Thursday, May 26, 2011

Beyond Grauniad Leeds

As I'm sure many people are aware by now, the Guardian Leeds experiment is drawing to a close, and John Baron is moving to The Northerner. This isn't a post about "but why?" or "those dastardly rotters!", but about where to take it next, which sort-of began a couple of weeks ago at WePublish, and was explored again last night at Megan Waugh's #AltMedia.

The meeting was to look at what people may want in some sort of gap-filling way to @GdnLeeds vanishing on Friday, and asking if an alternative newspaper in Leeds was feasible. Alas, a lack of agenda and structure to the meeting meant that people weren't really thinking strategically about how to go about doing something, just what the end product should be. Nothing about what we do now.

There were arguments for a "scare everybody" newspaper, for WebTV, for podcasts and community radio. The ever-dependable Mr Chitty mentioned that there's a fantastic noticeboard network in Leeds that is massively underused. Arguments for web-only versus traditional media outlets were put forwards and there was a serious split in the room between those who thought that print is dead - and we shouldn't even be trying to engage with those who don't "do" the internet - and those who wanted to produce something that included those who were digitally disenfranchised.

This was getting frustrating, and not just for me. Lots of what comes out at the end, nothing about what to do next.

I have no problem with running before you can walk but we have an exploitable resource - 15k uniques per week to Guardian Leeds with the majority being to the "what's going on in Leeds today" -style posts, along with 3.3k twitter followers on @GdnLeeds - that needs to maintain momentum. The project ends tomorrow (that's Friday 27th May 2011, if you're reading this in the future), and to just switch all of that off is a collossal waste of effort. Far better to put in something - nearly anything will do - that maintains momentum.

So, when one chap started explaining how Wordpress works I gave in. I asked what was going to happen to the twitter account, was told it'd lapse. I posited that if the most popular articles on Guardian Leeds were the news aggregation posts, those that collected interesting blog and newspaper articles with a hyperlocal focus, then surely continuing to do those (with some sort of technical solution, the details of which were not relevant to this discussion), and posting them to twitter under the @GdnLeeds account, would be a decent interim solution whilst this AltMedia project tries to find its feet. I was asked who would do it.

Yes, I think you can see where this ended up.

So, pending approval from John's bosses in That London, I want to start continuing the "what's going on in Leeds" posts, with blogs, newspaper stories, interesting curatorial points and the occasional rant. I don't have time to do everything John did in the 16 months of sterling work he did for GdnLeeds (I'm not sure anybody would have) but at least I can make a start on it. It won't be on the Guardian's website (unless some sort of miracle happens) but it's something worthwhile that needs to be continued. And hopefully, when the Alternative Media in Leeds project knows what it wants to do, there'll be a place for the daily roundup posts there as well.

8 comments:

  1. Mike, have offered to help structure the next meeting so that we get tangible actions in three areas.

    1 Product - creating an 'alt-media story engine' and establishing media and channels to get engagement with those stories.

    2 Marketing and PR - generally raising the profile of the project, keeping it in the public eye and managing relationships with key stakeholders.

    3 Governance and financial management - business models, plans, cash flows, investment, funding etc.

    Hope we can try to put collective talents to work in these three areas and just crack on....

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  2. "I have no problem with running before you can walk but we have an exploitable resource - 15k uniques per week to Guardian Leeds with the majority being to the "what's going on in Leeds today" -style posts, along with 3.3k twitter followers on @GdnLeeds - that needs to maintain momentum. The project ends tomorrow (that's Friday 27th May 2011, if you're reading this in the future), and to just switch all of that off is a collossal waste of effort. Far better to put in something - nearly anything will do - that maintains momentum" wa the aim of the suggestion that a wordpress.com blog (linked to from GdnLeeds) might be started. However it's done and whatever is easiest I think hanging on to the GdnLeeds readership as much as possible, as you suggest, is a good idea.

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  3. @Mike Good-oh! They're three good areas to concentrate on. What'll be interesting is how the Product group work out what is needed; there was a lot of good comments last night about what is and isn't viable, and I hope that the product group concentrates on what they would like to see and feel able to pass on those recommendations to the Gov & FM group. If everybody is worrying about everything then that's probably not helpful :)

    @Terry sorry, I didn't mean to dismiss your discussion about Wordpress! Your answer was the right one in my opinion, it's just an implementation task to get it sorted out.

    Thank you, both, for the comments.

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  4. Good to see some sensible ideas coming out of this.

    The idea of some kind of printed paper being handed out to poor people containing the type of copy to be found in the Socialist Worker is complete non-starter.

    Reality in a nutshell is, there is an opportunity while there's enthusiasm, momentum and an audience, to start an alternative community news blog which those with a bit of writing skill can maintain voluntarily and hopefully grow.

    In the first instance without a John there, yes it'll be difficult to perhaps cover the full range of stories that Guardian Leeds has covered, but that's not impossible to overcome in time...

    @Jason__Slack

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  5. You know I agree with all of the above since we spent half of last night nodding at each and saying 'Exactly!'. :)

    Thanks again for asking the very pertinent question about the Twitter account and as always let me know if I can help in any way... my time is far more my own these days.

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  6. @Jason I'm not going to worry about the product just yet; I want to maintain the momentum in order to keep the project alive and worth pursuing. If it just dies out it'll be that much harder to kick start it again.

    John did an incredible job that will be near-impossible to match (certainly short-term) but with time and effort we *might* just be able to start covering much of what he did.

    @Alex Yep, and of course :)

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  7. @M I'd agree with that, even leaving it a couple of weeks to get something going will lose a big chunk of the audience that's been built up... I hope the idea of keeping the twitter daily update comes off, could be interested in helping with that :o)

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  8. Sorry I couldn't make last night, but ~m has grasped the essential point of making something happen this week and heroically volunteered to do it.

    That print thing - I think you might be pushing at an open door if you were to ask libraries to print a sheet off to their noticeboards every day. Maybe go via Elizabeth Sanderson, but they should like the footfall.

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