Engaging readers with prac­tical action steps could offer a new journ­al­istic dir­ec­tion for hyper­local media and a shot in the arm for com­munity volunteering

I recently attended an event organ­ised by Action for Happiness and Positive News entitled “Can we change the news for good?”. Featuring key­notes from ex-BBC journ­alist, Martyn Lewis and Sean Dagan Wood (editor of Positive News), their ideas inspired some really inter­esting thoughts about our own projects.

Both speakers delivered insightful speeches on the broken state of today’s journ­alism which over­whelm­ingly reports stories with a neg­ative bias. But, they explained, stories with a pos­itive bias have been proven to be more mem­or­able and leave the reader feeling happier.

Martyn, in par­tic­ular, high­lighted a couple of sig­ni­ficant points (espe­cially for Folk Labs’ work). His praise for the ability of hyper­local media sites to present a more diverse news pro­file about a neigh­bour­hood or place dir­ectly echoes why we have such a strong interest in sup­porting them.

But his main point was about how solutions-based journ­alism is a meth­od­o­logy for encour­aging more pos­itive news. Essentially he stressed that, when reporting a neg­ative story, the art­icle should also include solu­tions or actions the reader might take to resolve the problem. This offers readers an avenue to take action in response, rather than simply being forced to absorb and pro­cess negativity.

In our work for the Transition Free Press, we saw how much care the edit­orial team always took to include some sort of call-to-arms at the foot of each art­icle to allow readers to imme­di­ately see where they could dis­cover more or dir­ectly participate.

And it was this sen­ti­ment which echoed many of the mes­sages we heard recently – espe­cially at Talk About Local 2015 uncon­fer­ence held in London. Several times we heard an intriguing idea pro­posed that Hyperlocal media could offer more than the tra­di­tional journ­al­istic broad­cast model for news cov­erage. Could it innovate towards some­thing more closely resem­bling the Stack Exchange model of solu­tions dis­covery? This idea actu­ally emerged from a work­shop dis­cus­sion about how to manage neg­ative beha­viour from audi­ences, rather than as a means of redir­ecting journ­alism itself.

Over the coming months we will be exploring how we might sup­port such a shift on our own Drupal-based OpenLocal hyper­local web­site system. We’ve been devel­oping OpenLocal in col­lab­or­a­tion with the Herne Hill Forum and recently relaunched the upgrade to their own hyper­local site.

Of course, you can ini­tiate a change in dis­course simply by ending on a ques­tion or providing a helpful link at the end of an art­icle as we saw with Transition Free Press. But we see an oppor­tunity for tech­no­logy to provide a better exper­i­ence for audiences.

For the time-being, we’ll be pro­to­typing a basic approach to enable Herne Hill’s com­munity news art­icles to be visu­ally linked to local events or online forums where solu­tions might be dis­cussed fur­ther. Commenting on issues is the first step to offering readers a sense that they can con­tribute. But com­menting struc­tures which are only arranged in chro­no­lo­gical order don’t provide any means for the most pos­itive responses to be pro­moted and unhelpful com­ments to be demoted.

So, even­tu­ally, we’d like to try to build a Stack Exchange-style solu­tions system within OpenLocal itself. It’s clearly not impossible as Lullabot’s Jeff Eaton explains in this free Stack Exchange Fantasy Sites tutorial on their bril­liant DrupalizeMe video tutorial site.

So, ulti­mately, we’ll prob­ably need to design entirely new forms of con­tent in order to build tools which could com­bine hyper­local journ­alism, solu­tions design and cit­izen participation.
But we can already see that solutions-based journ­alism through hyper­local web­sites could be a powerful com­bin­a­tion for local communities.

This blog was originally published at Folk Labs. 

Homepage image accompanying this article is copyright GotCredit.