Working with Ofcom on Hyperlocal

One of the partners on the Media Community and the Creative Citizen project is the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom. From the outset they were interested in the extent to which Hyperlocal news websites might be something they need to keep statistics on. They understood what they were and the nature of the debate about them (due mainly to the excellent work of their former employee Damian Radcliffe) but they lacked data on how many there are and how often they publish.

Now, with our help, Ofcom have published such data. In May I took a snapshot of the stories published by Hyperlocal news websites and worked with Ofcom to ready the data for publication in their annual Communications Market Report.

As a researcher it’s gratifying to see one’s work in such a significant document but equally, as a Hyperlocal publisher myself, it’s great that we have a recognised benchmark against which we can track growth or otherwise of the sector.

Our partners in the research project, Talk About Local, have blogged their reaction to the report.

The Egypt Project: Empowering Citizen Journalism in a non-Traditional Way

Being in Egypt is  interesting, not only for watching how a post-revolution society is like, enjoying a warm climate in the winter. But,  from a media researcher perspective, the country with more than 23 million internet users, 9 million Facebook users and over 71 million mobile subscribers form an interesting social media case.  Last Sunday I came back from Cairo, after spending two weeks in my home city, attending a series of meeting to get a new project starting .
Among the dilemma over a ‘superpower’ of people’s media proved by the ongoing Arab uprisings, the Interactive Cultures Center is a leading partner in an innovative research project to encourage disseminate citizen reporting in Egypt, by helping citizen journalists to bring their reports to the mainstream media. The center is joining forces with the not-for profit technology company, Meedan and the leaning independent newspaper in Egypt, Al Masry Al Youm.

The Egypt project is about gathering journalists in a virtual newsroom to report on  one specific theme, they would build on each other reports. The theme is  the upcoming parliamentary and Shura (Upper House) elections in Egypt, Meedan is building this newsroom, AMAY is publishing it and the professional journalists are their web and social media department staff, citizen journalists are recruited by a local partner and both citizens and professional journalists are to be receiving training workshops on a variety of topics that help them develop their reports.

Interactive Cultures is developing a curriculum for these trainings; so the citizens would learn more about how to make their media production appealing to the mainstream media, and journalists will get closer to the social media sphere, what does it mean that media is becoming social and all of them would learn how to verify the citizen reports.

Nevertheless, under the leadership of Prof. Tim Wall, I am monitoring the project and evaluating it .
The  project is going to benefit  both types of reporters  are benefiting, a  traditional way of improving popular journalism is conducting direct training to people on how to use social networks and make media reports, what should not be the case a country that already has a very active citizen journalists, proved by the vibrant networks formed organically by people during and after the revolution to cover the protest news across the most populated country ( 85 million) in the Arab region.

In other words, quality citizen reports are needed for all societies, but where the good citizen journalism practices are, the priority is to get these reports out of the social networks and make them available for people who do not use the internet. This is the gap the project is expected to cover; to optimize the audience (consumers) rather than the reporters (producers).

Now, I am  again booking a new return ticket to Cairo, to attend  the international conference of The Faculty of Mass Communication in Cairo University, in collaboration with the University of Westminster  and UNESCO, I’ll  present a paper about the interaction between social and traditional media, in which, the Egypt project is strongly present.

Is data journalism a fetish?

On Wednesday I presented my paper from IAMCR 2010 to the Centre’s weekly research seminar. The paper explores crowd sourced investigation tool Help Me Investigate, and in doing so touches on some wider issues around changes in journalistic practices.

I was fortunate enough to be asked many probing questions about the work, which I hope will help me improve the paper. However a wider set of concerns and questions arose which are outside the scope of this piece of work. Nonetheless, they are valid lines of enquiry and so they seemed worth capturing here on the blog. Who knows, I might come back to them later.

The questions concerned the way in which emerging journalistic practices seem to be more about the process of creating stories through new means, rather than about the stories themselves. In particular, data journalism was described as being a fetish. That is not to say it is fashionable, rather that it is understood to have inherent powers which have been subjectively applied to it, and which may not stand up to critique.

So, what do you think: is data journalism a fetish?