In the first of series of case studies of hyperlocal start-ups, NMJ examines a highly successful rural community website
Photo: David Grimshaw
Now in its third year, the site provides the village with near-continuous coverage of local news, event listings and celebratory photos that a weekly newspaper could only dream of. And its several daily postings are all provided by a six-strong team of voluntary bloggers.
The idea came in 2007 when the village – losing its shop, Methodist chapel and bus service to Derby – was at a low ebb. Needing to secure funding for the rebuilding of the Memorial Hall, some enterprising residents figured that a website might demonstrate the sincerity of the community to grant-givers.
Launching in March 2008, the site was an ‘instant hit’, according to Mike Atkinson, one of the editorial team and an award-winning blogger in his own right. Two years on, it gets 400 page views on a quiet day and 1200 on a busy one, drawing interest from outsiders such as former residents. ‘Pretty much everyone in the village who has a computer reads us on a regular basis,’ says Atkinson.
The bloggers, who work as and when with no rota, are often out and about covering local events. There’s no hierarchical editorial structure but, with the most controversial issues being fly-tipping and fouling by dogs, there’s not much need for an editor to carry the can.
So what about money? The healthy clutch of banners promoting local organisations and businesses on the site is deceptive: they’re not adverts. Initially generating income through sponsorship and donations in kind for the Memorial Hall appeal, they have stayed up as a ‘thank you’ to donors.
Atkinson says that the bloggers, who all have other sources of income, don’t expect to earn anything from their work. Meanwhile, with the domain name donated by a villager, the costs of running the site – around £10 a year – are negligible.
‘We’re not going to go down the road of Adsense,’ says Atkinson. ‘We’re not interested in monetising.’
Clearly, www.parwich.org is a powerful illustration of two encouraging new truths about the future of local online journalism: both local news and readers exist in unprecedented levels of detail or – in the new jargon – ‘granularity’.
But the case of Parwich says little about whether the funding model is there too. Its staunchly non-commercial approach makes it hard to tell whether the model is financially unviable or whether this is just the way the founders of this particular project want to do things.
The apparently idyllic nature of life in the village also means it has few lessons to share about the practicalities of covering tougher patches and more controversial stories.
Future NMJ case studies of hyperlocal experiments will explore these and other questions.
Thanks for a very fair summary of what we do. Re. monetising: I suppose our reluctance to go down this route stems from the blog having minuscule running costs, so throwing ourselves into selling ad space doesn’t feel like something we would ever prioritise – administering the blog takes a lot of oiur time as it is, so it’s a question of where our energies can be best spent. That said, three companies from that list of sponsors on our sidebar have paid specifically to advertise with us: small sums, but they’re small companies. Adsense doesn’t appeal as it would feel like a colonisation of our blog from an outside force: a little area on our sidebar that wouldn’t be ours, and that would have nothing to do with our village.
Perhaps it all comes back to the fact that we’re all volunteers, who have chosen to donate our time freely for the good of our community. Some people might join the horticultural society, or help to run the village hall… running the blog is simply the way we have chosen to make our own contribution. And with that in mind: it’s worth stressing that we see ourselves as bloggers rather than journalists, and we see the blog as a village noticeboard / parish magazine / photo gallery rather than as an online newspaper. So there’s an accent on the feelgood, and on posts which positively reflect our community.
Yes, Parwich is an “idyllic” place to live, and we enjoy reflecting that and celebrating our strengths – but like any communities, we also have our divisions and conflicts, and these sometimes spill over into heated exchanges in our comments boxes. For that reason, we have recently introduced a new comments policy, with a clear statement on acceptable content and a ban on anonymous and pseudonymous comments. There are particular issues to deal with, when you’re running a site where the majority of readers and commenters live next door to each other, and know each other personally – this makes us notably different from other online communities.
As for dealing with “tougher patches and more controversial stories”: we don’t have many, but we have run posts criticising planning decisions from the Peak District National Park Authority (PDNPA), and our campaign to get the county council to take action on a dangerous stretch of road was picked up by our local newspaper, who ran two separate cover stories on the issue. We think that this was enough to finally hold the council accountable, and action was taken not long after the stories appeared. This is a great strength which we have: our visibility via Google etc makes our public servants that much more accountable, and we know that local politicians, PDNPA officers and the like keep an eye on what we are saying. This has certainly led to notably warmer relations with the PDNPA, for example.
There aren’t many subjects which we wouldn’t touch, but recently one of our villagers was in trouble with the law over a fairly minor misdemeanour, and this was very briefly mentioned in the local paper. We saw no value in posting about this on our blog: the matter is already widely known, and publicising it further would have served no purpose. Again, this marks us out as community bloggers, not local journalists.
interesting stuff – I was asked by a journalism academic at kingston what my model was for http://www.kingscrossenvironment.com – basically i am not sure i need a model. in the community people have given thousands of hours of volunteering time over the years to all sorts of community endeavours. many neighbourhood organsiations have run for now decades on a volunteering princple – WI, Scouts, churches, mosques, ‘friends of…’ groups etc.
we just give a little time to a website as well and i stick my hand in my pocket for about £10 a month running costs. you don’t need special journalism training to write and publish online. i am sure if we had training we could do a better job, but it isn’t necessary to do the basics and even some more advanced stuff.
britain has a rich tradition of volunteering and ‘lay’ involvement – that is just carrying on on the web in the emerging hyperlocal movement