One of my favourite panels at last week’s West by West Midlands (WXWM) event was Nicky Getgood’s talk about the Digbeth is Good blog. Nicky’s presentation itself was a gentle journey through the history of her blog, complete with anecdotes about some of her Digbeth centred projects such as the week of breakfasts. The talk was interesting, but it was the Q&A session at the end that really got me thinking.
As a group, the audience were clearly big fans of Digbeth is Good and very supportive of Nicky. Here’s a summary of some of the questions, issues and themes that the room threw at Nicky:
- Why is Digbeth a good place to demonstrate hyperlocal blogging?
- How are you engaging with the local community in Digbeth?
- Do you have a duty of care to represent the people of Digbeth?
- How do you make this blog sustainable and make sure that it lasts?
- Are you training people in the community so that they can contribute to the blog?
- How can you monetise this blog?
- If you monetise this blog how will this change your editorial voice?
- Digbeth is Good is seen by the cabinet office as an example of best practice for local blogging.
- Digbeth is Good is held up as a case study for “the future of news”.
Nicky held up well under this barrage of questions and pressure, but I did feel that we put her on the spot (it didn’t stop me from being one of her interrogators). I couldn’t work out what it was that was bothering me so much until Michael Grimes made the sharpest contribution of the day:
(Digbeth is Good) started as a personal blog… I worry that we get to this point where what we’ve built as our own thing – suddenly there is an expectation that now you have to take that to a more expert or more professional level. We could just let it go, if no one wants it. You shouldn’t feel as though you have to make sure that it continues.
What Michael has spotted is that when blogs start to matter, communities feel that they own them. The Birmingham blogging community, the cabinet office, the people of Digbeth, and Nicky: who owns her blog? It seems that in some ways Nicky has become the last person that gets a say in what she does next. In their rush to be supportive and encouraging, people have started to worry about Nicky’s blog. It has started to matter to people on a level that the author may not have signed up for. We’re used to seeing this in mainstream media. There are movements such as fan fiction, examples of fan power and countless fan communities in places like Facebook where people come together to take ownership of media products for themselves.
What happens when a blog gets a fan club? What happens when a community starts to take ownership of the blog away from the author? Does that suck some of the fun out of it? In some ways there are a parrallels here with some of the recent debate around Created in Birmingham but there is a key difference: no one’s getting paid to write Digbeth is Good. It’s not a public service, it’s Nicky’s space to tell stories about her world.
I hope Nicky does what she wants to do and keeps enjoying it. If we’re all lucky it’ll be the things we think she should do too. Digbeth is good and Nicky’s doing a great job having fun.
The lovely people at Rhubarb Radio have published all the talks from WxWM on their website.
Thank you SO MUCH for writing this. Can see this post heavilly influencing my as yet unwritten WxWM retrospective!
Some initial thoughts are:
DiG started out as a purely voluntary thing (which it still is) with quite a rough brief – ‘cover the arts/cultural stuff in Digbeth , and whatever else you feel like’.
It’s kind of became more personalised as I gained confidence in blogging. I don’t think this is a bad thing – people seemed to react well to that and DiG wouldn’t have gotten so much of my time, effort, attention and care if I didn’t love it so much.
This will happen with other ‘hyper-local’ sites people do – although they’ll be about and serve communities the fact that people will devote so much to them means they will become emotionally invested in them. Take BiNS, for example, would that be half of what it is if Jon Bounds didn’t give as much of himself to it as he does?
I love the fact that the Birmingham blogging community has helped and enabled me to develop DiG. It’s been brilliant – I’ve gotten so much of people’s time, expertise, advice and technical help since I started because that’s the amazingly supportive nature of this network.
Saying that, you’ve really hit the nail on the head with this post – I do sometimes feel pressure from people to take things in a certain direction when perhaps I’m not ready to go there yet. Not that I don’t welcome advice and suggestions – please, keep it coming. But I’m not going to always want to necessarilly follow it, ay least not straight away. Stef’s suggestion that I perhaps start lookng for someone else to hand the reigns to isn’t something I feel ready to do yet – there are still other things I want to do with DiG, ideas I want to try out. But saying that, months ago Will Perrin suggested I lighten my load by building up a team and I initially wasn’t keen on the idea. Now recruiting new authors and building up more of a team is precisely what I’m doing! I’ll get to these places and take these decisions when I feel ready.
I guess what I’m saying is that although DiG is about Digbeth, therefore about and for a community, the fact that I’m devoting so much time and effort to it, purely for the love of it, means it feels quite personal and precious to me. So I suppose I need to feel I can take it in the direction that I want. What to do if people feel I should be doing it differently? An interesting question. Thank you for posing it!
Nicky.
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