Canadian Hyperlocal News Project

This essay by Regan Burles is the winner of the 2012 Dalton Camp Award for commentary on the link between democracy and the media. On July 7, 2011 journalist Kai Nagata quit his job as CTV’s Quebec City bureau chief. His departure, and the article in which he explained the reasons for it, drew significant media attention across Canada. The essay garnered more than 100,000 views in a month, and by that time over a thousand online comments had been made on the piece.

According to Robert Quiqley, journalism professor at University of Texas at Austin and former social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, one of the biggest mistakes journos make is to “just push out their content without actually interacting with anybody… So, they are missing out on a huge opportunity to engage their audience, get sources, and get feedback on their stories.”

Alan Rusbridger is a busy man on two sides of the Atlantic. The editor of the Guardian seems to be everywhere, writing, tweeting, and leading the paper’s ongoing coverage of the British phone hacking scandal that continues to pick off executives and editors of Rupert Murdoch’s News International. Meanwhile, on this side of the water, he’s directing the establishment of The Guardian’s New York-based operation, where they hope to claim a foothold in the US media market through an aggressive online-only play.

The Atlantic Home Thursday, May 31, 2012 Follow the Atlantic » Twitter Facebook RSS iPhone Politics Business Entertainment International Technology National Health Magazine video Peter Osnos Peter Osnos - Peter Osnos is a journalist turned book editor/publisher. He spent 18 years working at various bureaus for The Washington Post before founding Public Affairs Books. More All Posts Email Osnos Share Share Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on twitter « Previous Business | Next Business » Email Email Print Print Is Philanthropy Print Journalism’s Last Hope? By Peter Osnos May 29 2012, 1:51 PM ET 15 The Ford Foundation recently pledged $1.04 million to Los Angeles’ struggling daily. We might be looking at the future of newspapers. latimes-body.jpgAP It was startling to read last week that the Ford Foundation was awarding a two-year grant of $1.04 million to the Los Angeles Times for the hiring of reporters.

Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Center for Civic Media taught a class this semester tailor-made for Nieman Lab readers: “News in the Age of Participatory Media.” The hook: What happens if you treat journalism as an engineering problem, bringing together the efforts of journalists and computer scientists?

Ross Hawkes is the founder of the hyperlocal news website Lichfield Live and a senior journalism lecturer at Staffordshire University. Here he argues that journalists working for large media companies awash in a culture of centralisation no longer connect with or understand their audience. This is an edited excerpt from a chapter in the the book, What do we mean by local.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” George Orwell wrote in his satire Animal Farm. This sarcastic quote is turning out to be true for hyperlocal journalists, many of whom are finding limited access to local public records and meetings while more rights are granted to representatives of traditional media organizations.

Australian academic Lawrie Zion has launched Best Practices, a blog he hopes will ‘open up conversations about ethics and excellence’ in digital journalism

In late April, a six-year-old digital startup called Journatic struck a deal with a 165-year-old newspaper company to take over its online community news operations. When the deal was reported on hyperlocal watchdog site Street Fight, commenters hit the fan.

There’s a craving in the air for a definitive statement on what journalism is, something to rally around as everything changes. But I want to do the opposite. I want to explode journalism, to break it apart into its atomic acts. I’m beginning to suspect that taking it apart is the only way we can put it all back together again.

ast July, a high-speed train crashed in the Wenzhou suburbs of China’s Zhejiang Province, killing 38 people and injuring 192. The Chinese government’s media apparatus quickly swung into gear, working overtime to quell growing rumors of an engineering flaw that may have caused the crash. But despite the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt at full control over China’s media outlets — ordering that newspapers avoid mentioning the crash at all, except to spotlight “positive news or information released by the authorities” — the anguish and grief of the Chinese people would not be silenced, as they took to social media outlets to demand answers from the authorities.

The rise of social media tools in recent years has empowered online news startups to increase content distribution, market their sites and track users. But most say they cannot lasso data to track whether they are turning users into supporters who will help their sites survive.

With civic engagement becoming an increasingly critical component of successful governance in the 21st century, cities around the world are seeking to leverage technology as a tool for citizen participation, but civic leaders face real challenges finding, evaluating, and deploying the right tools in the absence of good information.That’s why earlier this year, we announced our plans to build Engagement Commons: a comprehensive and dynamic catalog of the tools available for civic engagement and the real-world stories of their deployments.

A keynote presentation by Jan Schaffer at the BBC Connecting Communities Conference in Salford, United Kingdom

“Hyperlocal news is not a new phenomenon to Welsh language culture. After all, we’ve had the local print-based newsletters known as papurau bro since the 1970s. The first of these was Y Dinesydd here in the fair city of Caerdydd. The paper continues to this day under that title, which roughly translates as The Citizen.

Today’s extract from What do we mean by local?* is by Tom O’Brien, co-founder and editor of the north London-based website, MyMuswell. loc Its genesis was the 2011 riots, he explains, because nothing was being reported about buildings being attacked in Muswell Hill. He and a friend wondered why, and then they did something about it…

Two things today made me assess the small progress made in hyperlocal journalism to date, and to reconsider the direction we might be headed in.

A new academic journal is to be launched in February next year which will focus on emerging trends in digital journalism. Digital Journalism will be edited by professor of journalism studies at Cardiff University Bob Franklin, who already edits Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies.

The new opinion department of the New York Times has been experimenting with Google+ Hangouts, hosting a video interview with Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the United Nations.

Twitter is a tool for the future