Cost implications have been cited in a move that will cut a number of journalist’s jobs (although this is part of a company-wide move in Trinity Mirror which has seen another set of redundancies announced in Birmingham).

Alun Edmunds, the publishing director for Media Wales, said the readership will still be served by Trinity who will cover the area with The Western Mail.

That’s good to hear, but it does leave a problem – there’s a huge difference between having your own local paper which devotes all its coverage to what is happening in your community and having the big local covering events from over 40 miles away.

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I find this a bit ironic the week after my colleague Andy Williams appeared on BBC breakfast talking about the impact of newspaper closures on communities.

I’m all for hyperlocal sites expanding into these area – but it does leave a crucial problem. The 2001 census gives the Neath/Port Talbot area a population of some 134,468 with over 15 per cent being listed as retired. I wonder how many of them have broadband access?

So maybe, what could happen in towns where we lose papers are collectives or co-operatives where journalists and the community work together to create print and hyperlocal. There are issues with economy of scale and more to be thought about – but is this impossible?

I recently read an interesting piece on the Nieman Lab called Newspapers get the kind of communities they deserve

All we have left is the trust that our readers — that our community — have in us. And how do we gain and keep that trust? By telling them the truth — but also by listening to them and valuing their input, and making them an equal partner in what we are doing. Only then will we get the kind of community that really matters.

Although the piece was primarily looking at a news outlets online community, I really like the quote by author Mathew Ingram.

Can we use co-operative techniques, coupled with the best of online and offline distribution to work with and alongside a community to keep the news relevant and local.

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She made some very interesting points about how that needs to change and highlighted projects like our tahoe, Albany Today (from her own j-school) and News Mixer as projects which require young journalists to “set up shop” and engage in the networked communities and the community on their own doorstep.

We need to rethink our own practices within the academy and make our purposes and obligations more explicit

She added that educators need to

teach students to value innovation, uncertainty and experimentation

There are issues that Mensing outnlined here regarding timetable, collaborating with disperate groups, rewarding innovation and experimentation (something tough in the traditional academic setting) and the difficulty in faculty being able to make community commitments.

This was something that cropped up when I managed to blag a coffee with the editor of The Hindu a little while ago.

At the conference, Bettina Peters of the Global Forum for Media Development questioned whether it was appropriate to try and export business models from the developed world to the developing world.She went on to discuss the need for collaboration between the North and South hemisphere, getting educators and journalists involved in sharing ideas and knowledge.

She gave an example that journalists in Nigeria might be equipped to support journalists in Romania – even though the constraints they face may be very different.

Mixed models and the sharing of ideas are key ideas cropping from the plenary, should be an interesting couple of days.

If you’ve not been able to get down here – and places were pretty limited given the number of people  presenting – you can watch the plenary stream online.

There’s also a Flickr group and the conference Twitter account and hashtag #foj09.

I’ll be posting sporadically throughout the conference.

A screenshot of the Digital Revolution blog

Russell Barnes, producer of a new BBC documentary with a working title of Digital Revolution, is set to publish bits of the show’s interviews online before it airs.

He’s explains why

The second phase of our online project will begin in September. We want to share our rushes online, as they are filmed, including our encounters with the web’s head honchos.

We hope to release those under a permissive licence so that web users can re-use them or do their own mash-ups as they please. Whenever we can, we’re trying to rewrite the traditional BBC script and create something truer to the spirit of the web.

What is also quite interesting is that the show’s minisite has its own blog and production briefing section.

Should be an interesting experiment – although for those of us who use the internet a lot the interview list does read like the cast from the web’s own Usual Suspects.

Johnston Rejects Scotsman Sale Talk, Launches Hyperlocal Sites Off the balk of talks about speculation surrounding the sale of the Scotsman, paidContent:UK focus on Johnston’s hyperlocal setup in Leeds

“Freesheet no longer viable model” and other myths The row surrounding the closure of London’s freesheets gets some myth debunking

Sony Reader recently announced that it was dropping its own proprietary ebook format in favour of the epub format. Which got me thinking a little bit about ereaders and magazines and newspapers.

The Plastic Logic reader can handle PDF and graphics and the epub format as can be seen in this All Things Digital video

Just a little thought – Adobe’s inDesign publishes to epub format, and the epub format is capable of supporting images. So, does that mean that Sony’s ereader may be gearing up towards a version which would support images?

That would certainly make it a more interesting platform for media publishers.

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• Sony takes Reader openness one step further, will offer EPUB titles only (engadget.com)

Just another great example of what can be done with data to make it easy to understand rather than leaving it in a spreadsheet.

Rather than just the numbers of service personnel killed – the UK fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq infographic page offers three views: a combined total and one for each of the countries. It also shows a UK map of where British service men killed in action came from and bar charts for cause of death, branch of the services, age, rank, gender and there is an interactive timeline

status.twitter alert on Thursday afternoon

When my Twitter client -  Tweetdeck – stopped returning messages, I wondered what was going on. After all like many interested in social media and new communications technologies I’ve found it a very useful service. Wondering if this was and API call problem, or even my own network infrastructure, I first tried Twhirl, then checked Twitter.com – nothing.

A quick check of the web showed my network was functioning, so I piled over to status.twitter.com.

Their first message was simply Twitter was down, later it came up as a denial of service attack.

According to Wired Twitter hasn’t been down since May 8 – and it has become noticeably more reliable (although I did see the fail whale earlier on today, but then I use desktop or mobile clients to access Twitter for the most part).

This does raise an issue for journalism though. If we us third party applications and services – particularly hosted on servers that don’t belong to us (or any organisation we may work for) – then how can we risk manage for someone else’s servers being under attack.

Lots of journalists and journalism organisation use Twitter to distribute RSS feeds, talk to the networks they are involved with, crowd source, share and just be humans in an online setting.

But what happens when that goes down – is it in one sense like your rented printing presses going down or your leased delivery vans stopping working. Or maybe more appropriately, somone cutting a phone line and disconnecting the network.

An interesting question for anyone interested in distributed journalism.

There’s no point in looking back though, or starting to worry about whether we should use a bespoke Twitter-style tool – after all Google pulled the plug on Jaiku. Just a thing to consider when we are looking at the costs and infrastructure that happen. It might be Free to use, as Chris Anderson suggests, but using someone else’s infrastructure is one business cost worth thinking about.

Dominic Ponsford’s Is iPhone App future of local news? in  Press Gazette states that

Some 50 Mobile Local News applications are now live in the US on the Apple App Store, according to Inergize Digital and DoApp Inc (via Editor and Publisher.

Dominic rightly says that it’s an interesting idea and only a matter of time before someone does it in the UK.

But this is where a crucial issue comes in – how many local or hyperlocal news outlets can develop this kind of thing?

I was looking back through my bookmarks and found this link to Standford’s iTunesU course on iPhone Application Programming.

Yes this is only one platform, but a very interesting one – particularly given you can use the same technology to create news apps for the iTouch.