Metamedia

While We Were Here – turning a festival into a newspaper

What.

While We Were Here is a 16-page free souvenir newspaper with a print run of 4,000. It was put together by a small team of volunteers during this year’s Greenbelt Festival. It included a 4-page black and white comic pull-out in the centre of the paper. You can download a copy of the main paper or the comic in PDF formats.

Where.

Greenbelt Festival takes place over four days at the end of August every year at Cheltenham race course. There’s no accommodation on site that’s not under canvas – so the newspaper team were camping out on the course along with about 20,000 other festival-goers. We appropriated a small box that’s normally used for watching the races and turned it into a newsroom, with two design Macs and three or four laptops at any given time. There were not enough chairs, the carpet went half-way up the walls, and we were constantly watched by pictures of small men on large horses.

Who.

In total there were ten people involved in making the main paper. We didn’t have much to do with the comic guys – they did their own thing and arrived perfectly on time with all their spreads in PDF form. Our team was brought together by Matt Patterson as hands-on managing editor and James Stewart as hands-off. I was the editor. James Weiner and Paul Abbott worked on data and infographics for the paper. Ben Weiner,  Will Quirk, Geraldine Nassieu-Maupas and Oliver Mayes made up our design and layout team, and Wilf Whitty dealt with some last-minute front-cover design issues.

The rest of the team were primarily design-minded folks and I was (as far as I know) the only one with newsroom experience. As a result partly of that and partly the fact that I’ll organise anything if it stands still near me for long enough, I took charge of content planning and making sure we had something interesting, well-written and appropriate for print on every page.

Why.

As a tangible souvenir, something to commemorate the experience of being at Greenbelt for those who were there and something to express a little of what it was like for those who weren’t. Something that’s separate from the blog or the Flickr stream or the Twitter conversations, a document that physically exists and can be handed around families, shown to children, given to grandparents, in a way that the internet still can’t.

And, in a very real way, we did it because we could.

When. How.

I was one of the last of the team to arrive on site, on Friday morning. At 2.30pm the team met for the first time and found out our general brief. Over the next four hours we hammered out a page plan for the paper, focussing on what we felt were the major themes and events from the Festival that people would recognise and want to read about. We decided who would be covering what in terms of writing content specifically for the paper. I briefedthe Festival’s photographers about what we’d need and when. We made up a flat plan and stuck it to various pictures of horses, and I wrote up a schedule working backwards from our hard deadline – 6pm on Sunday.

We made the paper in just over two days. The design team did a lot of work on Friday night and Saturday morning putting templates and grids together, while I did vox pops and got quotes from various festival punters. I started to put content together on Saturday afternoon, which is when it became clear that we couldn’t use most of the content from the two people who were blogging the festival over the weekend. One person’s writing was very long-form, personal and intellectual, while the other’s was very short-form and timely – both made for great blog posts but wouldn’t work in print. I started roping in people to write reviews and snippets of content, as did managing editor James Stewart. The infographics team finally managed to get hold of some data they could use and started drawing golf buggies in Illustrator.

By Sunday lunchtime we had about half of what we needed copy-edited and in formats ready to put on the page, and we had two neat infographics ready to place. I spent the next three or four hours writing, helping choose pictures, deciding what content needed to go in which boxes, copy-editing and being very rude to other people’s work so it would fit in print-sized boxes, while next to me the layout team collaborated to pull it all in to InDesign and make it look perfect. By about 4pm we had collected all the content we needed; the next two hours involved me pacing around the newsroom, making sure we had everything in the right place, picking different pictures when the ones we had didn’t work out, and occasionally taking a seat and making changes to the text or the design when things simply wouldn’t fit right.

Matt started uploading it at about 6.45pm. Network sloth meant it finally finished at about 8pm. The printers in Peterborough turned their presses on for about a minute and a half, and we had a print run of 4,000 copies. Four hours later thanks to some strangers who drove through the night for us, it was back on site ready for the first copies to be distributed at the last show of the evening.

Lessons learned.

• Planning is vital, much more so for print than for online journalism. If a blog post doesn’t go up or goes up late, few people will notice. If there’s a hole in your print paper, they definitely will. Thematic planning for something like this is crucial too – content should fit together, images should complement each other, pages should balance. That’s impossible to do with slapdash content delivered at the last minute.
• Briefing, therefore, is another crucial element. You can’t simply say “Write me 450 words about the music scene.” You need to make deadlines clear and make sure you’ve agreed which bits of the music scene are necessary. You need to talk about tone, audience, readability, style, voice. You need to make clear what’s needed, even when you’re both up against deadline, so that the content you get back is useful and takes the minimum of editing or rewriting.
• Build in redundancy. One of the reasons the paper worked well despite some of the content-related setbacks we had is that we did our best to get hold of more content than we needed – about half as much again. If I was doing it again I’d be shooting for twice as much, if not more. If it’s not used in the paper, it could go online; if it’s something that works better online, we wouldn’t have to force it into a print style. And if it doesn’t turn up, it doesn’t matter.
• Get data well in advance. Infographics are awesome but they can’t be created without data. If you have a tight deadline and you’re including data-driven charts or graphics, that’s the bit you should sort out first. We didn’t, and that’s why we only have two in the paper.
• Basic newspaper design skills are invaluable, even if you’re not a designer. If you’re planning content for pages, you need to understand how boxes fit together on a page, how headline size and positioning alters layout, what a baseline grid is, the difference between a 3-col and 4-col layout for a page, and a dozen other little things that don’t bother you while you’re writing but that become vital as soon as you’re laying out. You need to know the rules, what they are, how they can be bent and when they can be broken. Otherwise you end up coming in and asking questions like “Are we really wedded to a serif font?” and “Do we really need to lock to grid?” half an hour before final deadline. (Yes, this happened. No, it wasn’t me.)
• If you’re distributing content across multiple channels, a convergent newsroom is potentially a huge timesaver. This would have prevented completely the problems we had with last-minute content and having to repurpose pieces that were not right for print in their original forms – but it takes a lot of advance planning. Having a pool of writers – not necessarily bloggers or writers for print, just writers – who could be briefed individually by the blog editor and the newspaper editor, and whose work could be pulled to be used in one or both formats, would have been very valuable. Doing the same with images and video could mean a converged team in three parts: content creators at one end, putting their work into a big pool; editors in the middle, picking out the best of the bunch or the most appropriate for their medium; and distributors at the other end, feeding that work into the newspaper, the blog, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, the various other channels including feeding out to the magazine shows and round-up events on site – and making it easy for the press office to pass out the best of what’s on offer too. I think this is the biggest thing I’ve taken from the experience – I grok convergence much better now I’ve seen it from the editor’s point of view.

The paywall debate

An interesting post extolling the virtues of the paywall by Julien Rath as part of journalism.co.uk’s excellent TNTJ group blog has really gotten me thinking. Not because I agree – far from it – but it’s finally forced me to put into words my own views on the massive paywall debate.

I don’t like them. I don’t think that most papers have ever been bought on the basis of the news content - or even the op-ed and columns. (Sometimes the columns – Bridget Jones springs to mind – but rarely, and certainly not enough to subsidise an entire paper.) Asking people to pay on the web for things they don’t necessarily value enough to pay for in print – this seems pointless to me.

There’s a laundry list of ideological complaints about paywalls. They trap journalism behind a wall, cutting off access to information in a terribly anti-open-web sort of way. They create gated communities where dissent is unlikely and where the turbulent streams of the open web can’t intrude – for better or worse. They ensure a sort of private members’ club that cuts off those who can’t or don’t want to pay, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on your point of view.

Ideology aside, my most basic reason for disliking paywalls is business based. We have declining circulation in print, which means very few new paper readers will come to our websites based on what we’ve put in our newspapers. One of the obvious ways to gather new readers therefore is online, getting young people used to seeing our content linked on Facebook, Twitter, social networks they belong to and appreciate, in the hope that we can drive brand loyalty through those platforms and maybe, eventually, a few of those people will start reading the paper.

What happens to that model if there’s no accessible content online? It dies. What’s the plan to attract new readers to your brand above all others if it’s all behind a paywall? I haven’t yet seen one that works. It doesn’t matter how well-written or wonderful your editorials are – if no one can link to them they aren’t going to drive new traffic to your site.

Breaking news content online will rarely if ever be unique outside exceptionally specialist circles. Commentary, analysis, feature articles are more “valuable”, but very rarely irreplaceable given the vast amount of alternative and specialist content available for free elsewhere. And many news consumers now read what their social circle reads and links. We come through that to like personalities or subject-specific content, but that’s not the same as a brand loyalty – I read Charlie Brooker and the Guardian Datablog regularly, but that doesn’t mean I ever read the Guardian homepage. Paying for the whole Times website when I just want Caitlin Moran doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – especially when I can’t search for Times content using my normal methods (Google) and no one else links me to it because it’s all behind a wall, so I’d have to go hunting for it specifically if I wanted to include it in my daily reading. If many other net users are like me then they won’t be willing to pay for a whole bundle when what they want is one strand.

I’m more open to the idea of limited paywalls on sites like the proposed New York Times one, where only very regular readers – the folks who are already brand loyal – get charged for content. I still think they do more harm than good, because at that point you’re essentially punishing people for liking you too much. If the expectation is that content is free, suddenly charging is going to irritate people and drive them away from engaging too strongly.

Yes, journalists need to be paid for what we do. We need to eat and live, after all. I’m interested in the idea of micropayment systems that let me pay pennies at a time for content from any one of hundreds of news sources – from specialist science papers via Athens through the Financial Times through the Sun, I suppose, pretty soon. I’m interested in untapped affiliation potential – ticket sales, restaurant bookings, holidays, iTunes links next to band reviews. We can still make money from picture sales, family notices and so on, but we can do it in new ways – like the death notices my paper has set up where a single payment gets you not just the notice in the paper but also a living page that remains as a permanent and changing tribute. And that’s before we get into serious targetted advertising solutions, or the content changes that have got the Mail Online to where it is today. [Edit to clarify: I'm not suggesting that any one of these is a magic bullet that will save the news industry. I'm simply pointing to possible multiple revenue streams that I feel are worth exploring to see whether they could go some way towards paying for news.]

I’m not Rupert Murdoch. I haven’t sat in front of the figures or done the maths with real audience numbers, so like most other people I’m just having a good old reckon. Still, I reckon there are better ways forward than paywalls. What do you think?

Greenbelt and Home Sweet Home – storytelling in tiny towns

I’m off to Greenbelt Festival at the weekend, and this year I’m on the team creating a print newspaper for the festival.

I blogged last year (when I was just starting out here) about the newspaper they gave out at the festival – a 16-page freesheet called While We Were Here, made possible only at the last minute with sponsorship from Hewlett Packard. It used content that was already online, sourcing images from Flickr and text from blog posts, in a neat reversal of the print-first view you (still, sadly) often see in traditional newsrooms, and it was available for download for free online as well as handed out on-site. It was – is – a wonderful souvenir of the festival, as well as being an excellent way to convey the intangible experiences of the festival. Because it was created by people right in the thick of things, writing from-the-heart blog posts/I-pieces and not carefully detached articles of traditional journalism, it does a much better job of conveying the atmosphere of the weekend than any events listing or simple description could.

Since reading and enjoying While We Were Here last year, I’ve had some experience creating newspapers from scratch on my own. I made a miniature four-page newspaper as part of a performance/installation/community experiment called Home Sweet Home by theatre company Subject to Change, consisting of a tiny cardboard suburb where people from Norwich built their own mini houses, flats and businesses, using the community billboard, radio station and postman to create stories. I built a tiny Evening News newspaper office complete with tiny clay journalists and mini bundles of newspapers, and I ran a breaking news service (on a billboard made of card and matchsticks) for three days.

The paper itself was a four-hour job in InDesign using the Evening News print templates and masthead to create something faithful to the design of the paper I was representing. The stories were a more complicated proposition. Some folks volunteered bizarre tales and information themselves in letters; others created things I found fascinating, so I wrote letters asking for more information. Many stories came from the community noticeboard, which became an outlet for frustrations and campaigns as well as plenty of advertising. It was important to create a souvenir, something tangible people could take away, and to give people who hadn’t been there a flavour of the absurdity of the event – and part of that was treating very silly stories with the seriousness I would if they were real. The skills you need to gather stories in tiny cardboard towns are, it seems, the same as you need in big concrete cities – sharp eyes, a willingness and ability to engage and converse, the ability to go where people are talking and listen to what they say.

That experiment taught me a great deal about what’s important in newsgathering. I hope the weekend’s antics will teach me something new about storytelling. Greenbelt is an entirely different proposition to Home Sweet Home – many thousands more people and much less clear avenues for newsgathering, for a start, plus the fact that the newspaper is likely to be focussed once again on individual and collective experience rather than hard news. (Though if Peter Tatchell’s talk gets really controversial, that could conceivably change.) Although I haven’t yet had a detailed brief from project leader James Stewart – and I’m not expecting one till I get there – I suspect the paper this year will once again function primarily as a record of the experience of being there – and that means a different set of challenges to what I do every day. I’m looking forward to helping to make it happen.

Three-tier journalism

There are three tiers of journalism in the UK at the moment – national, regional and hyperlocal – but in all the discussion and excitement over open data, the voices of journalists working at the coal-face in the middle tier tend to be absent. That’s a shame, because regional news offers some fascinating and unique challenges for data journalism and computer assisted reporting.

At one end of the scale there’s national journalism, which covers big issues affecting all regions of the country or stories of national interest. In most media national journalism tends to be biased towards the south in general and London in particular, and in newspaper terms there’s a partisan/issues bias too, along with a clear character.

Then at the other end of the scale there’s hyperlocal journalism, geared around my street, my postcode, my community. These are organisations tackling incredibly specific situations, interested in minutiae and detail, as well as the impact of wider stories on the communities in question. It’s all about applying the national news to a very specific set of circumstances.

Somewhere in between, on a sliding scale depending on the size of the news organisation, is regional journalism. At the moment that’s where I fit in – at the city- and county-wide level depending on which paper I’m writing for. The stories I follow up are a mix of both – national stories with an impact on the communities I write for, and street-level stories with wider implications. We also cover wide regional stories with an impact on a substantial proportion of our readers – council stories, crime cases, the sorts of stories which nationals would not cover at all while hyperlocals would cover only the relevant parts.

After a conversation with the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum at Hacks and Hackers, I started to understand that regional journalism has a particular set of needs and problems when it comes to data journalism. National news needs big picture data from which it can draw big trends. Government ata that groups England into its nine official regions works fine for broad sweeps; data that breaks down by city or county works well too. Hyperlocal news needs small details – court lists, crime reports, enormous amounts of council information – and it’s possible to not only extract but report and contextualise the details.

Regional news needs both, but in different ways. It needs those stories that the nationals wouldn’t cover and the hyperlocals would cover only part of. Data about the East of England is too vague for a paper that focuses primarily on 1/6 of the counties in the region; information from Breckland District Council is not universal enough when there are at least 13 other county and district councils in the paper’s patch. Government statistics by region need paragraphs attached looking at the vagaries of the statistics and how Cambridge skews everything a certain way. District council data has to be broadened out. Everything needs context.

The great thing about that? There are unending opportunities for good data journalism in regional news – opportunities to combine new technology and open data to produce something that’s relevant and useful to as many individuals as possible. The question is how we exploit them. I believe that we start by freeing up interested journalists to do data work beyond simply plotting their stories on a map, taking on stories that impact people on a regional level.

How do school catchment areas affect house prices? Since the county council decided to turn the lights off at midnight on certain streets, has there been an increase in crime? How have mental health service closures hit NHS waiting lists in the region? We should be using open data and freely available tools to do good regional journalism and helping people to find out.

The NCE News Practice exam: resources

I discovered on Wednesday that I’ve passed my NCE exams – and did particularly well on the News Practice exam, winning the Ted Bottomley award. (I love the name. Love it. Probably too much.)

The examiner [pdf] was very, very nice about my paper, saying:

A textbook example of how to tackle the Newspaper Practice paper. A comprehensive law
answer citing relevant cases and law, followed by practice answers that clearly demonstrate
the candidate’s imagination and ability. It is clear from this paper that this candidate is
already putting into practice the skills that the Newspaper Practice paper looks for. One of
the highest Newspaper Practice scores in recent years. A very impressive performance.

I’ve been trying to find the paper I wrote so I could work out what on earth I did right, but so far haven’t managed to unearth it. I’m pretty sure I arrived home and thrust it as far out of sight as possible along with the other papers.

But from what I remember, a staggering amount of what I wrote for the second half of the paper was about the internet. Specific, useful, relevant ideas about how to use it to move stories on, to facilitate comments and let the community take control of the conversation. I talked about topic pages, context as an integral part of news reporting, data journalism in many forms, visualisations, mashups, maps, timelines, social media, FOIs, online reportage in all sorts of guises and the importance of the hyperlink.

Anyone revising for News Practice exams – my best advice is read the links, think about how you can apply the theory to the practical, and good luck. Oh, and know your McNae’s. Nothing can beat that.

Dummy demolition

Alison Gow recently wrote an excellent post suggesting that newsrooms should get rid of the dummy – the page plan that tells print new teams what space we need to fill in the paper and where.

She said:

Everywhere I’ve worked it’s been called something different – The Book, The Plan, The Dummy, the Flatplan – but recently I’ve started wondering if it should be called The Box, because we think inside it.

… the HOW of filling a newspaper can become more absorbing and demanding than the WHAT …

…I would love to hear the phrase ‘How many words do you want?’ replaced with ‘How do you want this told?’ Is that happening on any editorial floors in the UK’s regional press yet? I’d love to know – because that really would be a converged newsroom.

I’d love to know too. As a general print journalist without an official specialism – and as a trainee, too – I’m not yet at the stage where the demands of the dummy consume my day as much as they do the content editors who have to fill its hungry boxes.

But the demands are becoming more apparent. We’re in the process of switching from a Microsoft Word-based CMS to Atex, built around InCopy and InDesign – and designed to allow reporters to write directly onto the page.

In effect, that means many stories have to be written to an exact length. Things weren’t particularly flexible for us before – we were writing to imaginary boxes 30cm or 8cm or sometimes 450 words long – but we could tweak our stories if we discovered they were “worth less” than we thought. That’s still going to be possible, but not as easy. Instead of writing the story to whatever length reporters felt was best and letting subs pick the right story lengths to fill the page, we’re now starting to see a situation where we have to work out how long our story will be before we begin to write it and set pen to paper.

It’s a different way of working and it may well suit some journalists better than it does me. But for me, the psychological impact of writing a story into a box is that I find myself stretching stories to fit, squeezing an extra quote or two in or lopping off a few facts.

And I have to change that. If stories are too long or too short then they’re in the wrong box, and I have to move them to fit. But that process has illuminated for me the problems of writing for boxes in the first place, especially for the web. If we write the boxed-in print version first, the web version will never flow the way it could given the unlimited space we have there to play in.

Allen Ginsberg once said – though I can’t find a cite online for it, I’m informed by a university tutor – that the length of a line of poetry can be constrained by the paper you write on. (Another beat poet, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, wrote him a letter on a length of toilet paper afterwards.) His argument was that the words should fit the breath instead.

Boxes constrain and limit us, and force unnatural shapes onto the writing process. No matter how many journalists, editors and newsrooms begin to break away from the dummy and start asking how we can tell stories instead of what shape they should be, if the technology we use keeps dragging us back there, journalists will still be writing 30cm page leads first and thinking about everything else – including innovating for the web – as secondary.

Exploring the read/write world

Yesterday, Nick Booth at Podnosh posted a transcript of a conversation on Twitter where he asked for useful analogies to describe the internet to people who’ve only experienced radio and tv.

The conversation – and the comments – got me thinking about the way metaphors limit what we can understand about the online world and affect how we use it, particularly the page/document conceptual metaphor that pervades our language.

We use print language constantly online. Web pages, archives, scroll, above the fold, inbox, email, post. The metaphor is pervasive and often goes unnoticed as we use the language that reinforces it, making it hard to tease out the implications and assumptions of this mindset.

But pages aren’t flat, static, words on the screen as we see in print papers. What happens if we call a page a node? Or a window? Or a stream, a fall, a flow, a conversation, a connection, a junction?

Conceiving of pages as stories, for instance, opens up the idea of letting journalists develop an entire story online, rather than in our notebooks. Posting complete transcripts of interviews, not just the quotes we think are important. Including raw footage alongside the edit for those who are interested. Asking at early stages of a project where users think we should be investigating more. Incorporating links to our research and visualisations of our data not when we think they are relevant but when we stumble across them.

Conceiving of pages as junctions makes flat print-like design stand out as inadequate – not fit for their intended purpose, which is to facilitate forward movement and choice for reader.

And what if, instead of a reader, we have a traveller? The idea of a reader implies commitment, passivity, and above all a text-based medium. A traveller is someone who can leave at any moment, and opens up the idea of the page as a literal place – a location that can be moved through and explored rather than a document.

Thinking of the web as a series of pages gets us print design replicated online, lacking the myriad subtleties that are possible in a space that is simultaneously a limitless sea of connections and a location and a conversation and a lot of other things. Essentially, it gets you the front page of the new Times website – pretty and clean, but flat and without the cues many travellers use to make meaningful journeys through the web.

Thinking of it in any other way at all requires seriously examining the words we use, and playing with putting others in their place. Each conceptual metaphor has its own problems – calling the internet a brain inadvertently implies the organised hivemind that Twitter users protest does not exist, for instance – but we need a library (or bathtub, or pantry) that’s full of different options in order to open up new ways of thinking about what’s possible online.

Playing in the streets

Download now or preview on posterous

HSHletter9.pdf (1283 KB)

There’s a cake shop next door, a giant hamster over the road and soldiers are fighting zombies on the roof. MARY HAMILTON welcomes you to the new-look Evening News.

Breaking news: the postman has delivered a letter.

That’s how most of the news comes in to the Home Sweet Home offices of the Evening News. It’s delivered by a tall man in short trousers, a flat cap and socks, who leaves the envelopes leaning up against the front canopy of the 20cm cardboard building.

I built the office myself, from flat-pack cutout to fully-fledged busy office building complete with newspaper bundles and Plasticene journalists, sharing glue, card and colouring pens with neighbours and strangers.

I even recreated Bernard Meadows’ eyecatching bronze ball sculptures, carefully rolling and squeezing yellow moulding clay and poking it gingerly with a pencil, before giving the rest of my clay to an excited six-year-old who wanted to make bees for her garden.

It is part of a performance – or perhaps an exhibition – called Home Sweet Home, the brainchild of Goldsmiths graduates Abigail Conway and Lucy Hayhoe, in which participants build their own city from flat-pack parts and then experience its evolution as it fills with people playing along.

Watching the tiny town sprout from a black and white canvas into a riot of colour in the extravagant surroundings of Blackfriars Hall was both surreal and sublime, as bizarre buildings and peculiar personalities developed thanks to the imagination of neighbours.

But when the letters began to arrive the town took on a new and magical dimension, with stories, greetings, and feats of collective imagination all emerging thanks to the postal service and the presenters at the radio station.

My letter reads: “Dear Editor, An escaped swan ate my shoes!  Please put it in your newspaper! Yours, Joz Norris, No. 188”.

Immediately I spring into action. I post a breaking news update on the billboard outside the office – crafted from matchsticks, card and successive layers of paper posters – and dash off a return letter asking for more detail about the attack.

Over time, petitions spring up on the community notice board. A campaign to build a public swimming pool gathers pace. Disgruntled residents try to force an election. A little girl who runs a flower shop donates a sponge-and-cocktail-stick floral display to my office.

A small zombie outbreak spreads and threatens other city properties, so the Evening News drafts in a local militia to fight them off. Other businesses welcome the zombies, selling them vintage clothes and inviting them in to a night club.

And I get another letter from Joz saying that he’s bought another pair of Doc Martens but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to look a swan in the eye ever again.

The whole experience is a testament to the power of play. Adults and children alike tap into the storytelling possibilities of the town, expressing their personalities through their houses and opening them up as the community evolves around them.

While some people come along, build houses and leave, those who stay build stories around their houses, and the whole community evolves and changes as the project progresses.

A giant hamster in the back garden of one house is asked to join the Spiegeltent as a performer. A few hours later he has moved to the circus with signs advertising his upcoming performances.

I spend the weekend doing what journalists do: asking questions, writing down stories, monitoring the notice board and answering letters, preparing for a burst of activity on Sunday night as I put the Home Sweet Home edition of the Evening News together.

The following day, when I return to Blackfriars Hall with a stack of miniature newspapers under my arm, the Spiegeltent has disappeared, replaced by a giant hamster run with tunnels, hoops and a swimming pool.

I arrive at the office to discover someone has stuck a giant red ball to my door, in imitation of the large inflatable ball currently touring Norwich as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. They are planted on the church, the fire station and the city hall, too.

For a short time this miniature cardboard community has been incredibly real. It has had action, politics, feuds, joy, fear and anger, and the people who created it have told hundreds of tiny stories that were, for a while, incredibly important, as they literally changed the way their city was constructed.

As the houses were dismantled and returned to their owners, I felt deeply privileged to have been present at the birth and the death of Norwich’s smallest suburb, and to have been able to tell just a few of the stories the residents created.

A version of this article and its accompanying miniature newspaper
were originally published in the Evening News
(www.eveningnews24.co.uk).

Posted via email from InterMediaMary

What if? News games

What if papers used games as a news medium?

There are a few news outlets already making moves in this direction, but I haven’t seen much in the way of commentary or ideas about taking it beyond quiz apps and into educational tools, social activities or, well, making it fun.

Here’s the thing. I reckon news – especially news online where attention is easily lost – should be entertaining. It should be interesting, engaging, thoughtprovoking and, if possible and where appropriate, fun.

Could games be a news medium? Could we use online games to tell or break stories, or to foster real engagement with and within our communities? Here are nine ideas. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Hat tip: I’m indebted to Margaret Robertson for a talk at Greenbelt 09 that pointed me towards some of these games and got me thinking about narrative crossovers between real life experience, current affairs/news and gaming.

Continue reading ‘What if? News games’

The economy of not linking

So the New York Post printed a story without crediting the blogger who originally broke it – and the journalist whose byline is on the Post piece claimed it was an editorial policy not to credit blogs for scoops.

Continue reading ‘The economy of not linking’