David Harte

Increased interest in hyperlocal news has led to growing evidence of its economic value, its ability to play traditional democratic roles associated with news, and its merits and deficiencies in comparison with the outputs of a declining established commercial news industry. Given many hyperlocal producers cite the desire to play a role in producing better communities, this paper breaks new ground in examining the social and cultural dimensions of hyperlocal journalism’s news-making,
community-building, and place-making roles. We examine this emergent cultural form’s affinity with telling stories, and enabling conversations, about civic and political concerns, but also its affinity with, and celebration of, the banal everyday. Employing the novel theoretical concept of reciprocal journalism, we provide new evidence about the mutually reinforcing online, and offline, practices that underpin relationships between producers and the communities they inhabit and
represent. Drawing on evidence from the most extensive multi-method study of UK hyperlocal news to date, it demonstrates the different kinds of direct and indirect reciprocal exchange practices common in community news, and shows how such work, often composed of journalistic and community-activist practices, can enable and foster relationships of sustained reciprocity which improve and strengthen both hyperlocal news and the communities it serves.

The public interest value of news is often viewed through the prism of its relationship to democracy. In this respect news should act as: a source of accurate and plural information for citizens; a watchdog on elites; a mediator and/or representative of communities; and as an advocate of the public in campaigning terms. All of these roles are under pressure in the United Kingdom’s commercial local news sector. This has led many to speculate, often without evidence, that the output of a new generation of (mainly online) hyperlocal citizen news producers might (at least partially) play some of these roles. To test this assumption, we completed 34 semi-structured interviews with producers, the largest content analysis to date of UK hyperlocal news content (1941 posts on 313 sites), and the largest ever survey of UK community news practitioners (183 responses). We found that these sites produce a good deal of news about community activities, local politics, civic life and local business. Official news sources get a strong platform, but the public (local citizens, community groups) get more of a say than in much mainstream local news. Although there was little balanced coverage in the traditional sense, many community journalists have developed alternative strategies to foster and inform plural debate around contentious local issues. The majority of hyperlocal news producers cover community campaigns and a significant minority have initiated their own. We also found that critical public-interest investigations are carried out by a (surprisingly) large number of community news producers.

In recent years, a new wave of hyperlocal community news websites has developed in the United Kingdom (UK), with many taking advantage of new opportunities provided by free open-source publishing platforms. Given the trend in the UK newspaper industry towards closure and retrenchment of their local and regional press titles, it is perhaps understandable that policy-makers have shifted their gaze to these sites. This article examines the viability of hyperlocal news services with a particular focus on those that are independently owned and managed. Such operations often have a longevity that sits in contrast to a number of failed attempts by major media organisations to operate in the hyperlocal space. Yet many of the business models that underpin these sites seem precarious, often benefiting from a degree of self-exploitation. Drawing on 35 interviews with hyperlocal news publishers from across the UK, this article argues that publishers draw upon a civic discourse in order to make sense of their practice. This framing may limit the potential to develop economic sustainability and risks alienating policy-makers keen to work with an idealised “fictive” hyperlocal entrepreneur.

This study explores how Media Studies students at Birmingham City University use social media to enhance their professional profile and employability.  Social media is being used by a significant number of students to promote and publish their work online, network with industry professionals, and arrange media placements and paid work. Through the use of questionnaires, to provide quantitative data, and focus groups to provide qualitative data, the significance social media plays in enhancing the students’ professional profiles is analysed.  The focus groups include students who are actively using social media in this context, as well as those who are not, in order to understand why some students find these tools valuable, whilst others do not. The research supports the idea that social media can be an important tool in developing the professional profile of a Media student, with almost a quarter of students finding placements or paid work through social media.  The extent to which social media can develop the students’ social capital is examined and examples of ‘best practice’ are identified, including strategies for approaching industry professionals. The research approach is informed by Holmes’ (2006: 13) notion of a ‘graduate identity approach’ to employability research, which examines the ‘constructed nature of socially meaningful behaviour, and in turn the key concepts of warranting, practices, and emergent identity.’ The findings offer some reflections on how Web 2.0 tools are used by students and finds that students implement a range of strategies that in general, make distinctions between their emerging professional personas and their private lives. Boyd and Marwick’s (2010) notion of the ‘networked audience’, by which individuals communicate to an ‘imagined audience’ through their tweets, in some ways reflects students’ use of social media.

Acts of creative citizenship require places, where challenges and tensions generate energy, inviting resolution through creative collaboration. In this chapter we aim to shed light on processes of place-making, whether they occur in physical, digital or hybrid spaces. We adopt a broad definition of place to explore what place and making mean within three urban settings of our action research: a planning activist group in London; a hyperlocal news network in a Birmingham suburb; and a community media hub in Bristol.

All three places support groups that share an interest in the relationship between artistic imagination and its political expression in projects of urban renewal. We pay particular attention to the ways in which communicative infrastructures, or the ‘communications matrix’, may contribute to the construction of social relationships, and civic agency, leading to dividends in the form of enhanced networks of affinity, trust and resilience.

Since the mid-2000s, ‘hyperlocal’ has been identified as an emergent form of web-based, locally-focussed journalism practice that is seen to be playing an important role in offering news content that is “grounded in local, hermeneutic knowledge,” (Jones and Salter 2012: 96). Much research has focused on the civic value of hyperlocal (Metzgar et al. 2011, Kurpius 2010) with claims made about its ability to “make a distinctive contribution to local social capital, cohesion and civic involvement” (Flouch and Harris 2010: 6). This potential has been explored in a strand of a major Connected Communities project focused on the notion of “Creative Citizenship”, building on John Hartley’s discussions of the impact on citizenship of new media technologies whereby “‘ordinary’ people, using ‘new’ media produce discursive associative relations” (Hartley 2010: 245). This chapter draws on case study work undertaken on the Castle Vale estate in East Birmingham. ‘The Vale’ as it is known locally has been the subject of significant urban regeneration initiatives since the early 90s, the area having by then gained “a negative perception by residents and other communities” (Coatham & Martinali 2010: 91). Community Media has played a role in addressing these perceptions through the funding of a community radio station, hyperlocal website and a newspaper. Through interviews with residents and the community media organisation the chapter offers insight into the precariousness of such operations and reveals ways in which assumptions about the democratizing function of such media come up against the tensions over representation that exist between readers and producers. The chapter offers a critical account of how research into ‘connected communities’ needs to take account of the ‘banality’ of everyday activism by citizens sensitive to what David Parker and Christian Karner describe as externally-imposed “negative reputational geographies” (2011:309).

There has been increasing attention to hyperlocal news in media and policy circles in recent years (Greenslade 2007; Ofcom 2009 and 2012; Radcliffe 2012). Some prominent hyperlocal practitioners have even argued that these services are “a crucial part of the media future as the traditional local media dies or is cut back to a shadow of its former self” (Taggart 2010). But as yet little research has been carried out in a sustained and systematic way on this new kind of community-level hyperlocal news in the UK. This chapter begins to address this gap.

This chapter explores how Media Studies students at Birmingham City
University use Facebook in a number of ways to build relationships with each
other and with potential employers. The authors utilise research from interviews
and focus groups with students to demonstrate how Boyd and Marwick’s (2010)
notion of the ‘networked audience’, by which individuals communicate to an
‘imagined audience’ through their use of social media, in some ways reflects
students’ own use. The chapter finds that many students become more aware of
issues of ‘context collapse’ (ibid.) the more they use social media.

Offline representations and online constructions of ‘place’ in hyperlocal media
Theme: 16. Bottom-up, participatory urban and rural media and cultural policies

Since the mid-2000s, ‘hyperlocal’ has been identified as an emergent form of web-based, locally-focussed journalism practice that is seen to be playing an important role in offering news content “grounded in local, hermeneutic knowledge,” (Jones and Salter 2012: 96). Emerging research has focused on either the civic value of hyperlocal (Metzgar et al. 2011, Kurpius 2010, Thurman et al. 2011) or has argued there are economic gains to be had from unlocking its digitally-enabled potential (Nesta and Kantar Media 2013, Radcliffe 2012).

In contrast to these discourses, this paper draws on UK case studies to examine how hyperlocal media operations construct an understanding and narrative of place in localities. The paper follows Habermas (1991) and then Oldenburg (2001) to explore ways that hyperlocal media offer online ‘third places’ which are, in some respects, distanced from the reality of everyday life in that ‘place’. Hyperlocal media covers a range of subjects including charity events, business awards and activism, often sourced or involving everyday residents, but with the risk of developing a potentially fetishised (Postill 2011) sense of community. Such constructions are not always positive and tensions are evident between the representation offered by hyperlocals and the audiences they serve, demonstrating the potential of hyperlocal to offer up new subaltern spaces in the public sphere for debate about place-making.

The research forms part of a 30-month Research Council funded project, ‘Media Community and the Creative Citizen’, investigating the role of the creative economy in connected communities.


David Harte, Birmingham City University – Co-investigator, ‘Media, Community and the Creative Citizen’ – dave.harte@bcu.ac.uk
Jerome Turner, Birmingham City University – Research Fellow, ‘Media, Community and the Creative Citizen’ – Jerome.turner@bcu.ac.uk




References:

Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press.
Jones, J. & Salter, L. (2012) Digital journalism. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Kurpius, D. D., Metzgar, E. T. & Rowley, K. M. (2010) Sustaining Hyperlocal Media. Journalism Studies, Vol 11, No 3, pp. 359-376.
Metzgar, E. T., Kurpius, D. D. & Rowley, K. M. (2011) Defining hyperlocal media: Proposing a framework for discussion. New Media & Society, Vol 13, No 5, pp. 772-787.
Nesta & Kantar Media (2013) UK Demand for Hyperlocal Media Research Report.
Oldenburg, R. (Ed.). (2001). Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities. Da Capo Press.
Postill, J. (2011) Localizing the Internet: An Anthropological Account. Berghahn Books.
Radcliffe, D. (2012) Here and Now: UK hyperlocal media today. Nesta.
Thurman, N., Pascal, J. C. & Bradshaw, P. (2011) Can Big Media Do 'Big Society'?: A Critical Case Study of Commercial, Convergent Hyperlocal News. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Vol 8, No 2.

In his critique of journalism studies, John Hartley (2009) has argued for new perspectives to be brought to the study of journalism in the digital age. In order to understand the impact of what happens “if everyone is a journalist,” he suggests we turn to cultural studies’ interest in aspects of everyday cultural life, rather than journalism studies’ interest in “producer and practice” (2009: 154). This paper examines an emerging practice in ‘everyday journalism’, that of ‘hyperlocal’ news publishing on the Internet. The UK has over 600 hyperlocal websites – the majority run by non-professionals – covering small geographic areas from rural villages to urban housing estates. This nascent network offers an alternative public sphere that foreground the everyday, ‘banal’ concerns of people. As part of a 30-month Research Council funded project, ‘Media Community and the Creative Citizen’ (part of the Connected Communities theme), the paper outlines the role hyperlocal plays in enhancing community communications and the tensions that exist between readers and producers. We draw on a range of qualitative research – interviews, workshops, content analysis – to examine hyperlocal in the context of debates around banal (Postill 2008) and everyday activism (Pink 2012). Our findings suggest that hyperlocal should be viewed as an aspect of the ‘significant everyday’ that is of value to the cultural studies ethnographer interested in understanding how “the possibilities for meaning are organised” (Atton 2004: 8).

David Harte, Birmingham City University – Co-investigator, ‘Media, Community and the Creative Citizen’
Jerome Turner, Birmingham City University – Research Fellow, ‘Media, Community and the Creative Citizen’

References:
Atton, C. (2004) An alternative Internet. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hartley, J. (2009) The uses of digital literacy. St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press.
Pink, S. (2012) Situating everyday life : practices and places. London: SAGE.
Postill, J. (2008) Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks. New Media & Society, Vol 10, No 3, pp. 413-431.

'We started work in May 2012 and we are due to complete in February 2015. This ‘first findings’ document is intended to provide a brief round- up of our work to date, for sharing with those attending or following remotely our Creative Citizens Conference, at the Royal College of Art in London in September 2014. It is not an ‘end of project’ report because the conference itself will provide important inputs to our thinking.' - from the introduction by Principal Investigator, Ian Hargreaves

Creative Citizens Fair, Saturday June 27th, 2015. At Impact Hub, Birmingham, UK. Funded under the AHRC Connected Communities Festival programme.

Community studies, even when they employ co-creation methods, are not always effective at communicating their work to non-academic audiences. The Connected Communities Festival showcase opportunity allows the Media, Community and the Creative Citizen project to build on engagement work by co-producing a one-day event with relevant community-facing partner organisations. Speakers and attendees were invited to discuss their activities at a peer-to-peer level – in short, the ‘creative citizens’ that have been the subject of the project's work – and participate in ‘family friendly’ activities to explore themes inherent in citizenship practices. 

1. Presentations and discussion
The main focus of the day was pre-programmed talks running from 11am-4pm. This allowed for a maximum of eight speakers at 20 minutes each, followed by 10 minutes for questions. A call for event speakers was aimed primarily at Birmingham organisations or community projects, in recognition of current discourses of the ‘Greater Birmingham’ region, and its active creative industries and citizens. The talks were 1. selected by the partnership team from call ‘applications’, and 2. invited from currently known organisations. The focus was on learning and sharing, so talks were encouraged that engaged with best practice advice. The real value came from a peer-to-peer approach, rather than passing through a prism of academia, off-putting for some.

2. Workshops and activities
Activities and workshops were run in a more social open Fair space at the same venue, with attendees taking part on a ‘drop in’ basis. The focus was on encouraging people to collectively explore everyday understandings of themes such as ‘place’, ‘community’ and ‘giving’. The three workshops were: a finger knitting workshop exploring themes of community; breadmaking workshop; urban planning workshop. Permanent whiteboards installed during the day invited attendees to share their answers to the question ‘What does being a creative citizen mean to you?’ and also create a crowdsourced network diagram of people and their possible connections for future collaboration. The focus of these activities was to provide innovative methods for engaging with and rethinking issues inherent in creative citizenship practices, and to create new collaborative relationships where possible.

3. Stands and stalls
The open space offered  organisations (including our partners) opportunity to present stands or single tables, where attendees could find out more about their work throughout the event.
4. Exhibition: Creative Citizens photographic portraits and materials

The event also capitalised on project materials created thus far, such as a series of photographic portraits of ‘creative citizens’ displayed at the 2014 Cardiff showcase. Given these subjects were from across the UK, this situates the Birmingham event within a broader context of citizenship activities and the research project itself. We also made printed copies of our 40-page Findings document available to attendees.

Day's running order

Creative Citizens @CrtvCitizens ​creativecitizens.co.uk
Hashtag for the event #CCFair

Talks in the Town Hall (Upstairs​)
11.00 Digbeth is Good @digbeth ​digbeth.org
11.30 The Hub at Ashmore Park @ashmoreparkhub ​www.the-hub.info
12.00 Bread2Share @bread2share ​bread2share.fraggle.co
12.30 ​LUNCH
13.00 Little Hippo @littlehipposhop  www.littlehippopresents.com
13.30 Bearwood Promoters @BearwoodShuffle ​www.bearwoodshuffle.org
14.00 The Real Junk Food Project @TRJFPBrum ​www.therealjunkfoodproject.org 14.30 ​BREAK
15.00 Craftivism @Bham_Craftivist ​www.janethakoordin.com/

Workshops in The Workshop (Downstairs)
Crafty Muthas - Finger Knitting - Throughout the day @craftymuthas ​www.craftymuthasbearwood.com/
Bread2Share - Dough Making - Between 2pm and 4pm @bread2share ​bread2share.fraggle.co
Made - Placemaking/Housing Design Challenge - Throughout the day @MADEplaces ​www.made.org.uk

Stalls in The Workshop (Downstairs)
Beatfreeks @beatfreeks ​www.beatfreeks.com
Envision @envisionuk ​www.envision.org.uk
Time Union Coventry @TimeUnionCoventry ​timetodigestcoventry.wordpress.com/time-union All of Birmingham is a Stage (DanceXchange) @dancexchange ​www.dancexchange.org.uk The Real Junk Food Project @TRJFPBrum ​www.therealjunkfoodproject.org
Reel Eyes Films @reeleyze ​www.reeleyesfilms.co.uk
Bearwood Shuffle @BearwoodShuffle ​www.bearwoodshuffle.org
Moseley Exchange @MoseleyExchange ​www.moseleyexchange.com

The event was free, with capacity for 100. 100 free tickets were 'sold' on Eventbrite, with around 85 attending on the day, plus organisers / staff. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with evidence from feedback forms that theday informed their own practices and in some cases set up new, concrete projects or connections.

Feedback on Twitter: https://storify.com/jezturner/creative-citizens-fair-2015-feedback

Work of the Creative Citizens project, which I worked on, has been recognised in Cardiff University's Centre for Community Journalism annual review, where they, in turn, "work with communities in Wales and beyond to support the development
of news services created by local people, for local people."

In discussing research, they said they: "learnt from and publicised Creative Citizens research carried out at Cardiff  University and Birmingham City University into the value of hyperlocal news;" (Annual review, p11)