Local News & Information

People will pay for the convenience of not poring through internet sludge all day and having someone clarify what they need to know.”

Journalists are needed so people have access to the information and answers they need to guide their lives.

Six years later, Jeff Jarvis wrote a frustrated post on his blog Buzz Machine. Hurricane Sandy had just devastated his New Jersey neighborhood. He needed to know which streets were passable, where power crews were actually working, which gas stations had fuel. His local news outlet published stories about the devastation but left the community on... See more

Asynchronous forms of engagement can be synchronized with regular weekly or daily reports provided by the platform that serve something of the function that “talk of the town” columns in local newspapers used to provide.

Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.

It will make all of us happier.

that local journalism is a crucial facet of society that connects us to the places we live and the people who live around us and gives us a sorely needed sense of shared reality in an atomised age; that this kind of journalism has been decimated in Greater Manchester and pretty much every other community in this country because its old business... See more