This weekend’s first unconference event for those running local community websites raised some fascinating issues – not least in areas of ethics and access.
Bringing together people from across the UK to share skills, knowledge and experience meant Talk About Local 09 quickly revealed some of the issues for these self-publishers, community activists, bloggers and journalists.
And how these people are considered lies at heart of these issues – what do we call someone who’s taken it on themselves to start a website for the local community and how should they be treated?
It was clear from listening to their experiences that there’s no consensus on this. At the one extreme, local councils had denied access and even been accused of making late-night pressuring calls to remove material, while at the other end of the scale, some more enlightened council press officers treated the new news sources in the same way as the established local newspaper.
As I pointed out in The Guardian piece on this issue, the governing body the National Association for Local Authorities is reviewing its stance, but one thing’s for sure, the authorities are not moving quickly enough to properly reflect the reality of the changed local news landscape.
One of the participants in Saturday’s event thinks the issue is one of perception of who brings ‘the truth’, as a posting on the blog Culturing Stuff says;
“Just lately it seems as though every institution we hold dear, has some kind of skeletal defect waiting to be discovered if we decide to open the cupboard door. So with this in mind let’s revert back to the point… How come blogging is blogging and the news is THE NEWS (all official and truthful) and is Bloggin seen as a lesser being, just because the format has no established rules or code of conduct?”
All this appears to lead us back to one of the debates circulating last week about transparency and it is perhaps that, in the end, which will provide the measure of whether something is regarded as credible or truthful by the authorities currently keeping the gate of information sources.
Any journalists – or council press officers – want to comment?
* See more pictures at the Flickr pool for Tal09 and dip into the day’s debates with this Tweetdoc.
Dim Sum Digital 
Having had a chat about this issue with a few people who run local blogs, I suspect there are a number of issues at play here.
Councils are, by nature, risk-averse organisations. That is why they tend to contract large organisations and, I imagine, why in many cases they feel more comfortable dealing with the incumbent media organisations in their local area.
These media organisations may not be any better or worse at telling the “truth”, but they do have established reputations and have built up a long-standing relationship with the council. As you mention they also have established industry rules or codes of conduct that – in theory at least – allow redress. Blogs are, in that sense, unknown entities to be treated with suspicion.
As an example, it is interesting to note that – apart from The Birmingham Post, Birmingham Mail and Express & Star – the only other local news website Birmingham City Council seems to have developed a relationship with is The Stirrer. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this same website was set up by an ex-BBC journalist (Adrian Goldberg). For better or worse, organisations like councils still see mainstream media connections as a mark of credibility.
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Unfortunately you will still find a lot of people in journalism who will argue that the only true journalist is the one that’s been to journalism school. In academia you will be ostracised if you dared think otherwise; and from there this makes its way into the minds of the future journalists, perpetuating the stereotype.
What a lot of those people fail to see is that, like being a musician (and unlike being a doctor), journalism is easy to pick up and practice by laymen. And, like in music (but not in medicine), laymen can achieve things most college-spawned journalists can’t even dream of.
If I grabbed a guitar and played in your favourite club, you would consider me a guitarist. Even if I sucked: in that case I’d just be a bad guitarist. Same with blogs or any other media.
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I was having a discussion with another journalist only last night about how universities churn out journalism graduates who are largely unequipped for actually being a journalist. Many find that they can’t get jobs on paper – local, regional or national – because they haven’t got that all-important NCTJ qualification. And those that choose to go straight into freelancing quickly discover that despite studying for 4 years they weren’t taught how to pitch, or do any of the other things a freelance must do to survive and thrive.
But, as Dilyan points out, you don’t need to have studied journalism to be a journalist. Much of it can be picked up on the job, the rest from McNae’s (probably!). Where local papers are disappearing, these non-journalist journalists perform a vital service plugging the gap and ensuring that local news still gets published.
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There’s a new paper round where I live called the Hackney Citizen, which has links on its website for three ‘journalist jobs’ all of which are unpaid. Isn’t the big issue about the economic model of generating and publishing news stories and generating that actually require someone to sit down and research in a proper way to get to a ‘truth’. I applaud the Hackney Citizen in its endeavour to give a different point of view and provide some much needed competition for the Hackney Gazette, and the ‘paper’ that Hackney council circulates that is so obviously full of puffery it makes me vomit. PS I am not a journalist, but am a citizen.
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I like the quote from NALC in the Guardian piece
“We can say anecdotally that we would encourage councils to treat only accredited journalists as journalists. And treat citizen journalists as citizens.”
To me this reads: If you work for a paper, radio station or TV station that has a website then new media is fine. If you run solely on-line then go away.
As for treating citizens as citizens, I dream of living in a local authority where I can phone up the press office to ask for information and be given it. Rather than the refusal we get currently.
I can see the point in some way that you don’t want 100 people turning up and wanting to sit in the press benches (however unlikely this is to happen in a council meeting!) but what happens when the local paper closes, look at Bedworth. Does the council then become a closed shop to news?
The other point is NALC give guidelines, not rules or law. So any council can engage with ‘New Media’ if they want at whatever level they want. Look at Walsall, a shining example of how to get it right.
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Joanna makes a great point. Local authorities are required to ‘play it safe’ in a way. If it hits the fan government like to be able to fall back on ‘proper procedure’ and ‘rules’ to justify their actions. Bloggers, as it stands at the moment, are outside of those procedures so the change to accepting them really needs to come from the top.
There is of course the chance that bloggers will mis-represent or just make stuff up. However, it’s not like that doesn’t happen with qualified journalists already anyway.
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Interesting one this – particularly for regional/local journalists.
One of the districts in which I work boasts at least four or five competition news websites.
While one or two of these sites demands the same access to the movers and shakers of the council as the more established media (ie us), they very rarely get it. Of course I welcome the advantage this provides, but you have to wonder how long this can be the case. As followers of blogs increase then they will become (or rather already are) ideal portals for local authorities to distribute information to a niche geographical community.
But then comes ‘the big question: How can citizen journalists be recognised as legitimate media when they don’t follow any code of conduct, or carry any formal training to identify them as journalists?
One citizen journalist I know will stop at nothing to get the photo, or the story – he really is the archetypal big screen hack, only on a small screen blog.
I’ve even heard stories of him barging into paramedics to get pix of a dying man at the scene of an accident. His reputation now goes before him and he has in fact tarnished the (already delicate) reputation of journalists in the community.
So does he deserve to call himself a journalist, or is he just a cheap hack? Probably the latter, but he’s a hack with an audience, and a growing one at that.
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Transparency will definitely be a key part of gaining the respect and co-operation of audiences and therefore councils. But I think journalists, be they bloggers or professionals, need more than that. As Dilyan says, anyone can be a journalist, even if it’s a bad journalist – but readers and councils are unlikely to take the bad ones seriously, however transparent they are, and why should they? So what more do you need? I’d start with confidence and motive.
Confidence is vital if you’re going to ask those tricky questions, publish uncomfortable truths – and not be bamboozled by late night phonecalls! For pros, it comes both from simply being given the job and from being armed with traditional journalistic skills either taught at hack school or picked up while doing it. The NCTJ is neither essential or perfect, but it is certainly practical, and online journalists should find what it teaches as useful as print.
And when interest or civic duty falter, a pro’s motive is there in the paypacket. The sheer variety of local news makes it highly unlikely any one unpaid person is going to be interested enough to dig consistently enough to maintain an audience’s – and council’s – trust. But a wage does.
This doesn’t mean to say that start-up community sites can’t achieve this too, I hope and believe they can. They certainly need to find a different business model to provide the paypacket. But the confidence borne of skills learnt and developed by decades of MSM local journalists is well worth preserving.
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I think a lot of press offices are caught in the same limbo that newspapers are, in that they just aren’t really sure how to handle the internet and the opportunities it offers for Random Acts of Journalism.
Right now, people working in the media have clearly defined roles – a reporter, a sports writer, a feature writer – but I would expect to see a rise in the term blogger as a profession in the very near future, just as it is in the US already.
The problem is that until that happens, organisations are always going to regard someone who rings up and asks a question ‘for the blog’ with confusion and, perhaps, suspicion – “Just what are they, and why should I be talking to them? The public should talk to their local councillor – I’m here to deal with the established media”.
Also, because a blogger doesn’t have the same backing as a newspaper/broadcast reporter (from a news editor who fields and deals with the complaint call to the issue of legal insurance) if some press officer gets on the phone in full bombastic mode some of them may well feel pressured into backing down… at the moment.
Everyone is able to break news – journalism may come into play at a later stage, but the ability to ask a question, note down the response, and publish it is not a mystic power.
I absolutely agree with Jo W – it’s a confidence thing. Right now, organisations are confident they can handle community news networks/bloggers. However, this embryonic news networks are getting more support, and gaining confidence all the time. Organisations are going to have to adapt to deal with this.
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When I first began as a reporter I found it much harder to get council press officers to talk to me than I do now. They preferred to speak to the chief reporter or the local government correspondent, or at least someone they had vaguely heard of.
It’s easier now that I have been working in the same place for some time, and many local press officers know who I am. But while they should, in theory, respond to any legitimate query, press officers tend to prefer dealing with people they know and have a relationship with. I guess that’s just human nature.
I’d suggest to bloggers that they just keep plugging away. Don’t assume that journalists are all getting access you’re not, because that may not be the case. There’s a good chance the same press officer has traditional hacks banging their heads against a brick wall too.
By the way, nobody’s ever asked me if I went to “journalism school”, whatever that is (studying for a degree in journalism?) As Louise Bolton says, the accepted qualification in journalism in the UK is the NCTJ, which is a vocational rather than academic qualification. Don’t tell anyone, but I never did that either . . .
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Firstly, a word of praise for the fantastic stuff that is going on in hyperlocal blogs across the country.
As a press officer the Talk About Local was invigorating, inspiring and illuminating. There is something about the ‘unconference’ format that really works. Well played Will Perrin and the team.
It certainly crystalised some thoughts on the path that we’re taking as a press office.
We think that our reputation includes what people are saying about us. If the debate is in the Walsall Advertiser or it’s letters page, we should be going there.
If it’s in the comments box on the Express & Star blog or on Twitter we’ll go there.
That’s just common sense isn’t it?
In a nutshell, we believe that social media is a really good channel of communication. But in order for it to work it really, really has to be a two way thing. If we talk to people we have to be prepared to listen. If only to pass on those messages to the right place.
It also means branching out into areas that we may not have before. For example, there’s a thriving flickr group in Walsall. We’re talking to them to try and arrange flickr meets in nominated council buildings, like the Council House.
After all, isn’t it a good idea to have the public come in, use and photograph public buildings?
Our @walsallcouncil feed isn’t linked to RSS. We can see the argument for it saving time by having this. It’s just that we think you’re missing a trick.
We’re only scratching the surface and I’m positive that in two, five and ten years time the world will look totally different.
Dan Slee
Press Officer
Walsall Council
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Thanks for contributing to this Dan – you’ll see that you’re the only press officer who has. So far 😉 Perhaps there will be some sort of best practice discussed in other town halls in the future and, hopefully, your experience will feature there. I’m sure a lot of bloggers would appreciate being treated in the way you describe here.
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Thanks Sarah. Fired in part by your excellent thread I’ve blogged on the subject here: http://bit.ly/nkPrD I’m sure as hyperlocals grow, develop and mature this debate will grow and grow.
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The excellent Sarah Lay from Derbyshire has blogged about hyperlocals and local authorities. It’s well worth a read.
http://www.sarahlay.com/2009/10/going-local/
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