How To Create Better Local Newspapers

Above is an image from  a  regeneration campaign in Sheffield, March 09

What’s Going On in Local Communities: How can we Tell?

There’s a problem with local news information and advertising. 

Too much of the same.

 
• What is the same? 

• Newspapers have embraced the internet with websites and blogs.
• The quality of local news hasn’t improved.
• The structure of print and internet advertising doesn’t embrace the social potential that technology offers.

Local Perception: We’re at the tail end of democracy?

• Local, regional, national and international news coverage appears to the general public as a done deal.

• Why? 

Quality of Local Newsprint and Technology

• How can technology be used to reinvent the local newspaper?

• It comes down to reinterpreting the needs of the potential reading community in terms of what the technology can do for them

There’s a potential to tweek the structure and create a new way of doing things

Gaps, or resistances, between different groups in society are the problem that the existing relationship of newsprint to advertising can’t bridge.


Resent(ation) or Presentation?

Prejudice, bias and stereotyping have become the norm to whip up opinion, response and sell newspapers...

Yet all the while on the horizon, underneath the calm of the way things are presented is the knowledge that, actually:

Prejudice, bias and stereotyping in the short term is bad for economic and social development in the long term.

How Local Newspapers can Flourish

There are two main gaps that need to be addressed and filled.

Gap One
 Local printed news and the internet.
When small local media are established it is usually in deference to the powerful historic structure of advertising inside the paper. Websites mirror and duplicate the printed content. This is ‘sold’ as ‘even better value for your pound, dollar or euro’, enhancing ‘readership’. Value is measured by the circulation of the paper, its readership and daily, weekly and monthly ‘traffic’ to the website.

A question of emphasis

• Noone questions this form. We are either ‘inside’ this structure as employees or professionals, or ‘outside’ as consumers, or readers.
• Yet if we grasp the historical value of newsprint and the advertising potential of the internet in a slightly different way everyone can really benefit.
Giving communities permission to create quality newsprint 
The second gap is between communities, businesses and culture.  
A community newspaper free of advertising with economic roots in the commercial internet environment has the potential for depth and range while at the same time being focussed on the importance of promoting more and more businesses through the internet.

The Paper’s the thing!

If businesses and local people can campaign together to create local newspapers where funding comes from internet advertising and sponsorship, the community mindset will become more assertive, less ‘confused’ about the value and power of the internet to them locally.

This is the main idea

• A new community newspaper established on these principles:

• That the structure is itself a campaign to move advertising and sponsorship onto the internet, to let local news breathe?

We’re materially rich but culturally poor

• This is the central thesis: this idea is empowering.  
• Everyone has opinions on newspapers and how they can be developed and improved.

Perceived Community Passivity

 Could this campaign give the wider general population a real opportunity to access the internet? 
Could it also assist in changing the way the general population perceives, understands and uses local print media and the internet?

  Any thoughts?
  Your ideas?

Reinterpreting Community

• Quality local newspapers are really important
• But so is a new agreement between the owner, businesses and the community that the quality of local newspapers will improve as they become involved in the campaign to create a template for a paper financed by a website

21st Century Quality Local News

• The central point is that this is a campaign to encourage local news media owners, businesses   who advertise and the community to support financially (and in kind) the idea that newsprint doesn’t have to contain advertising. 
• Advertising should be on the internet.
A new way of launching local news media
• The way any local news media is developed is through conversation, research, interview and the production of the product. 

The Design is Mine-But it is Something that Enables Others..Looks Outward

In the future can Blogging really present the case of lower income residents?

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/save-robin-hood-gardens.php

http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=71956_0_24_0_C

http://adaptivereuse.net/2008/03/05/dont-be-brutal-to-robin-hood-gardens/

http://progressivereactionary.blogspot.com/2008/02/save-robin-hood-gardens.html

http://www.msa.mmu.ac.uk/continuity/index.php/2008/03/04/save-robin-hood-gardens-you-must-be-joking/

http://theurbanearth.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/arquitetura-modernamodern-architecture-robin-hood-gardens/

http://slowpainting.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/brutalism-concrete-and-the-modernist-architectural-conundrum/

http://kosmograd.typepad.com/kosmograd/

http://awopbopaloobop.blogspot.com/

Can every inner city development rely on such a community of support as this one on behalf of the Robin Hood Gardens?

http://www.lewism.org/

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/architecture/index.html

http://fantasticjournal.blogspot.com/

http://www.team10online.org/

http://www.oube.co.uk/news/item.php?id=2574

http://blech.vox.com/library/post/reclaiming-the-nearly-new.html?_c=feed-atom

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19951005/ai_n14010157

Life is a Gift -Not a Weapon

When will the Blogging community begin to change the corporate face of advertising?

When will the capacity for 'storytelling' regenerate the ground for the sole trader and the small business?

http://www.nfp2.co.uk/2007/01/29/not-for-profits-have-the-gift-of-stories/

If not for profits have the gift of stories, what are they doing with them?

Sole Traders and Small Businesses-What Does Everyone Mean?

A new way of advertising. Professional- what does that really mean?

Why do people want to work for themselves? Because they have a skill, talent, that is connected inextricably to their own past, identity, sense of worth and value and, strangely enough, they want to pass that on, on their own terms to a constituency they define.

What does 'local' mean? It can be a neighbourhood, region, or it can be a process of making the larger, more corporate processes manageable. A product, service or a franchise.

Professional really means understanding these processes and giving them a human and responsive face.

A New Way of Advertising-Our Impressions of Your Product

Everyone -a concept lost in the age of market segmentation. What do we think of your products? How do you reach us?

Image courtesy of John Birdsall: http://www.johnbirdsall.co.uk/

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Poetic Review Connecting The Reader With The Product

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