Sitting on a goldmine? (picture from Flickr)

I’m in sunny London tomorrow to sit on a panel talking digital with digital editors from Trinity mirror newspapers. So I’ve been giving some thought to the lot of a digital editor.

You could see the digital editor as the interface between the newsroom and your digital audience. You’d be right. But do that wrong and there is a danger that they are your only interface – the rest of the newsroom ‘hide’ behind them.

There is also a danger that a digital editor becomes a digital production sub. They are the ones that make the content that’s produced in the newsroom ‘web friendly’. They are the ones that find the links, pictures and (more often than not) add the tags to journalists content that not only make stuff SEO friendly (along with those headlines they re-write) but also ensure that all the related stuff hidden in the archives is magically made visible.

There is also an expectation that your digital editor would be the one trying out all the new stuff – video, data and all of that kind of thing. Making it happen.

On top of that they’ll be ‘managing community’; keeping the readers comments under control and posting to Facebook.

Whatever their lot, there’s a lot of it!

The nice thing is that (most) newsroooms are more enlightened places. They don’t sideline the digital editor to simply be the web monkey who sits in the corner (right?). The input of journalists, who can see the value to their own journalistic identity, is the norm rather than the exception (right?). Which got me thinking a little.

The outward facing nature of a digital in newsrooms is vital. No doubt about that. Reaching out to community and offering ways in to the newsroom and news process is really important. All those things like crowdsourcing etc (the stuff that relies on that shifting relationship) is empowered and powered by them. Digital editors are frontline staff. But what about the other direction?

In this ‘digital first’ world, especially in organisations where end-to-end production systems are making all content digital, the digital editor may be sitting on the most complete map of expertise and interests in your newsroom outside your editors head. Archived, tagged ready to go.

When we crowdsource, we make an effort to find the interested and informed parties in our audience and get them to work with the newsroom. But what about the interested and informed in the newsroom? Aren’t they a crowd worth pulling together as well?

A newsrooms, especially newspaper newsrooms, have a (long) collected history and knowledge built on the individuals who work there. Maybe in the rush to push things out and engage on multiple platforms, we miss what’s right in front of us.

Maybe this thinking harks back to the days of librarians – the human databases that could connect your story to an article 20 years ago. I’m not suggesting that digital editors are librarians but maybe, in a world where digital is the thing that ties newsrooms together, they are sitting on all the data that gives places the material you put out there in context.

So perhaps it isn’t just about finding out about what your audience is clicking. Maybe your digital ed could also be telling you what your journalists are writing about? When and how often?

Sitting through a talk on the regulation of the press and then coming home to see the Sun’s front cover for today, I couldn’t help but put the two together.

“Our work with Condé Nast creates a new channel for customers to access the content they want from some of their favorite publications,” said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president, Inkjet and Web Solutions, Imaging and Printing Group, HP. “And, when coupled with our scheduled delivery service, allows customers to get the content they want, whenever they want it.”

Cool. What’s the story then HP? Digital paper? A new flexible tablet? A competitor to Newstand? No, that would be silly woudnt it? No. They have something a litle dafter to offer.

The big idea is not to charge people for the magazine content but charge them for the ink!

Meranda Watling over at 10,000 words highlighted HP’s plans for  a new subscription service that will deliver in cartridges to you every month, bundled in with that will be a reason to use the ink  – a subscription to magazines you can print out.

“This project is one of the many ways Condé Nast is using emerging technology to engage consumers,” said Julie Michalowski, senior vice president, Consumer Business Development, Condé Nast. “With this new HP pilot program, consumers will be able to have their favorite Condé Nast content at their fingertips.”

Yes, their ink-stained fingertips.

You could interprit this as a media organisation trying new things (and kudos to that) but, to me,  this is more like a technology company buying in to the worst of media models. This is HP turning in to one of those companies that sells you stuff on the back pages of magazines or those multi-part ‘build a model of the titanic’ things;  ‘Just 200 easy payments and you could have this beutiful copy of last Decembers vougue !’

In some ways this is no skin of Conde Nasts nose. If they already have digital editions, bundling them with, well, anything, is just an easy option. But for HP this sounds depsperate.

A few years ago I wrote a post about mapping post office closures using google maps and yahoo pipes.  I used that combination because of an issue with google maps and post codes. I needed to convert the posts codes in to a lat, long format – yahoo pipes did that job.

I noted that @patrickolszo mentioned that post on twitter today and I realised it was a bit long in the tooth and, of course, things have moved on considerably.  So here is how I’d do that now using googledocs and google fusion tables. 

I’ll use the data from the original map which came from publicservice.co.uk which is not current but at least it keeps the link across the posts!

Importing the data

In the previous example I noted that I did a fair bit of manipulation on the information splitting the text up to make columns I could use.

If you look at the sheet you can see it is actually a bit of a mess in places but it’s raw data. Truth be told I went through excel to do some column splitting and then combining to get the postcode out of the address.

Now I guess you could explore tools like Google Refine to help with that kind of thing. But I’ve shared a version of the spreadsheet on Google docs which you will need to save in to your own google docs account. Once you have the spreadsheet, you can import it in to a fusion table. In google docs

• Click Create new and select Table
• Click Google Spreadsheets from the Import new table options
• Find your saved version of the post office spreadsheet and click Select

A version of the spreadsheet will be loaded. At this point you can make changes to the column headers – I changed Address three to complete address for example. The last screen prompts you to add contextual information. It’s really worth doing this.

Always add context to your data when given the chance

When its loaded in the data is not that different from the spreadsheet. Fusion tables splits it across a number of pages, 100 rows at a time but that’s all that’s really obvious. I’m not going to go in to the functionality etc. of fusion tables here though. I’ll just do the basics to get us to the map.

Mapping the data

The first thing we need to do is tell fusion tables what data we are going to map each row.

• Select Edit > Modify columns
• Select the Post Code column and change the Type to Location
• Select File > Geocode and select Post Code from the drop down
• Click Geocode

Changing the post code column type to location

Fusion tables will then generate location data based on the post codes in the table. Much easier than the Yahoo pipes solution! You can also try geocoding more generic information. You could, for example, set the Address two column type to location as well and geocode that. But if you have more than one post office in the same town that might cause problems.

Generating the map

No you have the location information

• Select Visualize > Map

Fusion tables will take the data and put it on the map. You’ll need to zoom in and move around to see the points in detail. Clicking on a point will open a standard speech bubble with more data. But overall it’s looking pretty good. Well, almost. One of our post offices seems to have moved from Sevenoakes to Northern France!

The basic map but with a problem

Checking the data, it seems that the post code is TN13 IHZ when it should be TN13 1HZ. It isn’t the only one but I’ll just correct that postcode for now :

• Click Visualize > Table to switch back to table view
• Click the Address two header
• Select Sort Desc
• Find Sevenoaks and change the appropriate Post Code Entry
• Click Visualize > Map to go to the map view

The updated map

Using a custom icon on the map

The share settings in fusion tables

Once that is done you’re good to go. Here’s an embedded version of the map.

Note: The embed works using an iframe so if you’re using WordPress.com, sorry, you’re out of luck when it comes to adding the map to a post.

Conclusions.

The process of mapping is obviously a lot simpler with something like Fusion tables and I think that underlines just how far we’ve moved. That’s not just in terms of the underlying technology which, when you think about it, is pretty amazing. It also shows just how far and how quickly data, geocoded or otherwise, has become mainstream.

Anyway, it’s a simple little example and there is a tonne more that you can do with fusion tables but I hope it’s a useful insight.

The BBC editors site has a post on the update to the BBC’s social media guidelines for journalists and for ‘official’ social media streams for correspondents.

The reasoning for that distinction was interesting:

We label the Twitter accounts of some presenters and correspondents as “official” – and are also today publishing some specific guidance for them [64KB PDF]. This activity is regarded as BBC News output and tweets should normally be consistent with this, reflecting and focusing on areas relevant to the role or specialism, and avoiding personal interests or unrelated issues. A senior editor keeps an eye on tweets from these accounts after they’re sent out.

Given some of my recent posts about tweeting as a journalist during the riots, this stuck out. I agree with the idea of consistency; if you are a BBC person then always tweet like you are the BBC. I think that is a point worth taking further. If you are a journalist, always tweet like a journalist.

Another point that caught my eye was

Finally, we remind people that programme or genre content – like @BBCBreaking andBBC News on Facebook - should normally be checked by a second person before it goes out. The guidance also urges people to think carefully about the practicalities and editorial purpose of this activity. It shouldn’t be started “because it’s what everyone does these days”.

The statement actually suggest that it should only be started if you have the resources to see it through. In principle, sound advice. In practice it could be a charter to simply not do it.

Credit where credit is due

The guidelines are pretty much concerned with output – what BBC people put out on social networks. But it’s the area of attribution that generates the most comment (when people are not bemoaning the character limit). The BBC came in for a bit of stick during the riots for crediting platforms not people for pictures from social networking sites. Pictures where from Twitter and not the person who put them there.

It seems that some people think that the ‘undue prominence’ argument is a suitable lever to get the BBC to change their approach. I think that’s a red herring. In this context they are sources first and commercial entities second. Taking that approach would suggest that no commercial company could be mentioned during the news. Perhaps the best you could argue is that there is an ‘undue reliance’ on social media instead of putting journalists on the street.

But I digress. FishFingers flags the issue asking:

if a comment is sent to the BBC and it is read on air or posted as part of “live” coverage, why are we told that it came from Twitter? Why does the communication medium have to even be mentioned? Why not simply say that the person sent a message?

It’s a good point but I think you do need to say where it came from as well as who said/posted it. Credit where credit is due but as journalists we should where possible, always cite our sources – makes it a bit more transparent doesn’t it?

Right, this press gazette article then.

 Editors involved in a review of the National Council for Training of Journalists’ NCE qualification for senior journalists have urged the training body to continue emphasizing traditional journalism skills over the use of new media.

Why?

…“without the solid grounding of journalism, good news writing, accuracy and sound interviewing skills to support the technical ability to write for blogs/web/social networking sites, the quality of that journalism will suffer and will become indistinguishable from citizen journalism.”

Why?

[the] “ability to spot a story, conduct a strong interview and then produce clean, legally sound, well-structured copy remains the priority”, and that “with these key skills everything else (social media, video etc) will follow”.

All makes a weird kind of logical sense doesn’t it – Get the basics right first and the rest will follow.

But there is an equally important reason for picking up the NCE

 “Editors are now able to shortlist and recruit candidates who have passed the exam,” the report said.

Of course it would. It was written by the people who set (and charge for) the exam.

So far so business as normal with the old vs. new media debate.

What industry needs right now not what’s right for industry

Frustrating as it is, I’m not surprised by the report or the reaction to it. I’ve kind of moved beyond being annoyed by the continued blurring of the lines between NCTJ marketing and the ‘views of industry’. What annoys me about this report is that it’s so output driven – it’s all about getting the paper out not about the process.

Looking at the relative importance of things just underlines how output driven it it is.

What's important?

What better way to interact with readers/viewers and listeners than social media. It isn’t the only way but it’s a good way and yet social media is down the running order.  When your editor can’t afford to let you out of the office and you have to do all your work via computer, some web skills would be important in finding news stories wouldn’t they? So why are they languishing at the bottom of the list?

Because they are seen as a way of getting content out there not getting content in or helping with the journalistic process. They will always be less important than getting the paper/programme out.

The responses also underlines a general attitude from editors that they are only interested in trainees with the skills they need to run the newsroom.  Whilst that might be a very real issue for them (and perfectly valid), for journalism in general it’s training for the lowest common denominator not for the future.

What’s important for the medium

In my digital newsroom module I’ve been using  a 2009 Journalism Skills survey from skillset that outlines the skills gaps across new and trad skills.

The new skills gap by medium

I think it’s clear that the priority of choices is completely driven by the medium. When it comes to traditional skills the basics are there but, again, I think the mediums show through.

Traditional Skills by gap

I use this stuff to show that the mediums demand a set of skills but the importance is purely down to the medium. Learn all of them and inject  appropriate amounts of digital to help you along and your better placed to exploit opportunities across all the mediums.

In that sense its a much more honest and useful report and it underlines what this NCE report is really about. It’s not really about what’s important but WHY. That’s driven by the medium and it’s demands and in that respect it has little or nothing to do with a broad concept of good journalism. It’s more about feeding the machine.

Look further

Look, I’m not saying the NCE isn’t valuable or worth doing. It is. I’m not saying that the basic skills are not important. Unlike many of the editors, I’m happy to see the importance of all the skills mentioned. * But lets’ have a little honesty in this.

The truth is that whether you think that some skills are fundamental (basic?) or not when it comes to the new stuff the following is true:

• Social/new/multi media does not come after journalism it is part of it.
• They are not mutually exclusive from accuracy etc.
• Just because some editors don’t need them ,doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable.
• If you’re not integrating appropriate digital tools in to your journalistic process your missing an opportunity.

So if you’re a journalist looking at this report I’d suggest a more open mind . See it as checklist not a hierarchy. See it for what it is and where it has come from.

Above all else, don’t let people with an agenda dictate what skills you learn. The truth is that none of this is difficult and there are some great people, editors amongst them, yes,online. They are right across this stuff (trad and new) who can help.

And whilst we are talking about it – this and this as well. Oh and while you’re at it, this and this

* I wish I didn’t have to but if I don’t say this then I’m simply a neophyte who doesn’t understand what proper journalism is all about! Maybe I don’t!

I spent a lot of time watching twitter last night. Watching the dynamics of tweets about the riots – the reports, the reaction and the rumours.

I retweeted a few things but tried to avoid directly tweeting. I had an opinion, some tweets I thought deserved a response but others responded in better ways. But then I did tweet:

Reporting that nothing is happening in your area/city? ask yourself is that really news.

August 8, 2011 9:21 pm via Osfoora HDReplyRetweetFavorite

@digidickinson

Andy Dickinson

I was frustrated by a steady stream of tweets from news orgs and journo’s outside of London (and at that time outside the confirmed trouble spot in Brum) tweeting that nothing was happening in their areas. Since when has journalism been about reporting something that hasn’t happened?

It was a generalised statement (well, rhetorical question) and people happily and appropriately began putting holes in it.

Of course it was worth tweeting. According to Martin Smith that’s how you stop the rumours…

@digidickinson no but it may help stem some of the wild rumours on here. #balancingact

August 8, 2011 9:25 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@martinsmith1979

Martin Smith

and those rumours where causing mass panic according to Brett Cullen

@digidickinson Im not saying that, Im saying reporting that something not happening in your area,at a time when there is mass panic, is news

August 8, 2011 9:39 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@iambrettcullen

Brett Cullen

Really? Mass panic all over the country? But we digress…

David Bartlett argued that’s what a journalist should do:

@digidickinson don't journalists have a duty to inform? Including to correct misinformation?

August 8, 2011 9:33 pm via UberSocial for BlackBerryReplyRetweetFavorite

@davidbartlett1

david bartlett

as did Neil Macdonald:

@digidickinson you're wrong Andy. Lots of tweets saying rumour riots here and there. Up to local paper to set record straight. We tweeted it

August 8, 2011 9:36 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@xxnapoleonsolo

Neil Macdonald

Then Louise Bolitin drove the proverbial bus right through my point:

@digidickinson actually, yes. I'm talking with other disabled, many are scared if fires start they won't be ab;e to escape

August 8, 2011 9:32 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@louisebolotin

Louise Bolotin

How do I argue with that? Push the point further and I’m in danger of suggesting that it’s fine for disabled people to be worried about burning in a fire!

So, according to twitter, the answer to my original question was a resounding yes. I was wrong and I held my hands-up.

@iambrettcullen @louisebolotin @martinsmith1979 @davidbartlett1 @xxnapoleonsolo #puttinghandsup

August 8, 2011 9:56 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@digidickinson

Andy Dickinson

Time and place

I still think that it’s right to question if journalists and media orgs should tweet ’nothing is happening’.

• From a journalistic point of view statements without any context are not news.

Despite protestations of its importance ‘no news’ statements like that would never make the front page or head of a bulletin.  As Neil Macdonald pointed out that they where more information than news. Journalism as a source of information – very valid.

A few tweets did quote authoritative voices – police etc. That was better. Some proper information in there. Many did not.

• Pushing out those statements assumes that tweets are a direct answer to the rumours.

Of course they aren’t – there is no connection to the source. Most didn’t link to the original rumour so how can people know what reports where being talked about? At best you show that nothing is happening at worst you amplify the concern to a new network.

• It assumes that your tweets go in to the same networks and hold the same weight as those spreading the rumours

That may be true for some networks (see below), but the rumour will always travel further than the rebuttal and that’ll be beyond your network before you have any influence.  This is not like a celebrity apparently dying. It’s not a singular event that picks up momentum in the absence of any other information. This is a dynamic situation that is driving a lot of traffic. Generalised statements will get lost in the noise and new information replaces it. True or not the noise will swamp weak signals.

In this instance I thought that the ‘no news’ tweets simply served to amplify what the network already knew – at best a pointless exercise. Like spitting in the wind. At worse it created the idea of problem that wasn’t there.

I have to say (and did at the time) that Louises example proves the point.

Louise is talking to a specific network, one that she passionately cultivates and serves. Last night she talked specifically to them with information and updates that where directly relevant to them. It wasn’t rumour control, it was useful information. That’s not what a lot of the tweets where. But as she pointed out, the generality of my statement was just as bad:

@digidickinson but you just proved to me why I'm happy to see ppl tweeting that their neighbourhoods are quiet. Is reassuring for 99% of us

August 8, 2011 9:54 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@louisebolotin

Louise Bolotin

I found that last statement interesting though “reassuring for 99% of us”. I think that should be 99% of us on twitter. Which is my last point:

• Panic on Twitter does not equate to real panic

Generalising does not help.

Mea culpa

Which is what I discovered and, of course, exactly what I did with my original tweet. Lack of specifics, a broad statement left me wide open. Lesson learned and, through experience maybe point proved.

I still hold my hands up.

WPHMI - Help me investigate for your blog

A little while back I had an email from Paul Bradshaw asking me what I know about wordpress themes. He wanted to know how easy it would be to create a Help me investigate theme for wordpress.

If you don’t know what Help me investigate is then, in summary, it was an innovative service that allowed people to start and manage crows sourced investigations – go and take a look at the site (and blog). The site itself is no longer running but the code for the original site is still being developed 

The result of that initial contact is a plugin called WPHMI (WordPress Help me investigate). It takes the basic principle of HMI and integrates it in to a wordpress blog.

Why a plugin and not a theme?

Hold on Andy! Didn’t Paul ask about developing a theme not a plugin?

Developing WPHMI as a theme (a whole skin for a blog) fitted with my thinking that someone looking to set up HMI on a blog would probably set up a blog just for that. i.e. They would start a new blog that only covered the subject of the investigation. But the more I played around the more I thought that people may also want to integrate investigations in to an existing blog. They may already have established the blog within their community and building another resource away from there may make managing things tricky. So I moved on to the idea of plugin pretty quickly.

Whilst that may be more flexible in terms of integrating the functionality, integrating the design is less successful. By fitting in to an existing blog you also have to fit in with the design and given the thousands of themes out there, thats no mean feat. So the plugin is designed (at the moment) to fit in with the standard Twenty-Ten theme.

Again the idea is that you could install wordpress, install and activate the plugin and have things working ‘straigh-out-of the box’. *

How does it work?

The plugin page has a brief set of instructions but from a technical point of view…The plugin works by adding two new custom-post types – Investigations and Challenges –  and a custom user – Investigation Contributor. You create an investigation and associate challenges for investigation contributors to complete. It also adds a new taxonomy called Topics which is used to organise the investigations by theme.

Technically speaking, the management of who is working on a challenge, whether the challenge is complete or whether an investigation is finished is done using custom data in the custom posts. This has it’s limitations compared to running a whole new table in the database to hold the data but there you go. I did explore the idea of parent and child relationships to manage investigations and challenges but I couldn’t get my head round it.

What’s next

I’m not sure. The plugin works but it is basic. There is a lot of tweaking and I’m sure some proper programmers and wordpress people will know better ways to do what I have done (or be able to correct the rubbish coding I have used). But, in the spirit of HMI, I wanted to put it out there and see what people made of it.

But I do have a list of things that I would like to  add/do time willing

• Custom RSS feeds for investigations and challenges - there are feeds for each of the topics.
• A dashboard widget that tracks investigations and challenges
• Make CSS more generic to improve compatibility with other themes

Maybe I should set-up a blog using the plugin to investigate improving it!

Important things to say

The plugin wouldn’t have happened if Paul hadn’t suggested it. The concept, format and design is all down to the original creators of the site:

The site was conceived by Paul Bradshaw, developed with Nick Boothand built by Stef Lewandowski. Journalists involved in the site have included Heather Brooke, James Ball and Colin Meek.

If you do decide to take the code and do more with it, that should always be made very clear in what you do. Credit them above all else.

I should also note that the plugin uses slightly modified version of a Meta-box script by Tran Ngoc Tuan Anh to create the meta boxes on the post pages.

So if you want to download the plugin and have a play then take a look at the WPHMI page for more.

* I know that wordpress now ships with TwentyEleven! If this plugin lives for any length of time in its current form then I would look at ‘phasing out twentyten support’ :) 

I spent some time in Bergen last week (lovely place, bloody expensive beer!) to talk to some people about a new content management system.  Whilst I was there I dropped in on a seminar about data…

…dedicated to the emerging “web of data” and how it could create new possibilities in a deeply disrupted media economy.

The shorthand for this was ‘breaking out of the silos’. To underline that point, some of the organizers  were running around in municipal-workers jackets. That was a bit lost on me other than thinking Norwegian workers are pretty snappy dressers!

It turned out to be a really interesting, mixed bag of people who were fired up by the possibilities of linking open data (LOD).

Pia J.V. Josendal opened the batting with a neat presentation that was kind of a dummies guide to data. A few interesting things in there for me like finding out what a triple is and also the five star rating system for your data.

The next delegate was Hjalmar Gislason from DataMarket.com, a nifty website that collects data (time series at the moment) and lets you visualize it like this.

I was struck by what a cool name they had and pondered that it shows just how recent the mainstream interest in this stuff is that you could get a name like that. Hjálmar Gíslason agreed.

@digidickinson Yup, when we secured the domain in 2009, the term "data market" had hrdly been coined. Imgine?!

May 11, 2011 12:20 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@datamarket

DataMarket

His presentation was quite nifty too.

One presentation I couldn’t stay for but looked really interesting was Rune Smistad’s run through rNews (a proposed standard for using RDFa to annotate news-specific metadata in HTML documents) The slides are interesting but I think I missed out on not hearing the context.

There was a heavy presence of journalists but they were by no means the majority, it wasn’t a data journalism conference. But it was clear that everyone thought that journalism was the place that the concept was getting most traction and most use.

The UK got a lot of love for it’s data-J work during the sessions but I saw a lot of similarities in the approaches. It also showed me that there are a lot of tech people, people who understand all this triples, sparq and data stuff. They can see the use for it and they have a passion for getting it out there. It doesn’t matter that  they are in Norway (or the UK for that matter) they just want journalists to come and do good stuff with the data they are freeing from the silos.

Lets get this hyperlocal stuff back to London. Just don't get any on your hands (via Wikipedia)

In short. No and credit for trying.

I was frustrated by much of the twitter chat around the announcement that Guardian local was no more. The insinuation seemed to be that this was a failed experiment. I tweeted that no experiment is a failure.

So it’s good to hear that the Guardian:

have also learned from the local communities who got involved with telling their stories. And using this we have continually refined our approach over the past year.

But it’s scary to hear

One of the guiding principles of the local blogs has been dialogue with communities about situations and topics of mutual interest and concern. There will still be plenty of that on guardian.co.uk – for example, in our growing army of local cutswatchers, monitoring local council activities – but we felt, in that spirit, that we should share the thinking behind the local experiment with you, the readers who have been involved all along

‘We value the community so much that we want to bring it all in to one place’. It’s trying to take community out of the community.’ Thanks for allowing us to experiment on you but we’re back off to London now. We’ll call you when we need you!’

But I’m trying not to be parochial about this and dismiss it as the Guardian cementing the London centric nature of their broader community offering. (Who wants to be a member of the ‘Guardian club’ (the touchy feely response to the paywall argument) if there is no room for local communities? But, hey, I did see a masterclass in Manchester.)

No,  I’m sure that the Guardian has learned loads and will see the benefit. I’m sure they understand how to run a crowd now. I’m sure they see the value in having someone on the ground. They must see the potential of new technology in having faster, targeted and responsive journalism. It even strengthened their brand – albeit in a passive way.

So a lot for the Guardian to be proud of. But any the failure of any experiment comes from how you use the results not the experiment itself. And they’ll fail if they take the results and don’t keep the hyperlocal team.

Relationships matter

Talking to community managers from the small hyperlocals to the big players like Propublica it’s clear that there is real value in the experience of handling a crowd at grass roots. I’m sure that Hannah, John and Michael have that in spades. I never met John and Michael but did meet Hannah. She is whip smart. I’ve no reason to assume that John and Michael are any different because Sarah, who drove the project, is planet-size smart when it comes to this stuff. To lose them would be a bad fail.

The truth is that the value of the Guardian local communities rests with them; their work and their relationship building. The unique nature of each area can’t be homogenised in to a broad model. The people who are upset to see the sites go didn’t have a relationship with the Guardian – the Guardian is the bastard that broke their relationship up!  You can’t just transplant the Guardian Cardiff model anywhere. You could put Hannah or John or Michael anywhere and they’d use that experience. But you might also lose some of their passion and, with the best will in the world, there would be little or no reason for their Guardian Local audiences to follow them.

That’s why I stand by my belief that hyperlocal is not a model that large media organisations can ever get right.

I wanted the Guardian to prove me wrong and for a while they did. They let the hyperlocals have an identity and quietly absorbed the experience.Yes!  Then they went and blew it by acting like the Guardian rather than letting the sites speak for themselves and standing by their belief “that journalism plays a vital role in communities”

Update: A great storify from Sarah on the closure – the tweets alone show what people feel about the move.

More updates: Rick Waghorn, whose Addiply system was used for ads on the local sites, is very nice in saying I was one of the people who ’get’ the biggest lesson to learn from the saga. Shucks!  Tom Allen has a good post about the response to the closure including the start of fundraising efforts to try to take the guardian up on their offer of partnership. I was surprised that the Guardian only considered this ‘after’ the closure announcement rather than seeing it as part of the exit strategy. But the support is showing and efforts to find ways to fund the sits are underway. Matt Edgar suggests using Guardian subscriptions to pay - don’t subscribe to the Guardian any more, subscribe to hyperlocal. I’m sure the loss of subscriptions was not in the Guardians mind when they closed the site.

 The Media briefing also picks up on the this thread as Ed Oldfied looks at how the story developed and what happens next. There are some interesting facts and figures in the post but it does rest of the word failed again! A point that is picked up in an addition to the post:

It is worth pointing out that while the business model of these sites was unproven and ultimately unviable, the publishing model from a content perspective was a success – as proven by the outpouring of anger from readers in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff, and the awards and accolades the three beatbloggers gathered.

Sarah Hartley, who led the project, doesn’t agree with Ed’s analysis and “takes exception to the term ‘failed’”, preferring to describe the project as “halted, stopped, concluded”.

I agree.