By Sarah Hartley: Almost 100 people left their bedrooms, home offices and local community halls for talkaboutlocal’s inaugural unconference this weekend. Some attendees in Stock-on-Trent were professional journalists, starting out on their own against a backdrop of local and regional press lay-offs and closures, some had a political cause to fight while others quite simply wanted to give a voice to a community not well-served by a newspaper industry retracting and centralising.
Definitive numbers of these hyperlocal sites are hard to come by but the website http://www.nutshell.org.uk has already listed more than 50.
The event organiser, William Perrin, from TalkAboutLocal.org says: “People have always wanted to get involved to make things better and suddenly they can do it for themselves. The web 2.0 tools provide platforms that are incredibly easy to use, without any real cost.”
A lack of local news provision is one of the reasons Hannah Waldram got involved. The 23-year-old Cardiff University journalism graduate found herself jobless and back home in the Midlands, so in August she set up bournvillevillage.com.
“I had an idea of providing some sort of local news service a while back because we have never had a local newspaper in my area. Because it’s my local community, I feel quite strongly about it.”
It’s a similar story heading north into Staffordshire where journalism lecturer Ross Hawkes set up his Lichfield blog in the city that Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) closed local newspaper
This article originally appeared in © Guardian News & Media Ltd..
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