My international hyperlocal experience

Newsgarden / BlockTalk

This was my last week on Serra Media’s Fall Internship Program. I joined that in the end of September - an opportunity to have an ‘international experience’ with a propose I’ve been working some years with and which became more popular recently: hyperlocal news.  

In this program, we are four community cultivators – from Seattle (WA), Portland (OR), Los Angeles (CA) and, yes, Porto Alegre (RS), Brazil. The position’s goal: we should “grow a meaningful, constructive community of Web users through outreach, participation and creativity”. 

I was curious about how is working with another audience, who has different culture and ways for accessing internet and digital tools. On my daily job, here in Brazil, I edit a supplement and a blog about the neighbourhood where I grow up. Everything could be so different from I’m used to do. I’ve never been in USA or Canada – for while -, but I’ve picked up news for four cities/regions in these countries for nine weeks.

Actually it isn’t so different. Hyperlocal news can be similar anywhere: weekend markets, traffic interruptions, festivals, city hall decisions, interesting people. Example: last Thursday, there’s a storm in Porto Alegre, and some bloggers sent me photos, published on Blog do ZH Zona Sul early afternoon. At night, I checked The Bellingham Herald’s Newsgarden and found out a report submitted by a user: That Blows, with photos of a Vintage Ford Truck crushed by a tree fall. Stormy weather caused damages in both cities.

As community cultivators, we identified who is blogging about that city and share their posts in Newsgarden – and, of course, I invited them to add more contributions there in the future. As here, sometimes people invited me to visit their places (“Oh, thanks, but I live out of the city…“). 

Both cases, in Brazil and in US, one of the main challenges is the audience’s engagement. I haven’t created an amazing formule to this question during the internship – if someone has it, let me know (some tips in the post Social Tools and Hard Work Drive Local Audiences, Serra Media Blog) -, but I’m glad to finish the task with some result: the number of views increased in all these sites since this internship began. Now I can face another hyperlocal experience.

* * *

Related post:

> Working With Newsgarden/BlockTalk

 

Sobre crowdsourcing

Blog do Editor, em zerohora.com

 

Texto originalmente publicado no Blog do Editor, em zerohora.com

 

“Na segunda-feira, o Blog do ZH Zona Sul publicou o post Que obra é essa?, relativo a uma obra iniciada ao lado da ciclovia da Diário de Notícias, na zona sul da Capital, pedindo a ajuda dos leitores para desvendar o mistério. No final de outubro, fotografamos um buraco raso, por alguns metros, aberto dias antes por uma retroescavadeira.

Sem placa no local ou funcionários que pudessem dar informações, ligamos para diversas secretarias e empresas para saber o que seria feito ali. Nenhuma soube dizer do que se tratava.

Em meio ao mistério de uma obra inacabada, o blog lançou a sua dúvida na rede e perguntou aos internautas se teriam alguma pista para passar à reportagem. Essse “chamado aberto” aos leitores é conhecido como crowdsourcing, em uma ideia de que o coletivo pode resultar em informações mais precisas.

A prática, claro, ganhou força com a internet. Um dos exemplos mais expressivos é o do jornal The Guardian, que publicou em seu site 458.832 documentos com os gastos dos parlamentares britânicos. Até a tarde desta terça, dia 18, 24.603 internautas já garimparam 215.503 papéis.

Em Zero Hora, você pode já ter percebido esses convites ao público há um tempo — um dos mais recentes, foi o chamado no Twitter (@zerohora) sobre a passagem do Sucatão pelo céu porto-alegrense, no domingo. As respostas dos leitores ganharam espaço na Reportagem Especial da segunda-feira passada.

Com mais de 1,6 mil acessos e 28 palpites no post — dos que sugeriam ser uma obra da Bienal do Mercosul aos ciclistas e pedestres que disputam lugar na via para bicicletas devido à falta de calçada no local —, o ZH Zona Sul realizou uma segunda rodada de ligações, mas o mistério permanece.

Aliás, se tiver uma dica, mande um e-mail para zonasul@zerohora.com.br. Afinal, esse post também é um chamado aberto.

* Melissa Becker, repórter dos cadernos de Bairros da Zero Hora“

 

Working with Newsgarden/BlockTalk

I’m currently in a Fall Internship Programm for Serra Media, a technology and services company based in Seattle (WA). For nine weeks, I’m a community manager working on the Newsgarden/BlockTalk platform in four websites: The Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, WA), Kitsap Sun (Bremerton, WA), Kelowna Capital News (Kelowna, BC, Canada) and Penticton Western News (Penticton, BC, Canada). It’s being an interesting experience.

The Bellingham Herald

Kitsap Sun

Kelowna Capital News

Penticton Western News

 

 

Lots of local news, one map

Finally I add a Google Maps on Blog do ZH Zona Sul. It’s about some traffic interruptions for the instalation of drainpipes on South Zone streets, which will lasts until 2010. The works happen in almost 15 places at same time, in different roads and different periods of time – so the map is updated very often. Since I published (on Oct. 2nd), the map has more than 2,600 views in eight days.

 

On the road

Working on the road - Photo: Diego Vara

 

For the first time, I used CoverItLive in a coverage for Zero Hora, sharing the task with a colleague. Paulo was at the newsroom, and I reported from one of the main roads to the coast of my State (the “Freeway”). Monday is a bank holiday here in Brazil, so a big traffic jam was expected on Friday night. 

We added informations like if there’re too many cars, about some crashes, how to avoid them and answering user’s questions (check the result). CoverItLive is very easy to use. For the next coverage, some tips about live blogging.

 

A Impostora do 11/09

 

Matéria publicada em Zero Hora de 20/09/2009, editoria de Mundo, sobre Tania Head – ou melhor, Alicia Esteve Head, que se passou por sobrevivente do 11 de Setembro e chegou à presidência do World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. 

Revelada como uma farsa em 2007 em uma reportagem do New York Times, sua história foi tema do documentário The 9/11 Faker, produzido no ano passado pela emissora britânica Channel 4 e exibido no Brasil pelo GNT neste mês.

 

 

Links para a matéria:

> Escombro de mentiras: Uma impostora em meio à tragédia

> Desmascarada na primeira página

> Galeria de farsantes

 

ZH Zona Sul on Twitter

Since June, ZH Zona Sul has an account on Twitter: http://twitter.com/zhzonasul

At this moment, we have more than 100 followers. Another neighbourhood supplement should have its Twitter account soon, as a tool to be nearer the readers. 

We tweet about:

- New posts on its blog

- Every Friday, a reminder about the supplement publication

- Retweet some news and tips about that area tweeted by city hall sectors (water supply cut for some hours or a block on traffic in some street, e.g.)

- Questions to help us in a report

 

Brasília 2.0??

Blog do Planalto: cool maps, lots of videos, but no comments

 

Finally, the Brazilian’s presidency launched a blog this week (Blog do Planalto), as I suggested in a past post. It’s a very nice blog - the user can choose the layout, there’re lots of videos and Google Map is used to show which places president Lula visited during the week. But it’s not possible to let comments about any post. They said the staff wouldn’t be enough to moderate the comments. What a shame.

Two journalists created a clone of this site on WordPress, then users can let your opinions – one of the posts, from Sept. 3rd until now, has 617 comments.

 

Trolls

I translated to Portuguese this post: Why online communities attract trolls, by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk. It’s a very interesting text about people who ‘mess’ attempts at debate with their comments and how to handle with this. Impossible to erradicate. I translated this post to our ZH Zona Sul’s bloggers, citizens who aren’t used to be aimed with this kind of comments.

The Portuguese version (with the author’s permission) is here.

 

Your Story has its end

UM UPDATE: no post Your story, eu mencionava o projeto da BBC de mesmo nome que tinha um objetivo ambicioso - ter citizen journalists espalhados pelo mundo. Pois, na semana passada, li que a broadcast company cortou fundos para esse projeto (veja mais no Editors Weblog).

Fim de uma fase de euforia do jornalismo colaborativo, como diz Ana Carmem? O site, no entanto, segue no ar, com notícias como as eleições no Irã por tweets e blogs (leia aqui). Não perca os próximos capítulos da emocionante novela O Futuro dos Jornais.