links for 2009-05-10

James Hatts, editor of London SE1, summed up the essence of hyper-local news by saying “if you do these things right then there is a lot of goodwill out there” and those concerned about their area “will care that it’s well reported on and that there is a sense of community and information sharing“.

If the wire editor and feature editor roles are becoming obsolete for print newspapers, as Steve Yelvington persuasively argues, then those editors should be retrained — or retrain themselves — as web curators. Rather than become obsolete, these editors could become essential to their news organization’s future on the web.

Northcliffe Media is to roll out a series of ultra-local sites with a focus on social media, according to reports.
The local newspaper publisher will launch an initial 30 sites in June, targeted at towns with a population between 10,000 and 40,000 which have no local paper or website.

This is a project from CAN-UK, who’ve been working from Ladywood for more than a decade. Lozells already has the very fine http://www.lozells.info and the South Lozells Housing Regeneration area is beginning to use the web to tell the story of how it is progressing, see vision-lozells.org