BBC Election Hackday – 27 April
My work colleague Paul Bradshaw put on a fantastic event for journalists (students, BBC, press, hyperlocals) aimed to producing some data-driven stories with an election theme. I found myself on a team focusing on women and the election.

.@DatainBrum 1/2 Some of Team Women, Power and Politics at #BBCElectionHackday pic.twitter.com/Q7HY00Ks9A

— ★Pauline Roche★ (@paulineroche) April 27, 2015

My modest output for the day, with help from Sofia Casotto (she also produced an infographic of the data), was to pull together data on the number of female general election candidates in Birmingham constituencies from 1979 to the present day.

Pre-election hyperlocal stuff
I’m struggling to find time to keep my hyperlocal site bournvillevillage.com ticking over with sufficient content so I was grateful to Francis Clarke who lives locally when he suggested writing an account of the general election husting for Selly Oak constituency and also profiled some of the candidates. Nice to have David Higgerson give a nod to this work in his election round-up.

Francis’s articles are here: bournvillevillage.com/author/clarke-francisggmail-com/

Election days – 7 and 8 May 2015
As with 2010, I got to attend the general election count on the evening of 7 May (thanks to Birmingham City Council for the invite to myself and other hyperlocals) and in addition this year I went to the local election count on the afternoon of 8 May.

I produced some audio:

listen to 18 yr old Luke Holland talks about his local election campaign on audioBoom

listen to Mark Rogers, returning officer Birmingham on how the #BrumVotes15 count is going on audioBoom

listen to Tim Huxtable – Conservative winner in Bournville ward on audioBoom

I also found myself acting as a kind of roving reporter for the student radio station that was on air throughout the night.

listen to Dave Harte talks live from the ICC count about John Hemming conceding on audioBoom

I wrote a couple of results blog posts:
bournvillevillage.com/news/huxtable-re-elected-in-bournville-local-elections-2015/
bournvillevillage.com/news/labour-hold-selly-oak-general-election/

I did some live streaming:
I wanted to experiment with Twitter’s live streaming service, Persicope. I had some fun with this although the streams don’t archive so I can’t show you the results (and I didn’t save the video locally to my phone). I streamed the incoming boxes on the Thursday, some results at the general count and placed my phone on a tripod for the locals count and let it stream all the results.

LIVE on #Periscope: Take 2: Boxes coming in at Birmingham count. #brumvotes15. https://t.co/T9p3pW7iTy

— Dave Harte (@daveharte) May 7, 2015

LIVE on #Periscope: Northfield declaration #brumvotes15 https://t.co/rVdvhueA7F

— Dave Harte (@daveharte) May 8, 2015

LIVE on #Periscope: local results at #brumvotes15 as they are announced https://t.co/a0WwXIUknJ

— Dave Harte (@daveharte) May 8, 2015

Still streaming the #BrumVotes15 here https://t.co/a0WwXIUknJ – I’m Birmingham’s newest local TV station.

— Dave Harte (@daveharte) May 8, 2015

Overall the election was fun and I got to hang out with some brilliant students from Birmingham City University (running a fantastic news and results service on the birminghameastside.com blog) and also Pauline from newsinbrum.com who knows everyone on the local political scene and was great company across both counts.

The era is well documented by guides of the time and there exists many reels of microfiche (in the British Library and elsewhere) containing copies of the publications.

Birmingham had many alternative publications (including the one-off ‘China Cat Sunflower’ from 1972) and with a little more time I might get round to listing them as there are bibliographic guides stretching into the mid-1990s.

‘Street Press’ (initially ‘Birmingham Street Press’) existed from February 1970 until 1973 and was notable for being distributed well beyond Birmingham according to John Noyce’s ‘The directory of British alternative periodicals, 1965-1974′ (1979). The entry for Street Press in Noyce’s guide is rather brief: “noted for its fine graphics […] a platform for new, radical, critical and beautiful ideas” (p291).

However, John Spiers earlier bibliographic guide (1974), despite being a little all over the place with dates, reprints the the publication’s “own autobiographical note.”

It makes for inspiring reading 45 years after it was written and is worth reproducing in full:

“If you believe implicitly in the politics of the established press, you won’t like what you see in the pages that follow. We have produced a critic’s paradise – a jungle of thoughts and feeling which don’t pretend to be objective. There is no fat wad of hypnotic advertising and we’re not geared to offer the kind of services that the national and local dailies bring to your home. What we want to do is set the seeds for the eventual growth of an alternative press… Birmingham more than other places lacks a happy spirit of its own. People are worn and choked by the machinery and effluent of an oppressive industrial routine. Can’t we kick it off? Make your own freedom if it is no longer given as a simple right. If this is a mad ranting, does it do any harm? We must be able to choose for ourselves, to create the way of life we need, and to find out how to remove the sickness which is both inside and outside our heads. LEARN TO PLAY AGAIN. The shape of an alternative society has not yet been drawn – only the germ of an extra idea exists. There are no golden rules, nor restrictive guidelines – think of your own experiments – search beyond your borders. Build, create, chase that dream.”

I’m about to start my sixth year of running a hyperlocal blog for the sleepy suburb of Bournville in Birmingham. It’s timely then to reflect on what I’ve learnt over the years as both practitioner and researcher.

In fact, it’s especially timely as I’m close to finalising a house move that would take me over the border to a neighbouring suburb. Will it be possible to carry on as Bournville’s local news blogger if I don’t live there?

I’ve written 397 of the 479 articles on bournvillevillage.com since the blog began in the summer of 2009. It was January 2010 that I took over from Hannah Waldram as she headed off to London to work for The Guardian (she’s now at Instagram).

The difference between Hannah and I is that she is a fully trained journalist and I am most certainly not. But that’s not to say that I can’t do journalism. Indeed, as the academic John Hartley (in his 2009 book ‘The Uses of Digital Literacy’) has argued: ‘everyone is a journalist’. Hartley’s point is that there’s no actual barrier to participation in journalism as a practice.

Obviously journalism is full of committed, trained, brave professionals but that doesn’t stop me, the relatively untrained (I did a couple of semesters of ‘news writing’ at Uni), writing 379 articles for a local news website.

So that’s one thing I’ve learnt over the years: that journalism isn’t the preserve of journalists.

It is this aspect that most interests me from a research point of view. For having started out as someone who just quite liked the idea of writing about his local area (and who couldn’t bring himself to say no when Hannah asked me to take the blog over), I am now coming to the end of a near three year research project that looked at the ‘creative citizens’ who run hyperlocal websites across the UK.

And what we’ve found in that research has surprised me. Given the majority of ‘hyperlocalists’ are as lacking in training as myself, it’s impressive to see the volume of investigatory work and the holding of local power to account that happens.

In our extensive interviews we found that hyperlocals are more often run on the basis of goodwill and a kind of civic commitment than a desire to make money and sustain employment. That might well mean that hyperlocal’s future is a little precarious should it not find a way to get the same injection of funds that other local news providers get (many local newspapers get state funding via statutory notices and Local TV gets BBC funding).

But you can go pretty far with goodwill and a simmering desire to pick away at local injustices. I don’t think I’ve been as effective as others in that space but I’m proud of the stories I’ve written.

My problem now is what happens next if I move from the quiet of Bournville. Anyone fancy the sleepiest job in hyperlocal?

The analysis contributes to the outputs of the Creative Citizens project I am part of as well as being an element of my PhD. The 2012 and 2013 analyses have been published by Ofcom (in the 2012 Market Communications Report and the 2013 Internet Citizens report).

The new figures below will form part of Ofcom’s 2014 Internet Citizens report due for publication later in November. Unlike previous years I haven’t undertaken a detailed analysis of number of stories published (largely due to time).

Below are the findings which are also in a short report (PDF) and the spreadsheet I worked from is on google drive (be sure to click around the various worksheets tabbed at the bottom).

‘Active’ Hyperlocal websites

• There are 702 (632 in 2013) hyperlocal websites listed on the Openly Local database[1] as of 25 October 2014.
• 408 of these sites were ‘active’ (496 in 2013, 432 in 2012) and operating in the UK. ‘Active’ was defined as a website having posted a news story at least once in the 5 months prior to the sampling date or functioned as an active forum-only or wiki-based website.
• 288 (133 in 2013) are no longer active. This figure is a mix of websites that have closed or have not published in the 5 months prior to the sample period. Many of the inactive websites (n=86) are part of the ‘Local People’ franchise. Although some (n=37) still show evidence of activity from local residents (such as events being published or reviews of businesses), the vast majority comprise nothing but spam postings and although online were declared as inactive due to the complete lack of locally focused material. The Local People network no longer receives financial support [2].

Geographic distribution

Number of sites in UK nations:

• England: 359 (-86 on 2013)
• Wales[3]: 25 (-1)
• Scotland: 19 (-1)
• Northern Ireland: 3 (no change)
• (Isle of Man) 2

Number of sites in English regions:

• London: 92
• South West: 43
• South East: 48
• West Midlands: 51
• Yorkshire and Humberside: 36
• North West: 37
• East Midlands: 16
• East of England: 29
• North East: 7

Birmingham has 20 active sites (-6 on 2013), the most in any UK authority area.

Across London Boroughs there are 85 active hyperlocal websites.

Cardiff has 12 and Edinburgh has 8 hyperlocal websites.

[1] http://openlylocal.com_hyperlocal_sites

[2] See www.pressgazette.co.uk/node/49450 and http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2013/news/freelance-publishers-axed-from-local-world-sites/

[3] The Centre for Community Journalism at Cardiff University has undertaken an extensive mapping of Welsh community media (http://www.communityjournalism.co.uk/find-a-hyperlocal/) which includes many ‘Papurau Bro’ community newspapers. Their database also maps UK hyperlocals which largely mirrors those listed on the Openly Local database.

I wasn’t alone in doing this. In the aisle I was in there were about half a dozen of us doing the same thing, furiously stuffing handfuls of the small yellow sheets in our pockets as we went.

What kind of madness was this?

I was encouraged to participate in this presumably nightly ritual of confetti gathering by a woman called Sally who had been standing in front of me during the first half of the concert. Sally was very much a Kate Bush superfan. This was her tenth visit to see Kate on this tour and she wasn’t shy at imparting useful insider knowledge. “As soon as the lights go up for the interval, go for it. Aim for the middle aisle,” was her advice on confetti collection. In her mid-50s, slight, and with a wonderful, tactile hands-on manner, Sally was at pains to regularly provide me with constant reassurance that the experience was going to be as good as I hoped it would be.

Her ongoing commentary on the first half of the gig was refreshingly instructive rather than intrusive, strewn with insights as to Kate’s whereabouts ay any one time: “she’s just stage-right, it’s okay, she comes back in a moment, and then it’ll be amazing, watch.”

Sally had spent all day in the standby queue to acquire her tenth Kate Bush ticket. Pete, another multiple-attender and a co-queuer of Sally’s, came to check on her several times before the start to compare notes on their view and remind each other of the show’s upcoming highlights. John, behind me and sporting a Gary Numan t-shirt, was on his third concert, and during the interval we would be joined by the surely-too-young-to-be-a-fan Jane.

All of us were lined up against the side wall of the Hammersmith Apollo as far down as we were allowed to stand (about 12 rows from the front of the stage). Jane arrived from her seat in the circle just before the second half began. She had a card and flowers ready to give to Kate if she got the chance. Her plan was to head to the front of the stage during the final song and politely (“I’m not going to rush at her, honest”) pass the flowers Kate’s way. Jane was on her third gig and, like Sally, had been queuing since before lunch for her ticket.

Amongst this group of clearly devoted Bush fans I felt like a fraud. I was in this spot because the ‘rear stalls standing’ ticket was the cheapest I could get. I have a real fondness for Kate Bush but am I a ‘fan’? Pressing refresh on a ticketing website for 20 minutes on a Friday morning in March is not the same as coming to West London and waiting all day at the venue in hope of getting a return.

To some extent I felt a kind of critical distance to this group. I could feel myself observing them. I felt like an ethnographer might feel. I imagined myself writing something very much like this article where I pick apart the habits of the ‘superfan’ and subtly tempt the reader to ridicule Sally, Pete, John and Jane for their obsessiveness, perhaps in that same predictable way that the press all too readily do.

But that’s not what’s going to happen here.

As the first half ended Sally turned to me to tell me again how amazing the whole thing was. Realising that I was trying and failing to respond, she reached her hand out to my shoulder and said: “it’s good to see a man get emotional.”

I wasn’t so much crying as doing that thing that men of my age do: use every muscle in our face to prevent the physical evidence of crying from actually appearing. Tear-free maybe, but my contorted features had given the game away. I may not have queued all day for a ticket, I may have a few gaps in my Kate Bush record collection, I may not (in fact, do not) own a Kate Bush poster or t-shirt or mug or keyring or have an embroidered cushion with her face on it; but my emotions caught me off guard as Kate sang ‘The Morning Fog’, very much a song where the loveliness is turned up to eleven.

It was a couple of minutes before I could compose myself enough to begin my frenzied search for the confetti. From that moment any sense of critical distance had gone (and what a nonsense to think like that in the first place). By the time young Jane arrived I was not so much the wry observer but the co-conspirator, feeding her tactics to ensure she got those flowers in Kate’s hands. Let’s call this: Operation Kate Must Get Jane’s Flowers (OKMGJF).

OKMGJF began with a sudden movement to the front of the stage at the beginning of the last song, Cloudbusting. I gave the command: “go, go now,” whilst John played a path-clearing role for Jane as he took the lead and the pair of them arrived right at the front of the stage. I was a little way back and thought the moment was lost as Kate said her goodbyes downstage centre, too far from where they were on the right.

But then, just as she was leaving the stage, I saw Kate reach down and reappear holding Jane’s Flowers aloft. OKMGJF had triumphed. As we exited, slightly dazed by the operation’s complete success, we all congratulated ourselves on a job well done but in the glare of the house lights we felt a sudden uncomfortableness and without any goodbyes we shuffled off.

I’ve always been slightly jealous of academic colleagues of mine whose research involves analysis of aspects of fan culture, particularly popular music fandom. By and large they seem to be talking about their own fandom and its associated behaviours and then make larger claims about the wider relevance of such practices (in relation to issues of gender, race, politics, capitalism etc.). Their starting point, whether they foreground it in their writing or not, are the moments of pleasure they feel in enacting their fandom. Such starting points involve the sensory: hearing the music, pushing your way to the bar at a gig, having Sally reassuringly touch your arm. They also involve habits and routines that are to a degree, pre-cognitive. My own habits usually relate to a set of movements of the body designed to suppress outward expressions of enjoyment (there’s maybe a slight tapping of the foot).

My point here is that whilst popular music studies is having a great time as it goes to gigs, scrambles around on the floor for confetti and writes research papers, over in other aspects of culture it’s all po-faced seriousness and not a tear in sight.

It’s not uncommon to find the researcher as participant in ethnographic studies of alternative media or community journalism but it’s harder to find the sensory discussed at all. It’s a discussion of texts or networks that tends to dominate. Yet when I undertake community journalism where I live (in Bournville in the UK), it’s the sensory aspects that dominate. The smell of chocolate permeates the air, it’s in your nostrils reminding you of everything from the lived experiences of the factory workers to the threat to the very future of the smell as a result of Cadbury’s takeover by Kraft.

As Sara Cohen’s excellent 1993 essay reminds us, popular music “is human activity involving social relationships, identities and collective practices”. So is journalism. Cohen’s interests are like mine, an interest in “practices and processes rather than upon structures, texts or products.”

So my trip to see Kate Bush ultimately made me think about the sensory encounters we have as researchers with the practices we feel passionate about. Bound up in the sensory are emotions, and too often we use the language of research or the methodological traditions of our subject domains to do as I do and contort ourselves rather that let our real feelings show.

First published at Medium.

That costs his council about £150,000 per year and overall costs the public sector £26m (that figure according to Fitgerald but a report by the Local Government Information Unit  puts it at £67m).

Fitzgerald claimed: “nobody ever reads them and nobody ever responds to them,” but the newspaper industry has made it clear to government that they should stay in place, he complained.

Hyperlocal media operations play into this debate for a couple of reasons. Firstly, many of them have significant local online audiences and also, in some areas they serve localities that might no longer have local newspaper representation.

Wrexham.com and Forestgate.net are two hyperlocals that have put in Freedom of Information requests and Talk About Local have voiced their concerns about the practice.

I think the current state of play is that the government isn’t likely to make any changes here. Certainly the summary given in written evidence by The Newspaper Society on the Deregulation Bill in March 2014 would suggest so.

Anyway, I was wondering how much this practice costs Birmingham City Council. The long route to finding out is an FOI request but you can get a global figure on how much the City pays the local newspaper group (Trinity Mirror) by looking through the list of payments that the council publishes. This does give which council department makes the payment but doesn’t say what it is for so the figure below may include other items such as printing costs (if it uses Trinity Mirror’s printing services) or job ads.

However, I suspect this figure is largely for statutory notices:

Birmingham City Council paid Trinity Mirror £198,068 in the last 12 months (June 2013 – June 2014)

(full tortuous working out in this excel spreadsheet which includes breakdowns for each month on the separate tabs)

I have just launched a new newspaper for Birmingham. It has 24 pages of fantastic original content covering news, arts, politics, sport, satire. and more. What’s more, it’s written by some of the city’s best writers.

The newspaper, printed by Newspaper Club’s new PaperLater service is a single-copy one-off edition. If you want to I can let you have my copy so long as you promise to send it to the next person who wants to read it. Eventually, I think it can make its way across the whole of Birmingham.

Why I did this: Ahead of the BBC’s recent Revival of Local Journalism conference I attempted to crowd source a list of hyperlocal-ish blogs for Birmingham (you can add to the list here). I wanted to make a point that together, these blogs covered the range of topics one might find in the local press and actually do it quite well.

Then at the end of the event I was chatting to someone (can’t recall who) who said that their mother still buys a newspaper but passes it on to neighbours when she’s read it. It often makes its way down the whole street he said.

Quite liking that idea and noticing that PaperLater had launched I thought I would see if I could turn some of Birmingham’s best blogs into a newspaper. If you’re an author of one of the articles then apologies if you’re annoyed that I printed out your article without asking.

I might write a little more at some stage about the rationale for these choices and about how PaperLater formats the newspaper (often with generous white space – which I quite like), but for the meantime, enjoy Issue 1 (of 1) of erm,: ‘Some posts from Birmingham’s blogs, printed out’.

(See more pics of the paper)

The full list of articles are:

I was given a few minutes to talk to the theme and so I put some slides together and wrote a few notes to accompany. This is almost as I delivered it but this version has an extra slide:

Slides:

Notes:

SLIDE 1
I thought I would say something about making use of big data and social media.

Obviously ‘listening’, to big data implies collecting, analysing and creating new knowledge from that analysis. What you do with that knowledge is up to you but I used this picture, from the german film The Lives of Others, to just put a note of caution in. A report from June 2013 by ComRes found that 68% of UK respondents were concerned about their personal privacy online. And here I am about to go through how to scrape personal data and create value from it. You should remember that people aren’t on social media so that you can harvest information about them. Just like in the film they might have an awareness that they could be listened to, but they don’t actually know you’re doing it.

SLIDE 2
But anyway, onward. There are the questions that I thought relevant to how we might think about the data that comes about as a result of people using social media.

• Where’s the big data that tells me what people say about their everyday cultural engagement?
• How do I capture it and make sense of it?
• How do I create value from it?

SLIDE 3
You have to realise that the way in which we use social media creates an immense amount of data. The internet is full of scary infographics telling you that there’s a million tweets a second or some such nonsense. None of this is helpful to you. Please look away from the infographic. Your audience is not the entire world. Better instead to think about big data in small places. Maybe the small places in which your cultural organisation operates.

By way of example here’s some recent research I did amount the level of social media activity use, in one month, on the B31 Voices community news service. There’s still a lot of data here but it’s on a level that’s a bit more manageable. So really I want to make the point that ‘Big’ social data is overwhelming but ‘biggish’ social data, relevant to your interests, is manageable.

SLIDE 4
I’ll come back to this B31 data in a moment but first wanted to say that I think there’s two ways to deal with social media data. The first is about listening for what people say about you because you want to immediately react to it. So a custom search, as in this example, in tweetdeck, let’s you create a narrow search that you can monitor on an ongoing basis. You do this because you want to react to the data as it happens.

SLIDE 5
Another example, like this is using an app like Loci which finds geo-located tweets, facebook or instgram updates. I like this one as it includes pictures. Big data isn’t just words, it’s pictures too. In fact making sense of image-based big data is something that researchers are only just focusing on.

SLIDE 5
The second way is perhaps a more reflective, analytic way. That is, to scrape data, using the Google or Twitter API. Having a sense of what APIs let you do is really important. You should have a play with the facebook graph api. It really is not rocket science although this screen of JSON code may suggest otherwise.

SLIDE 7
What you really want is data in a spreadsheet. Then you can do some analysis and start to reflect on what it tells you. For this, pivot tables are your friend. So for the B31 Voices website everyone wants to talk about Pets. Missing pets, found pets, cute pets, dead pets. Obviously I’m not specifically researching the arts conversation but it’s there.

SLIDE 8
And what are people saying about the arts in B31? Well it’s not always what you want to hear but it may be that your organisation needs to be aware of it and hear it.

SLIDE 9
Finally I just want to highlight one of the ways in which to create value from this data. No doubt we’ll hear today about profiling and targeting audiences through data but don’t forget that the data is qualitative and has value in and of itself. B31 Voices turn their data into an attempt to tell positive stories about the people and places of B31. Sometimes it’s worth taking big data off the spreadsheet and making it work for you. ‘Big Data’ is really small qualitative data in disguise.

Well as one of the outputs of the research I have produced an infographic on the social media activity of B31 Voices during the month of March 2014. Hope you like it:

(PDF version)

pic by Siobhan Stevenson

If the Syrian conflict is so heavily covered by Social Media, and therefore presumably front and centre in the public gaze, why is it also seemingly the least resolvable? Why has social media not changed anything there? That was the thrust of a question asked at the end of a great morning panel at the Media for Social Change Unconference at Birmingham City University (on Saturday 3rd May 2014).

The response was a sightly defensive one from the panel, along the lines of: the conflict is still too young to ‘prove’ that social media hasn’t worked. The better answer I think was given earlier in the day when Dr Michele Aaron argued that all this youtube footage, all this social media stuff, was ultimately little more than a kind of conflict ‘porn’. Aaron was making the point that it is well established that film and documentary of conflict often serves to do little more than make us better at looking at it. At gazing. We’re moved to tears of pity or anger but are we moved to action? How is the viewer made to feel ‘at risk’ by watching this material? It was a really strong point although not one fully explored by the panel.

My own interest was in how the citizen reporter is situated in the supply chain of journalism. How does the money flow? Are we content to effectively exploit the people who risk their lives to gather this on-the-ground compelling content. Ed Bice from Meedan and Raja Al-Thaibani from Witness.org both agreed that this was a problem. That in some way these citizens are a form of slave labour right now. Ed has a useful optimistic take in identifying the potential for micro-payment systems to ensure money flows back the other way. Raja pointed out that many citizen journalists go on to work for mainstream organisations but the result is often a softening of the hard edge they had before as they fit that organisation’s style and news values.

Dr Dima Saber, in the chair, asked the question early on: how do we research this? This actually never got answered directly. But some interesting anecdotes about journalistic practices (including one about a journalist ‘friending’ a jihadist on Facebook) made me think about the need to go back to what Journalism Studies has done well for so long: newsroom ethnographies. Of course nowadays the newsroom is dispersed: it’s the local café, the bedroom, the train, the street corner. How do we study the practices of journalism in the 21st Century in order to reveal the “invisible structures of power and recognition” (Willig 2013: 384). In doing so we might have something to say about the increasing media festishisation of the conflict in the MENA region and perhaps start to make use of citizen media in a way that make us, the audience, better at doing than at watching. .

Ref: Willig, I. (2013) Newsroom ethnography in a field perspective. Journalism, Vol 14, No 3, pp. 372-387.