Projects 2013 > "Little j" Hyper Local News > Journal
In the last workshop we did go over the audiences but to be honest we spent a great deal of our time talking with Tom Grinstead from the Guardian – certainly not time wasted. I liked the healthy skepticism coming from the advisors on using personas carefully and wisely (if at all in some opinions) and in my background as a psychologist I understand the troubles ‘making-up’ personas can cause a project. However Justin, Emma, Sara and me did talk through the audiences and a definite focus was on the local residents or community users of the project. Whilst this is good we also needed to look at the other side of Little j, how the journalists were going to make use of the system. After all, the project is meant to be supporting local journalists and so we need to create something usable and useful for them to collect and gather better hyperlocal news stories.
So we have three overarching audience groups:
- The Little j’s – The local community members who we want to motivate to get involved in their local news and newspapers;
- The Local j’s – The local news journalists, in this case those from the Port Talbot Magnet;
- The National j’s – The national news teams who would want to tap into any local news that could be of national interest.
The last category is going to be very important to us in the long-run but immediately we are going to concentrate on the first two.
We have also come up with a nice tagline for the project:
Little j – Make the headlines
We like this as it’s an action line that aims at the active 1% (of the 1/9/90 rule) much like You Tube’s “Broadcast Yourself”.
We have put out a call for pilots to test the first prototypes here: http://iwant.littlej.org but as yet we have had very few people signing up (a subtle nudge there for you).
We have moved on and used the Ushahidi platform to create a rough working version of the functionality which we may actually use on the Little Day in Port Talbot.
The team at Cardiff (especially the wonderful Emma) is busy getting our pop-up newsroom ready for the 6 March which will be our Little J – Little Day. Our purpose for this day is to start to create a buzz around what’s coming soon, an event to raise the profile of the Port Talbot Magnet and also as a research tool for us to get real data on what channels of communication the people of Port Talbot favour. The result will be an actual printed version of the Port Talbot Magnet containing stories created on the day by the local community and the local journalists.
Meanwhile, we are starting to think about venture capitalist investment so we can continue with the platform development post-REACT.
Phew!
Posted by Paul Davies