Interesting to see our hyperlocal newspaper, Bay Life the Journal centre stage as volunteers prepare to launch a new project in Eastbourne next weekend (Saturday 28 January).—Bay Life, 19 January 2017
The new project which is linked to the Pevensey Volunteers project is busy establishing a hub in the town centre together with an online profile, and we understand, their own hyperlocal broadsheet newspaper.
The team responsible for the newspaper have told Bay Life that the first edition, to be published on Saturday 28 January will feature “news and information about some of the voluntary activity taking place in the town, including articles by MP Caroline Ansell, Liberal candidate Stephen Lloyd and key volunteer organisations in the town, together with a section that will tell the stories of vulnerable people and how they have been helped by volunteer groups”.
Included in the newspaper we understand is the story of the new lottery funded ‘Wayfinder Woman’ project, inspired by Laura Murphy and a group of local women, which has been granted £79,000 by the Lottery Fund to bring the profile of unknown influential Eastbourne women to the fore who have been ‘hidden by circumstance’.
The pioneering Wayfinder Woman project is being seen as having national significance in terms of the orientation and ‘depth of vision’ by a number of commentators locally.
The new volunteer centre has chosen to feature a copy of the Bay Life Journal as they set their table as the project prepares to launch.
Will their new hyperlocal newspaper match the standards of our own newspaper with the production values?
The birth of the hyperlocal press in Sussex is beginning to emerge as local people take their own stories to the press in the form of their own productions, missing out the cipher of the newspapers owned and controlled by major corporations.
There are something like 100 to 200 of these new ‘hyperlocal newspapers’ already in production up and down the country, with perhaps as many as another 200 planned to launch this year.
There is a marked lack of connection in the regional press with local people. The stories that matter in relation to the social context of villages and towns in Sussex can seem almost incidental. When presented there is marked absence of depth to the coverage.
Social media is becoming a key source of daily news for local people and the regional press seems unable to respond to the threat posed by the internet.
Sales of local newspapers continue to slide down. Portals online controlled by large media corporations at the local level singularly fail to connect with people. Clunky pop up adverts interfere with the browsing experience, with the local news spread so thin online that people are turning away from the portals in frustration.
The new hyperlocal press seems counter intuitive in the sense that social media online is now the place to see latest news, but having said that, what appears to be working for this new breed of newspaper, is the fact that like social media, the input is coming directly from local people in relation to the way that the news is being shaped.
The term ‘citizen journalism’ has been coined in relation to the way that the news is being gathered in relation to this phenomenon. The ‘hyperlocal press’ appears to have become one of the ways in which some of this gathering of news and information is being formatted.
Local campaigns and ventures with a social and business context are being presented in an interesting way and with depth to the profile of these ventures.
Of course these newspaper ventures are very small scale in terms of their production and reach, so it remains to be seen if they can capture enough of the local imagination to scale up with their print runs.
Nonetheless their decisions to make available ‘full digital download subscriptions’ of their editions; is something new in relation to profiling newspapers . The inclusion of a subscription base appears to mix the best of print values with the best in terms of accessibility and reach of the web..
There appears to be a freshness about the approach of these hyperlocal newspapers and a visceral connection of some descriptiion with the publications in some way for the organistions involved.
Seeing their values, aims, news and campaigns presented in broadsheet form to a production level standard seems to meet some kind of demand for local people to ‘see their own news’.
Perhaps the fact that these newspapers are themselves community ventures coming from inside the communities that they serve resonates in some way with the notion of ‘ownership”. Perhaps many local newspapers, now all owned almost exclusively by large media corporations seem a long way removed from local people and out of tune with the times in which we live.
Bay Life understands that a third ‘hyperlocal broadsheet’ is to launch in Brighton later this year working with the same kind of targeted ‘local social context remit’, featuring the working life of amenity societies across the city.
Of course there are questions about the economic viability of these new models of ‘hyperlocal newspaper,’ given the fact that they such small scale ventures.
Will there be enough advertising revenue to fund their growth and development? The question here would appear to be how much support they get from their own local communities and local business. The early evidence suggests that there is a spark of interest.
Congratulations to the Eastbourne Volunteers project and their work. The smiling excited faces suggest that there will be no time to read the local newspapers, with the exception of course of the new hyperlocal press, including their own broadsheet venture.
Their newspaper, the ‘Eastbourne Volunteer’ lunches on Saturday 28 January.
IMAGE CREDIT: Eastbourne Volunteers
