How to microblog in high heels

It’s coming up to the first monthversary of the hyper-local news website I set up for my local area – Bournvillevillage.com – and today Newsquest decided to jump on the hyper-local band wagon and set up a number of local websites itself.

So media organisations are cottoning on to the success of the hyper-local scene. Essentially a hyper-local website is a blog which acts as an outlet for community news for that postal code area – news which is not already being covered by the local print newspaper. It was only a matter of time before local media organisations decided community blogs were the best way of filtering in news which they no longer had the number of reporters to cover. But Newsquest’s simple model for the local blogger threatens to overlook some of the bigger problems which have yet to be worked out in this very new medium.

In some way, Newsquests Northern Echo’s hyper-local model vastly resembles the core structure of many hyper-local blogs – pictures, stories and a basic CMS structure, roughly three posts a week, and the personal touch of the local writer themselves.

But there are a number of issues which arise out of connecting a hyper-local blog to a local media organisation.

Firstly, there is no mention of pay for the local bloggers – who I presume are expected to write and research local stories in their spare time out of love for the community – but running a blog is time-consuming and can be difficult to juggle alongside a job and personal commitments. So where is the incentive for the local blogger to work for Newsquest as opposed to just starting their own blog and avoiding the thrice weekly deadline.

Secondly, corporate media outlets may have had little experience with the hyper-local enterprise, and may be unaware of how the focus of a hyper-local blog changes once the blog is connected to a larger media organisation. Security, for example, becomes a key issue, as well as resources. Here are a couple of questions media organisations looking to take hyper-local blogs under their umbrella might need to consider:

• Will the local blogger be properly protected under libel law? Will they be able to employ the same defenses as staff reporters if they commit libel because, having minimum or no training in media law, they may add quotes/pictures in a blogpost which unbeknown to them are utterly defamatory?

• What happens if members of the public contributing to the site write something their neighbours don’t like? Without the protection of an editor or eyeballs of a subeditor to check for editorial integrity and libel – the local blogger could fall into the same plight as the columnist Liz Jones who has been the victim of violent attacks by neighbours because she wrote about the community she lived in in an unsavoury light (local bloggers take note – slagging off your neighbours won’t make you popular).

News organisations need to work out these legal issues before they commision local writers. If the local blogger lives in the community they are writing about, they run the risk of offending the very people they are providing the news service to. See more comments on the hyper-local safety debate here.

Hyper-local blogs cannot create investigative journalism in the traditional sense – because local bloggers don’t have the protection or experience to go poking around looking for dead bodies or unraveling council controversies. This is not necessarily a negative problem, however, as it means the focus of the hyper-local blog is more on the community rather than generating ground-breaking news. But it is surely an issue the umbrella organisation needs to discuss with the blogger to make sure they know the parameters for their work, and vision for how it integrates into the community and the news organisation.

Talk about Local is a service which helps local people get blogs up and running – but the emphasis is on community empowerment and giving people a voice to talk about what they love – not providing journalism for an umbrella media organisation.

The point is, media organisations need to work out how setting up a bunch of local people with a blog is going to contribute to their website – and how much of the blog will be focused on news, and how much on community, and how this is turn is going to help improve that local area. There must be an awareness of the issues surrounding hyper-local blogs as well as a celebration for what they can bring to a community.

And finally, some of the most successful hyper-local blogs I know have a personal touch which is integral to the feel of the blogger and their community. If the blog is just a modified template of the newspaper website it won’t have the ability to flourish in the same way independent blogs might.

There are other examples of news organisations setting up a list of community or local blogsites as part of their newspaper website, such as the Dorset Echo. The fact news organisations are wanting to create more outlets for getting local news to foreground is, in its essence, a positive step in the right direction. But they must make sure the welfare of the blogger and the community is priority, and not just wanting to appear part of the hyper-local phenomenon.