system exceedingly difficult. Similar systems have been introduced successfully at other newspaper groups who recognised this was a key investment that couldn’t be brought in on the cheap.
Over 230 editorial staff have been made redundant; significantly, 85 per cent volunteered to leave, a testament to the poor morale amongst staff. Those made compulsory redundant were often treated badly – in some cases individuals were given only a few hours to make a choice between a huge pay cut and imposed relocation or being forced to leave. All of this has taken place at a company that claims to belong to ‘Investors in People’.
The platform, which ran three blogs for Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh, was first launched in March 2010, described at the time by Guardian editor in chief Alan Rusbridger as a “tiny toe in local web water”.
But – continuing with the metaphor – it seems the waters may have been too cold, as the Guardian decided to start winding down the sites this week. The decision drew much disappointment from readers, expressed in both the comments section on this Guardian article, and across social media.
Editor of the project Sarah Hartley used Storify to bring together some of the reaction on Twitter. And speaking of Twitter there is already a hashtag campaign gathering pace on the site in particular reference to the Cardiff service.
On his blog Andy Dickinson contributes his thoughts, turning the debate onto understanding the value of the “beatbloggers” behind each site.
No, I’m sure that the Guardian has learned loads and will see the benefit. I’m sure they understand how to run a crowd now.
I’m sure they see the value in having someone on the ground. They must see the potential of new technology in having faster, targeted and responsive journalism. It even strengthened their brand – albeit in a passive way.
So a lot for the Guardian to be proud of. But the failure of any experiment comes from how you use the results not the experiment itself. And they’ll fail if they take the results and don’t keep the hyperlocal team.
… The truth is that the value of the Guardian local communities rests with them; their work and their relationship building. The unique nature of each area can’t be homogenised in to a broad model. The people who are upset to see the sites go didn’t have a relationship with the Guardian – the Guardian is the bastard that broke their realtionship up!
You can’t just transplant the Guardian Cardiff model anywhere. You could put Hannah or John or Michael anywhere and they’d use that experience. But you might also lose some of their passion and, with the best will in the world, there would be little or no reason for their Guardian Local audiences to follow them.
And so, Dickinson goes on to say, hyperlocal is not a model that large media organisations “can ever get right”. The impact of the closure of Guardian Local on the perceived future of hyperlocal journalism also formed part of paidContent’s reaction to the news:
Despite years of talk, hyperbole and failed experiments in “hyperlocal” journalism, which has been championed by many including the Guardian Local staff, there remain few concrete examples of formalised such efforts becoming commercially sustainable.
In the latest re-emergence of the hyperlocal hype curve, some pundits have even been pitching the paradigm to journalism students as the rock-star, enterprise-journalism career to seek out, in an industry where graduate job vacancies have dried up.
GNM’s decision may be one more indication that there is no future for industrialised “hyperlocal” journalism. At least its staff were salaried, trained professionals.
But the publisher says it will “integrate communities and topics into our wider site coverage wherever possible” and versions of the idea live on through sites like Northcliffe Media’s LocalPeople, networks like AOL’s Patch, Scotland’s good-looking STV Local and the imminent new UK government-sanctioned local TV network.
Some consolation to the faithful – GNM is also aiming to secure its future at the international, not local, level, by courting a US audience to sell as advertiser scale. Meanwhile, the many independent, volunteer-run hyperlocal blogs which had already existed prior to each of these exponents will go on publishing, perhaps buoyed by the qualitative, if not commercial, success of Guardian Local.
But there could still be a future for hyperlocal and the Guardian in the areas reached by its local project, in one form or another. Writing in the comments section of her own article on the Guardian, head of digital engagement Meg Pickard said one potential way forward could be for communities in the affected areas to raise funds to keep the project going, or carry on with the blogs themselves and keep the legacy going.
On that note, in conversation with editors here earlier, an interesting idea was mooted: would any of the local communities or individuals affected be interested in carrying on the Cardiff/Leeds/Edinburgh blogs? Or fundraising a sum to enable us to continue?
If we could find an alternative – community-supported? – funding model, that could extend the local project…. Worth pondering? Any thoughts?
Stumping up a bit of cash by way of pledging support (rather than full-on funding) to the Guardian Local site is not out of the question for Matt Edgar in Leeds, who writes on his blog that he’d be happy to commit the value of his print subscription to a citizen-run news service in the area “that offers quality writing with a determinedly local focus” – if 35 other local people will do the same, he says.
The Guardian is “winding down” its Guardian Local pilot including the successful Leeds blog. I think this is a mistake.
In just a short time John Baron and Sarah Hartley have created a service that gives a new and authentic voice to the UK’s sixth largest city. They’ve proven the value of a professional beatblogger who nurtures and complements the wider network of local bloggers.
… And as I wondered what to do, it struck me that I already pay the Guardian £23.32 per month to subscribe to the print edition of the (London-based) paper. What if that money went directly to supporting, in Mike’s words, “quality writing with a determinedly local focus”? And how many (or how few) committed subscribers would it take to make a service sustainable?
Back of an envelope, 36 print subscribers pay the Guardian £10,000 per year. It wouldn’t fund a whole beatblogger but it’s certainly enough to get the ball rolling. If you subscribe to the Guardian (or indeed any other daily paper) in Leeds would you consider switching that spend to a citizen-run news service? I would, and so far seven other people have joined me on Pledgebank.
