Clapton Pond Blog

On Local Blogging

Martin Stabe has been reading this blog. And Gary Andrews has been reading Martin Stabe:

"Not every journalist makes a good blogger, and certainly not every blogger makes a good journalist...But I know if I were at a local paper, I’d like to be engaging with people who can shape my paper, buy my paper, engage with my paper, produce ways to make my paper more profitable, and ultimately help gather news for the paper."

And he'd invoice any paper that lifted whole chunks of material from his blog. Now there's a thought.

Hackney Podcasts Of Quality & Distinction

Francesca Panetta makes podcasts for the Guardian. She also lives in Hackney. Result? This.

Slow News

Former Daily Mirror editor, Sunday Times news editor, Sun assistant editor and now professor of journalism Roy Greenslade:

"Citizen participation is, of course, the future of journalism, a future that too many paid-for local papers have been rather slow to grasp. Many of them are catching up now. But are they too late?"

In one case "slow to grasp" seems to be rather understating it.

More Grief For The Gazette

From the Press Gazette:

"Local newspapers under pressure from falling circulation and declining ad income face a new threat from the local councils they rely on for much of their advertising. Two London boroughs – Greenwich and Hammersmith & Fulham – have decided to boost the frequency of their own publications by going weekly and fortnightly respectively, and turning former information sheets into slick competitors containing much of the TV, sport and local news expected from a traditional weekly. Lambeth, another inner London borough, took its monthly Lambeth Life magazine fortnightly earlier this year. Council magazines in Hackney, Waltham Forest and Havering have also gone fortnightly."

All this, and the best the Hackney Gazette can do is get snotty about bloggers. Incidentally, its front page story this week is about former Boris Johnson deputy Ray Lewis and his governorship at the Petchey Academy. Where would our local rag be without me?