On 16 December 2010 Pevensey Bay Life joined a growing movement of digital platform providers of news and information by becoming licensed to deliver stories under the aegis of the Guardian Open Platform.
Tom Watson MP has described the scheme as ‘a work of simplistic genius that will have a dramatic effect on the news industry’ In essence, the scheme gives digital news providers access to over 1.2 million stories from the resources of the Guardian newspaper and enables them to deliver up information that can be filleted to suit different diets.
The licence allows us to fillet out full articles from the day’s Guardian (the last ten years worth of stories to be precise) and to publish them in the pages of Pevensey Bay Life, all under licence.
With access now to 1.2 million top quality news stories at our disposal, what value can this be to local business? (and by the bye that access increases daily, yesterday we had access to 356 new stories, as they appeared).
The answer is profile.
The Open Platform is a business plan. The Guardian’s feature advertising appears at the foot of each article. It is a small price for us to pay. It has the potential, of course for the Guardian to increase its readership in Pevensey Bay, and all the other localities enabled through the open licence, and they know it, and that is precisely what it might do. When it comes to our own customer base of course, the same argument applies. What Pevensey Bay Life is doing, is also being noticed.
Increased readership means an increased audience. Our audience reach and profile in 2011 looks set to deliver up to local business a sustainable platform. This is something that help them to build their profiles online. What the Guardian is doing is building an Open Platform in every sense.
What forward thinking local business is not going to give a glance to our rates card for 2011? We may be about to create a magic mix online that could have potential long lasting value to the local economy.
Profiles that get noticed by the right people bring business. Profiles that get noticed on new social and business platforms online bring business. It just so happens that they bring business with the bonus points built in. People that utilise these new platforms bring along with them, their new found flag waving friends.
We are already looking to see if the Daily Mail and Independent newspapers are about to follow suit with their own open platforms. The day they launch is the day that you will see their articles in the pages of Pevensey Bay Life.
December 16 2010 was something of a revolution in the offices of Pevensey Bay Life. We may not be the first online platform to deliver up the news in this way in the UK, but we are most certainly the first to do it in Sussex.
For us, and we hope for our growing audence, it represents something of a turn-key in the way that we can now serve the daily diet of news and information. Quality, fresh stories from national award winning journalists, picked ripe and re-sown to be relevant to local people, so that they pick and browse the issues that impact their lives.
Expect news about local economic and social issues, lifestyle stories, reviews, holiday destination tips about the Bay and, some of the best features based writers working in this country, throwing a little light on the locality, all delivered up through the Bay Life doors in our trademark, single page templates…….We are on the grid and under starters orders.
Happy browsing on the new Guardian powered open platform that is Pevensey Bay Life. Think local, act local, go global.
SIMON MONTGOMERY
editor, Pevensey Bay Life
