Tales of people-powered journalism
Plus a proposal to relaunch a local newspaper as a newsletter-first operation. And some sad, sad, oh so sad, news about Infowars.
Telling the community’s stories
One of my new colleagues at City St George’s journalism department, Suyin Haynes, has been running a week-long project on engaged journalism, that it’s worth catching up on over the weekend. It’s a series of articles from different emergent media outlets about how they’ve engaged their communities in their journalism. As Suyin put it on LinkedIn:
Brought together by The Lankellychase Foundation, these organisations are having a tangible impact through their approaches to co-production, autonomous storytelling and leading with lived experience. In a challenging time for the media industry, we hope that the project acts as a resource for others working in the space, creates connections and collaborations, and is a call for greater investment in this vital work.
Check it out:
I particularly enjoyed this account of how two Glasgow projects are making themselves publicly accessible:
Our Community Newsroom is a place [for local people to] drop-by to tell us what they think, pick up a copy of the Govanhill Magazine, or book time to speak to one of our journalists about a story they think we should be working on. It’s a venue for our community training sessions, discussions and social events, a place to make real world connections not possible online. Our shop window features headlines from recent stories helping our journalism be visible in our community.
The retreat of local news has meant a retreat in visibility of journalists generally. And that’s part of the erosion of trust we’ve seen. A decade ago, I was involved in the long-defunct Brighton Future of News Group’s day long take over of an abandoned shop to do live, real-time journalism. It opened my eyes to the potential of visible, accessible journalists.
More like this, please.
Going newsletter first
This is brilliant. A clear pitch to take over a local newspaper, with a digital- and newsletter-first strategy, and numbers against different revenue lines and costs to make it clear how it would work:
I’d focus the team on the following products:
- Website with metered paywall and good user experience (ex, The New York Times)
- Free flagship morning and evening newsletter (ex, Axios)
- Free suite of 10 content vertical newsletters helmed by star journalists (ex, Puck News)
- Free flagship podcast (ex, The Daily)
- Social handles (ex, Axios Charlotte)
- Tentpole events (ex, Texas Tribune)
Let’s hope he gets the chance to put it into effect. (He does have a back-up plan, though…)
Ted Williams
So sad, too bad…
Things are looking rocky for Infowars…
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars media platform and its assets will be sold off piece by piece in auctions this fall to help pay the more than $1 billion he owes relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, under an order expected to be approved by a federal judge.
Quickies
- 🔊 This could be handy, for podcasters and social video producers: BBC expands free sounds archive. Non-commercial use only, alas.
- 🧵 Meta’s Twitter competitor may be moving from threads.net. The company has acquired threads.com.
- 💃🏻 Architecture online mag Dezeen is on TikTok
- 🏛️ Remember Google’s handy, but discontinued, feature that allowed you to see cached version of webpages? Well, now they’ve brought it back, with Internet Archive Wayback Machine links.
Random (Adventurous) Plug
One of my indulgences over the last few years has been an Adventurous Ink subscription: one book a month, of a nature/outdoors/adventurous nature, along with a Zoom call with the author.
It’s been a way of getting the hell away from the screen, and focusing your mind on getting out and about at weekends.
Tim, who runs the club, is running a Kickstarter to relaunch it. If this sounds like your kind of thing, give it a try.
And finally…
Rob Beschizza
Knew it!
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