links for 2010-06-22

This was not a bid for citizen journalism to take on professional journalists as the debate has ofen skewed to,
but a genuine attempt to hear from the bottom upwards new voices and fresh stories. In many ways the excercise also mirrored videojournalisms unrehearsed look and feel towards approaching reports.

We in the UK are now expecting ‘a tsunami of data’ to flow from government thanks to the Big Society declaration (including a new ‘right to data’). Some people have begun using the data for development – such as the live train map for the London underground. But it is well worth casting our eyes across the Atlantic – we can learn alot from current developments in the US.

Local online competition is on the rise….and now, at a much faster pace. Don’t be fooled into thinking, ‘hyper-local doesn’t work yet’. Those early journalist-lead experiments from CUNY, New York Times and ChicagoNow still struggle for financial stability due to this common flaw: revenue & sales expertise took a back seat to editorial & tech in the start-up phase. Indeed, ‘build it and they will come’ does not work so well on the web.