Digital Sentinel becomes third pilot in council’s news scheme
The council’s Communities and Neighbourhoods committee agreed on Tuesday to approve the final tranche of the sum of £50,000 set aside for local news pilot schemes to a third project.
Although the initial sum was to provide funding for news projects in North Edinburgh, Craigmillar and in Gorgie/Dalry the balance of £12,000 has now been given to the Digital Sentinel which reports news in Wester Hailes and the surrounding areas. This fits with the original plan which was to engender some news reporting in deprived areas of the capital. The news pilot for Gorgie/Dalry did not ever get underway.
North Edinburgh News has already had up to £25,000 of funding awarded to it, although it is not yet clear how much of that has been paid over as there are as yet no detailed accounts. The Chronicle project centred around the Craigmillar area has been allocated up to £12,000 of support and now the Digital Sentinel which is already up and running has been given the balance of the £50,000 set aside. (Yes we know there is an underspend of £1,000 but these are approximate figures as we heard at the committee!)
The evaluation report on the three pilots is due in May 2015 in time for the next committee meeting and Councillor Paul Edie had lodged an amendment requesting that no more funds were paid over until the evaluation was carried out. He claimed it would be difficult to assess how the Digital Sentinel used the money: “How can we do an evaluation when the ink is hardly dry on the cheque?”
He received some support in his view from Conservative Councillor Allan Jackson who questioned what could be learned in the short time before the report is due in six weeks’ time, but their amendment was defeated and the committee agreed to deliver the funding by 9 votes to 2.
The Digital Sentinel is the online version of The Sentinel newspaper which became the West Edinburgh Times latterly and which then closed due to lack of funds. The media project was launched hand in hand with the Our Place in Time suite of projects which included the digital totem pole which now exists on the canal bank in Wester Hailes. The website has published over 500 articles in the period since October 2013 to date and has a social media presence on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
The Digital Sentinel has already had funding of £10,000 from Carnegie UK Trust as part of its Neighbourhood News project and the final report on the findings can be read below. It was a one year information gathering project and the funding came to an end last year.As well as its online presence paper copies of some articles are printed and displayed outside WHALE Arts Centre and in Wester Hailes Library.
Councillor Nigel Bagshaw requested that details of what the money will be spent on is made clear and Councillor Karen Keil asked if there could be an audit of what is happening around the city after the pilots are complete. She said she would find that very helpful.
The Convener, Councillor Maureen Child, commented that the idea behind the council’s Contact in the Community project was to look for sustainable ways of replacing the council’s own newspaper Outlook. She asserted that key aspects of the pilots are employability and training, that the North Edinburgh News has offered some local training and that the Digital Sentinel will enter into an arrangement with the Wester Hailes Education Centre whereby their pupils will be trained to become reporters.
Councillor Child continued that she would like to include in the evaluation some input from other publications such as The Broughton Spurtle and Greener Leith although neither of these hyperlocal sites are officially part of the pilot scheme. The Edinburgh Reporter understands that the collaboration between The Spurtle and Greener Leith to develop an app to encourage local shopping which got funding of almost £50,000 from the UK innovation foundation, NESTA, in its Destination Local project came to naught and most of the money was returned to NESTA.
The convener also confirmed in one line that the apparent investigation into the North Edinburgh News project had been concluded. This arose following the claims by some councillors that the way the money was being used to fund a paper rather than a digital version was not in line with the project’s guidelines.
Councillor Lunn who is Vice-Convener of the committee said he especially likes getting the daily email update from the Digital Sentinel and feels this is a project which is leading the way on training. The Sentinel employs one trainee reporter who is funded by an SCVO graduate scheme.
Councillor David Walker suggested that the money being granted now was in recognition of past work and was hopeful the good work would continue in future.
There are already many investigations into local or hyperlocal journalism. One of the most recent was the BBC conference in Salford last year entitled The Revival of Local Journalism when The Edinburgh Reporter was asked to deliver a presentation on the work we do here in Edinburgh. The nature of the conference was to find new ways for the BBC to assist local partners in delivering news. That work is ongoing and the Future of News report was published at the end of January.
In response to the report’s claims that ‘one of the biggest market failures in news in the last decade is local news’, the Chief Executive of Johnston Press, Ashley Highfield fired a warning shot across the BBC’s fairly broad bows.
Highfield, previously of the BBC, told the news broadcaster very firmly to get their tanks off his lawn, and leave local news to local newspapers. He also claimed that the best thing the BBC could do was give away its ‘bucket of content’ for free to local news outlets. Johnston Press owns The Scotsman and The Edinburgh Evening News which have just moved to a more streamlined editorial model and both papers now share the same 6:00am print deadline in an effort to shave the £360m debt which Johnston Press had when Highfield took over as boss. The full text of his letter is here.
Daniel Radcliffe investigated the hyperlocal journalism movement across the UK in 2012 when The Edinburgh Reporter was given a mention in his Here and Now UK Hyperlocal Journalism Today report prepared for NESTA. Radcliffe concluded that although there was a growth of the hyperlocal at least south of the border, there was little evidence of sustainability largely because of the individual nature of the sites. He claimed there is no one size fits all.
Since then NESTA has produced two further reports on its Destination Local funding the latest of which you can read here. This report suggest that local authorities should engage with hyperlocal news websites more fully as it is a cost effective way of reaching some citizens.
Hyperlocal Scotland is an organisation set up by Mike Rawlins of Talk About Local and Phyllis Stephen of The Edinburgh Reporter to try and assess the true spread of hyperlocal sites in Scotland and find ways of developing those in the future.
The Edinburgh Reporter is also a hyperlocal news website, and our model is one based on advertising and sponsorship, although in common with many other sites mentioned in the Destination Local report we still find it difficult to prove the worth of online advertising to some who prefer to see their advertising in print. Some other sites have produced their news on paper to overcome that barrier.
If you would like to advertise with us or make a small regular donation then of course we would very much appreciate it. See the foot of the site for ways of making donations.
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