OpenlyLocal WordPress plugin looks cool
Over in the UK, Philip John has just announced a new OpenlyLocal WordPress plugin that looks very cool. (Hope he doesn’t mind me grabbing the screenshot from his blog post!)
You tell the plugin which is your local UK council and it grabs data from the (also very cool) OpenlyLocal web site and turns it into a widget that shows upcoming council meetings.
Of course, this is only for UK-based local bloggers. If you’re not a UK blogger and you’re on WordPress, you can use the existing RSS widget to do something similar … but only if your local government web site offers an RSS feed of upcoming meetings. In my experience, many don’t.
(BTW, we could use something like OpenlyLocal over here in the US. Does anything like it exist?)
‘Positive Results’ from Seattle’s hyperlocal pilot project
It seems like everyone involved in Seattle’s innovative hyperlocal/traditional journalism collaboration is pretty happy about how things are going.
The yearlong pilot is just a few months old, but the Seattle partners already see some positive results.
Justin Carder, founder of CHS Capitol Hill Seattle, points to an informational graphic created in collaboration with the paper. After the Times ran a citywide map of voting results from the August primary, Carder contacted the paper to develop a graphic targeted on the Capitol Hill neighborhood. When Carder posted the graphic, he also linked readers to the Times’ citywide map.
“The process to make that kind of collaboration happen wasn’t in place” before the partnership formed, he said.
Another example of the new partnership involved breaking news in a Seattle neighborhood. When a wild cougar was trapped in a city park on a Sunday morning, Magnolia Voice — one of Next Door Media’s sites — broke the story and alerted the Times.
Magnolia Voice was “out there at the first light of dawn, taking photos and providing coverage,” said Bob Payne, director of communities for the Times’ Web site.
That’s from a Poynter.org update on the collaboration this summer of the Seattle Times and a handful of leading hyperlocal news blogs. The whole piece is a good read if you’re curious to know more about how things are going over there.
Hyperlocal News Roundup
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, and there are a few noteworthy things to pass along for hyperlocal bloggers, so enough chatter from me. Here’s a look at the hyperlocal news that’s caught my eye over the past month or so:
- The hyperlocal movement (blogs, web sites, etc.) was featured about a month ago in Newsweek magazine. The article talks about some of the challenges created by having local people cover local news and communities.
- On a related note, Dan Slee writes an interesting piece about the friction that’s happening in some places between local governments and local bloggers: What hyperlocal blogs will mean to Local Government. He offers lists of 5 things for govt. press people to do and 5 things for local bloggers to do.
- If you’re thinking about starting a hyperlocal news blog/site, Robert Niles offers some good tips and ideas in Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners. He calls it “a check-list of technical tools that you’ll need to get a basic, one-person news site on the Web.”
- CitySquares is now offering free, syndicated business listings for local bloggers. You can add listings based on location, category, or a combination. This is slightly different from the local newswire idea I’ve written about, but is similar in that it may help add more local content to your blog/site.
- Shields Bialasik shared 12 Ways to Keep You Hyperlocal Blog Vibrant. He has some interesting ideas in there, like starting a local press release engine or offering free local classifieds.
If I missed any good news/posts about hyperlocal blogging, drop a note in the comments so we can all have a look. Thx!
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