View of Hataitai, Wellington. Picture: Peter from Wellington (Flickr)
Howdy!
This, I hope, will be a very exciting project. Not only for Whitireia students, but also as a journalism experiment for everyone out there.
Small crimes, bigger problem
Let me explain. A few years ago, back in the UK, the local police introduced a Neighbourhood Watch map. It showed the local town, divided up into tiny segments. Each segment consisted of a few streets, and was labeled with the details of who we could contact if an incident occurred in each little section. One person whose sole goal was to represent the people living in that small area. Hyperlocal policing.
Of course, hyperlocal is a word we journalists should be getting used to. It is a goal we should be aiming for within our news websites. After all, every news story is hyperlocal… you just need to live in the right place.
The effect of the Neighbourhood Watch hyperlocal scheme was huge. Suddenly, local residents who were a victim of petty crime felt they had somewhere to go. By emailing their local rep, they felt like they were reporting the problem without bothering the ‘real’ police — the investigators and coppers in the town centre.
What they didn’t realise, of course, is that their little problems translated to a major problem in the bigger picture. If you get your car window smashed, is it a big issue? No, probably not. But if, by reporting it to your local rep, you found that people all over town were having their car windows smashed in the same way, all of a sudden there’s a big crime problem.
Small stories, bigger issue
How does this involve journalism? Simple: we’ll apply the same strategy to news gathering. At Whitireia, we’ve assigned each journalism student — there are 27 of them in total — to a very precise area of Wellington (plus some bigger patches for the surrounding areas). We are going to promote our ‘news map’ to local people, under the branding of ‘Who is YOUR journalist?’. Just like the Neighbourhood Watch, we need to give off the impression we want to hear everything that’s going on; no matter how small or insignificant it may be. There are thousands of stories sat out there, but the residents don’t think they’re important enough to bother the busy journos at the Dominion Post.
So, instead, they’ll come to our students.
Anyway, this news map will feature highly in the new news website I am developing for Whitireia. For this, I have added all the data we have — so far — to a Google map, below.
By zooming in, you can see how each section of Wellington is divided up. Click on each slice, and you’ll find the name of the reporter in charge, and a telephone number to get in touch.
As I recently discovered, those bubbles allow me to put HTML code in, so that opens up a whole wealth of options for local news coverage.
Magical map of marvellous minisites
So the plan is thus: fill each segment with news relating its geographical position. Make each slice of map its own minisite. This won’t be a problem. An RSS feed will be generated by the main news site — powered by Wordpress — and fed directly into each bubble. And, er, that’s it. Simple coding, simple concept… but I think it’s a powerful one that all our local newspapers should adopt.
But that’s not all. In time I will be feeding reporter’s Twitter feeds into that bubble too, allowing visitors to see what they’re working on. One student here is doing a story about bicycle accidents in Hutt. If she was to Twitter the message “researching bike accidents in Hutt, any experiences?”, people could immediately get in touch.
And then…?
Well what next? Google Maps is a platform I’m only just learning about. In time, perhaps, all our news stories can be tagged to certain locations. So, for example, any stories about a school could appear as a bubble in that school’s location… perhaps. But then perhaps it should be kept as simple as possible — we don’t want to drive away the people who would be the source of stories.
Over to you, guys. I’m very interested to hear what you have to suggest. Is this a good idea? What else should we be trying? What can I add?
