Why being a hyperlocal journalist is giving me an identity crisis…
…and is making me want to do a PhD about it.
The public persona suggests I’ve been clean for eight years. That’s right, eight years without the cold sweats, the constant pressure to find your next fix. But the truth is very different…
I’m still a journalist.
There, I did it. I admitted it. I said the four words it seems I should never have uttered in public.
The intro to my explanation about how and why I decided to try and embark on a PhD might be suitably (and predictably) melodramatic, but it actually allowed me to try to make sense of what I’ve been doing for the past eight years with LichfieldLive.
So in the spirit of sharing, I thought I’d give an abridged version of the rest of a quick introduction I was asked to do about why I’ve decided to start a journey that will contain a heck of a lot of study and more words than I ever imagined putting together in one Word document.
“LichfieldLive is a website run by former journalist Ross Hawkes”
Well, it seems a formal welcome to the scrapheap is required. After all, I’m a former journalist now if that intro is to be believed. But who decided I’d retired? Does my work now differ from that I created as a professional? Is the standard lower? What makes me former and not present?
As a journalist I’ve come to know the power of words, but this description that featured on a listing of hyperlocal publications has been hugely influential on the last few years of my life. What started as deep offence has become a sense of trying to understand why what will, in reality, have been a throwaway line in a directory of sites was put across that way and what it really means.
To start things off I decided to look at my hyperlocal life in numbers. In eight years (at the time of writing this), my name is on:
- 11,375 stories. That’s…
- 1,421 a year. Or…
- 118 a month. Or…
- 27 a week. Meaning…
- Almost four a day, seven days a week on average.
Granted, not all of these articles will have been in-depth pieces or have required much input from me in terms of research beyond an emergency press release etc, but nevertheless, that’s a lot of work given everything is tweaked for style if nothing else (and heaven knows I’m a tinkerer with words). It’s certainly equal to if not more than what I was producing as a full-time journalist.
So why am I now a former reporter?
Am I really clean of journalism? Or am I in rehab and suffering a relapse into a form of journalism that I didn’t realise existed until I ended up here? These are the sorts of questions that made me realise I do have an academic curiosity I never knew about.
This has led me to the beginnings of what everyone has warned me could be a long, hard and possibly never-ending road as I seek to explore areas such as definitions of journalism in the digital age and the relationship between amateur and professional publishers. Both areas are challenging for me, but for very different reasons. The former is one I’m confident in exploring, but I may be too close to different aspects to examine without bias or preconceptions. The latter on the other hand is moving me into unknown territory and forcing me to ask tough questions of my own work.
Some (very) exploratory early reading has found there are minimal aspects of crossover, although journalism does tend to position itself around the two linear poles of amateur and professional through the guise of reporters, bloggers, hyperlocal publishers and all other terminology that might be applied. But if I hover in the purgatory between the two as a professional journalist who now sits under the description of an amateur, then surely there must be others in the same position?
This is the real area I hope to dig into; the possible ‘third arm' of journalism — perhaps semi-professional journalism? — where reporters are working without the same frameworks of professionalism, but are contributing a great deal to the bigger media picture. Who are these people bridging a gap between the two poles? Why are they there? What are the relationships that exist between them and other media forms?
They are all questions that have piqued my interest, but aren’t quite as fundamental to my quest for understanding as:
Where, if anywhere, are these people transitioning to?
Hyperlocal journalism is becoming increasingly studied, although much focus is on cause and effect around why certain sites exist, or why contributing factors in professional reporting might aid the growth of such enterprises. There also feels like a sense of industry being keen to measure hyperlocals by traditional metrics, hence the push towards amateur status for anything such as blogging, UGC, citizen journalism etc that does not fit the framework of commercial success.
But what if trained journalists are echoing their pro counterparts or filling perceived news black holes? Are they really still amateur and should they be categorised as such? Should the focus of success be based more upon their own needs and desires than some chart of readership figures or social media account growth? What if a hyperlocal publisher doesn’t want to create a traditional business model or seek profit — does that make them a failure if they don’t subscribe to the measurement of success defined by very different media products?
All of this pontification brings me to question my own role in this once more.
Why am I doing this hyperlocal stuff?
It’s a question I’ve struggled to answer for the past eight or more years.
- Financial gain? Definitely not.
- Sense of civic duty? Perhaps, but not the real driver.
- Part of a training process to be a journalist? No, but I’d suggest any student works with hyperlocal to understand how to manage and deal with a patch.
- I’m an angry citizen desperate to be heard? Local things make me angry, but not every story is based on my anger at a missed bin collection or a cancelled train.
I suspect the truth lies somewhere between all of the above. Maybe I’m actually a poacher, turned gamekeeper, turned pheasant?
This position of travelling from professional to education via hyperlocal gives me what, I hope, will be an interesting perspective from which to research the field. If those linear boundaries between amateur and professional are blurring then I’d hope to be able to spot them and play some part, however small, in shaping the way we perceive emerging types of journalism and publishers.
Dave Harte, who is now part of my PhD supervision team, once wrote a blog post about the need for hyperlocal publishers to realise their limits. This led to the excellent round up on the issue of whether such publishers need exit strategies. This is certainly something that feeds into my own thought process around journeys in journalism (there’s a title if I get stuck!). Can I have an exit strategy if I never really understood what my entry strategy was?
The reading so far has shown me — and I feel like I’m betraying my beloved LichfieldLive by even muttering the words — that there is possibly a life beyond hyperlocal.
But in a delicious twist of irony, by considering an autoethnographic approach to some of the research, myself and the artist formerly known as The Lichfield Blog are interwoven for the foreseeable future. So much for an exit strategy.
Or maybe this work might just be the way out after all?
