better news

In the last three posts, I've described our journey with JesmondLocal so far. What’s next? During this “semester of learning”, we’ve decided we’re going to make a documentary. Inspired (and concerned) by the government’s plans for local TV, we’re asking ourselves: what would a really good local, social, community/crowd-sourced documentary look like? We have a good idea what bad local TV will look like. But could it be something better?

Aside from some funding from Newcastle University for our pop-up magazine and bootcamps, we have yet to invest time seeking longer-term financing. Our short term goal is to secure funding so that each year we could promote one of our student volunteers to a one-year, full-time contract as editor of the JesmondLocal news website.

In the last post, I explained five of the lessons we've learned since launching JesmondLocal two years ago. Here's another five:

Journalists have a part to play in halting the slide in civic engagement, reconnecting journalism with its democratic roots. We live-blog council ward meetings, so that the important decisions taken about our community are heard beyond the half dozen elderly people who bother to attend in person. We hold political hustings events during local elections so that the people of Jesmond get to meet and quiz the people who will represent them. If journalists don’t do it, who will?

Multimedia journalism, I’m discovering, can be practised by anyone. During a partnership with the BBC and local Jesmond schools to produce slideshows and short films for Radio 3’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage Gateshead, some of the best interviews were conducted by teenagers from a Jesmond school for children with severe hearing impairments. Journalists have a role to play in helping people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to tell their stories.

Passion and professionalism are mandatory. JesmondLocal wouldn’t happen without a handful of passionate professionals (that’s me, former Newcastle University journalism students Dan Howarth and Sophie Bauckham and chief evangelist David Baines) plus the patience of our partners, children and family pets. Sustainable journalism isn’t going to develop and evolve unless more professional journalists are willing to give up time and money to pass on their skills.

The next generation of journalists must see themselves also as educators. Those of us who have been in the business for longer struggle with the concept of sharing our skills. But in a post-Leveson world, journalists will have to work hard to recast the relationship with the public, and become more social in their working practices. It won’t be enough to be just a content creator – journalists also need to be organisers, collaborators, supporters and educators.

We are a unique laboratory of inquiry. I’m not sure that a larger media organisation could take the risks and leaps of faith that JesmondLocal ploughs into – community radio shows, pop-up magazines, journalism bootcamps -  or  be able to adapt and switch the focus of its inquiry as quickly when something doesn’t work, or a new innovation appears.

Two years on from launching JesmondLocal (see previous post for background), here’s what we’ve learned so far:

Student journalists need real world, grassroots work experience. For obvious reasons, opportunities for gaining experience in established news organisations are increasingly scarce. There is no shortage of classroom-based teaching, but would-be journalists, professional or otherwise, need first-hand, on-the-ground experience so they can learn the basics of newsgathering and reporting. We give each student a patch (crime, sport, health, environment etc) just as any local newspaper would do and show them how to build up their contacts book, work up story ideas, pitch them to a news desk etc. Hyperlocal/local journalism may not offer the sexy, celeb-filled material many of our students prefer to read, but we impress upon them that Jesmond, like any community, can be a microcosm of the wider world. When you learn the basics of covering a local politics story in Jesmond, you’re learning the basics of covering a political story at Westminster.

News organisations want to recruit talent with this real world, grassroots news experience. Our students often tell us that when invited to interview with the BBC, Sky and other news organisations, the JesmondLocal experience on their CVs is what often gets discussed the most.

What student journalists need to learn is changing all the time. The best university journalism courses are refreshed maybe once each academic year, if you’re lucky. But the tools, techniques and skills journalists need in 2012 are being refreshed almost daily. We offer our students three “semesters of learning” where, at our weekly team meetings, we run through a constantly changing curriculum of the latest multimedia tools, techniques and skills – Skyping experts from around the world to bring our volunteers the freshest insights.

Print is not dead. Convincing an advertiser to spend even £5 on a local online ad is almost impossible. But as soon as you mention the word “magazine”, local advertisers begin to take notice, writing cheques for up to £600 per page. Before Christmas, we created a magazine around the Turner Prize in just 48 hours at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. In the previous two years we’d barely sold enough online advertising to cover our domain fees. Yet in just a week, we sold enough print advertising not just to cover the costs of the magazine, but turn us a £1,000 profit (which we then foolishly donated to charity).

Projects accelerate learning and build community. The online news website remains the hub for what JesmondLocal does. But one-off projects, such as community radio shows and short films fast forward progress. For the same magazine project, we pulled in favours from a variety of creative professionals: illustrators, writers, photographers and film-makers. The chance to work alongside each other, including our students, gave everyone involved – professionals and volunteers - an opportunity to learn and explore new working partnerships.

Sometimes it feels like the journalism equivalent of the Hadron Collider – throwing a bunch of ideas, people, and projects together to see what sticks and what breaks.

We can’t yet claim to have discovered some elusive God particle. But on a good day, it can feel that we are inching our way towards discovering how, at least in our locality, we can create a model for journalism that is sustainable, independent and community-led.

JesmondLocal is a loose collective of professional journalists, educators and creatives, students and community volunteers… and anyone else we can pull in for specific projects.

But we do have a mission statement: to help people and organisations tell their own stories, in order to build cohesive communities around locations and shared interests.

And our vision of how we’ll do this is by cascading the skills of storytelling – journalism – from professionals to students to communities.

In a nutshell, we recruit a dozen to 15 student journalists each year, show and help them practise the skills, techniques, tools and values of independent, trustworthy, multimedia, grassroots journalism – then equip those students to pass on these newly-acquired skills, techniques, tools and values to would-be “citizen journalists” in the community.

To date we’ve struck successful partnerships with Newcastle University, the BBC, Waitrose and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. We’ve won some funding for community journalism bootcamps. We’ve even bagged some advertising. But most of the time, JesmondLocal runs on good will, a wing and a prayer.

I was a staff writer and section editor at The Guardian for 16 years, until I took voluntary redundancy in 2009. I freelance for newspapers (Financial Times, Guardian) and magazines (Management Today, Monocle – more details at http://ianwylie.co.uk). But a nagging itch that I ought to be better connected to where I live (Newcastle upon Tyne) brought me into contact with David Baines, a Newcastle University lecturer with a research interest in hyperlocal journalism. David encouraged me to take some of his students as volunteers and set up a news site for Jesmond, a suburb close to Newcastle upon Tyne city centre.

It was, perhaps, an ominous sign that media minister Jeremy Hunt chose to begin this week's presentations on his local TV proposals with the following quote from Winston Churchill: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

And there’s no faulting the minister’s enthusiasm for his project to create local TV stations in 65 towns and cities, despite wave after wave of criticism. Much it, such as the broadsides from London-based writers such as David Mitchell can easily be tagged as metropolitan putdowns of “the regions”.

Yet while Hunt’s intent is honourable – he talked of media’s role in creating and sustaining communities and the opportunity to nurture creativity and talent outside traditional media centres - it seems to me that this local TV proposal needs a reality check:

1. It’s 2011, not 1981. Which media entrepreneur in their right mind would, if given a blank canvas, choose TV as the platform for their new venture, when all the research suggests people are getting more of their entertainment and news online, and less from TV (and don't get me started on print)? Let's not faff on with TV transmitters and spectrum. Let’s fast forward to IPTV. As my friend Rick Waghorn points out, we’re all broadcasters (and rebroadcasters) now.

2. Cities are not local enough. A city is not a single community but a collection of many. If I'm going to bother to tune into Channel 8 for a couple of hours each day, I want to see news and features on my local (or hyperlocal) community, my immediate locality, the street I live on, the people, restaurants, local businesses etc that I engage with on a regular basis. (But of course, I would say that.)

3. Top-down models rarely work. I heard little or no talk of innovation at this week's presentation in Newcastle. As I looked around the room, what I saw was a group of experienced but panic-stricken broadcast professionals, desperate to re-apply the outmoded national or regional TV models they’ve been using for 20, 30 years and more. Like dinosaurs seeking one final meal. Yet these are the people (plus the local/regional newspaper groups sniffing around) who will, by in large, be winning bids, rather than the grassroots innovators such as Saddleworth News TV or Sangat TV.

There are other (potential) flaws. My colleague David Baines, for example, believes newspaper groups which bid successfully will do so only (and cynically) for the public subsidy. And that’s before we get down the road of figuring out economic viability and sustainability.

The people who run our football clubs (and Newcastle United in particular) seem to believe different rules apply to the business they're in - and that it's in their interest to alienate the customers they serve at every opportunity.

Latest example: players threatened with legal action if they criticise their club on Twitter, after Joey Barton exercised his freedom of expression.

Not all football fans are fans of Joey Barton, but many supporters value how Twitter has given them access to the wealthy footballers whose inflated salaries they pay through inflated ticket prices:

@StuartRowson Whatever you think of @Joey7Barton and his views - he's speaking directly to 266,484 people. Good or bad: The power of social media..

@EvanQuick Thanks must go to @Joey7Barton who has given his best for the club. All the best and thanks for turning a lot of fans opinions around.

@metalhead4eva @Joey7Barton joey, you are one of a few that understands what wearing the black and White means, on half of every toon fan - thanks

Would you open a chip shop next to McDonald's?

It doesn't sound like the smartest business move, but as I was watching Geordie Finishing School for Girls on BBC3 this week (as one does) I noticed that Gormans, a local F&C shop, has done just that - opened a takeaway right next door to a McD's in Byker.

It didn't seem very smart to me... until I read, in this blog by Instapaper creator Marco Arment, that local (good) coffee shops often experience an uptick in fortunes when Starbucks moves into their neighbourhood (he was referring to this earlier post in Slate).

Each new Starbucks store creates a local buzz... but when the queues at Starbucks grow beyond the point of reason, customers start venturing out, spy another coffeehouse right next-door and bingo! New customer.