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Thursday, August 18, 2005

DIY newsroom for Ireland?

Damien Mulley has a big idea and is looking for opinions. He's just registered Newsroom.ie with the intention of maybe creating a collaborative Irish news source:

In order to do this, my current solution, which may radically change once I get feedback is a system of local contributors. Split newsroom.ie into areas and split those areas into smaller areas and so on. So we have frontpage stories which are fed by contributions from the provences, the provences are fed from county sections, counties from localities etc. etc. It reminds me of the Powers of Ten idea in a way.

So we have the local kid talking about who vandalised the playground and taking pics and we have the local concerned citizen talking about some local planning controversy. At the same time in the greater area there may be some big yet local story, for example lots of Cork people pissed off over water charges and all discussing it.

It's a neat idea, but probably easier said than done. To do something like that you'll need a huge base of contributors, something that could only be built over time. You'd probably be starting out with a handful of people and I'm wondering if the model would fit to such a small starting point. Even if you look at the aggregate of what all Irish bloggers are writing about, you'd still have very patchy local news. The other thing I'm wondering is if this is too similar to the likes of Indymedia?

The other alternative Damien mentions is maybe a model which draws content from Irish blogs. While we already have two Irish blog aggregators, perhaps there's a gap in the market for an edited one, a "blogazine" so to speak, which pulls together interesting posts from Irish bloggers and categorises them. For example, you could feature what everyone is saying about the IRA annoucement one week, or what everyone says about the Rossport Five the next. That doesn't have to be the final model, rather a starting point on which you can build, gathering together contributors and photographers who needn't necessarily be bloggers in the first place.

UPDATE:
Bernie chips in with his own thoughts, citing the example of YourHub.com, which was created by the Rocky Mountain News.

MORE:
In the comments below, reader Curt points to a similar project, Pegasus News in Texas. It's yet to launch, but they have a blog here.

Dossing Times also has some commentary.
Categories: Ireland , Blogging , Media

posted by Dick O'Brien at 7:18 PM | link |

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