Gary Andrews

At Exeter St David’s train station last week, I picked up something I’ll never be able to buy again – a daily copy of the local paper, the Express and Echo. It was just under a month ago that the somewhat sad news that my hometown’s paper would become a weekly rather than daily publication.

I say sad for two reasons. Firstly because it’s never fun to see local journalism cut back, even if the economic climate is heading that way.

But it’s also sad because this has been coming for a while, largely due to continually bad decisions from the Echo’s owners, Northcliffe.

I’m not saying that the daily Echo’s demise was preventable – it may well have been inevitable no matter what – but the paper could have been given much more of a fighting chance.

Even when I moved away from Devon, I made a point of picking up the Echo whenever I returned to visit friends and family. The past few times have been painful to read.

The last few Echos I’ve purchased have been a shell of the brash, confident publication that was happy to cause trouble for local politicians and had an instinctive connection with the communities it served.

What was in front of me was like seeing a once-proud athlete towards the end of his life. The only surprise about the Echo going weekly is it didn’t happen sooner.

Let me declare my feelings. I am an unashamed fan of local media done well. That is, after all, my background.

Yes, I’m well aware of the foibles and failures of local newspapers. They can be unnecessarily hyperbolic and trivial, often in the same news story. They can sometimes become parodies of themselves.

They could, as I found out from speaking to various focuses of the subjects of their stories, occasionally play somewhat fast and loose. At my old office, we had an file of some of their worst hits, including one story several experienced journalists were amazed they didn’t get pulled up on contempt charges.

But despite all this, much of the Echo is recalled with fondness. They were terrier-like in holding local politicians to account. When a big story broke, their coverage was never less than impressive. And they knew how to serve the community and readership.

Yes, some stories may have seemed mundane but locals from outlying areas really appreciated the coverage given to these smaller stories.

Given the Echo’s patch took in the regional capital city, seaside towns, rural market towns and sleepy villages, their ability to strike a balance with these readers was impressive.

When I was much younger and dreamt of going into journalism, at that point I always considered the Echo the paper I wanted to work for. And 20 years ago, it had a well-liked reputation with its readership.

Even as recently as six years ago, the Echo was a pretty impressive regional paper. It had a confidence and swagger about it. Yes, that also brought out some of the worst aspects, as detailed above, but it also brought out the best.

Working in a competitor (of sorts) newsroom at the same time, I would frequently roll my eyes, but would frequently be impressed with their scoops and determination to reflect and be a heart of the community they served.

Those qualities have seriously declined in recent years. Journalists were cut back. Fewer reporters meant a restricted ability to embed with the community. It became easier to spot the press releases in the paper.

It made sense, financially, to re-use the same reports from the sister Devon-wide Western Morning News. But this paper served a different audience, and it became harder to find distinctive news in the Echo as a result.

And then there’s the web, something regional media companies never seemed to get or be prepared to get.

For a period, the Echo went big into video, posting clips of any and every story, plus doing a news in 60 seconds, featuring cutaways to the headline in the paper.

It wasn’t particularly well done or thought through. A couple of people I knew there said they were given very little training. But at least they tried something, although it didn’t seem hard to see how this could have been much more focused, and relevant to their audience. And it asked a lot of print journalists to learn a new skill and do it well, with a minimum of training.

But at least it was better than how the web is currently being treated. The pages are, astonishingly, updated from a central location in a different county on the other side of the country.

News is often not uploaded until 10am. Sports reports, one of the key selling points of a local paper, are often uploaded up to two days after the game. By this stage, anybody interested will have found the news elsewhere.

There is little incentive for readers to discover or return to their website on a daily, even weekly basis. It is as if this part of the paper has been deliberately left to die.

Perhaps a weekly Echo will see the paper regain some of its swagger. Perhaps I’m optimistic but I think a daily could work in Exeter. Just not a daily in the current form. And they may need to be more innovative elsewhere.

But, going offline, it’s the local communities who will be hit the most by this. The Office of National Statistics shows that 23% of the UK population have no internet at home. In Devon and Somerset, that accounts for around 750,000 households. In the most rural areas of these counties, the number is, I would wager, even higher.

For the outlying villages in Devon, this means they are even further cut off from the news. One of the strengths of the Echo was balancing the ultra local with the big stories, and knowing each of these communities. What’s more, these were read and appreciated. Will that continue? It’s not as if many rural, elderly households can log online for their information.

Local businesses may also feel the pinch, initially. These small-to-medium size businesses probably don’t have the PR budget to go all out on a campaign, can’t go beyond a certain level of advertising, and often rely on local papers to print their good news stories. Will there be space for these?

I say initially, though, because for businesses there’s generally an opportunity to be innovative and less reliant on the local press.

But the local events, such as fundraisers or community days, may seriously struggle to compete for attention. Granted, these aren’t exactly the hardest-hitting news stories, but they do serve the community.

Sports fans and clubs wanting local reporting will also be badly served. That’s not to say there’s not alternatives online, but local sport is a staple of a local paper, and a key reason for purchase.

How many of those will discontinue reading it because the results are a week late? And how will the clubs reach out to attract new fans or members? The Echo says the coverage will be even better. Many will be skeptical.

Time will tell what effect a weekly Echo will have on Exeter, and East and Mid Devon. It may revitalise the paper. Or it may be a large step towards the eventual collapse. In the immediate term, the main losers are the readers.

written by Gary \\ tags: Exeter, Express and Echo, local news, local newspapers

Those of you who follow me on other networks will have seen that a few weeks ago my co-host on the twofootedtackle podcast, Chris Nee, and I decided to call it a day for the pod.

I posted a detailed explanation on TFT as to why we were hanging up our microphones, but the basic and overriding reason was a lack of time.

It’s also, if I’m honest, the reason why this place looks a little neglected. I could use Tumblr or Posterous (both great platforms, I hasten to add) but I quite like to take my time to explain and think about issues. And much as I love Twitter, it doesn’t allow for much in-depth analysis or nuance in 140 characters.

It’s something I’ve touched on before but it’s one of the reasons I can see for a shift in attitudes to blogging among bloggers themselves.

If you’re young, a student or unemployed or retired then blogging is relatively easy to keep up. Similarly if the blog has some relation to the job then it’s no problem.

And when blogging was relatively new, it was a mixture of the enthusiasts, who could work blogging into a job, and those who had more time on their hands who led the charge.

Now many of those who led the charge are busier or have made a reasonably good fist of trying to monetise their blog.

Certainly those who blogged for fun – and are probably still leading proponents of blogging – have less time or work on a blog that pays. It’s become more professional, that’s for sure.

So where does this leave the professional amateur, the person who takes pride in their blog but holds down a day job and possibly a relationship, maybe with kids too? There’s only so many evenings you can stay up until the wee hours blogging merrily away.

Increasingly, I suspect, those early waves of professional amateurs have either got a career out of it or got out, bar for the occasional update on a semi-dormant blog (hey, I never said I wasn’t using myself as a case study).

And although the idea of bloggers still very much prevails as the single person hammering the keyboard in the bedroom, blogs are now major players in the content and media marketplace.

It’s why AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post and Techcrunch didn’t surprise me – although it’s not as if either of these were low profile hard-up bloggers trying to make ends meet.

But they general idea that more traditional media or Internet companies will be buying up or taking over the smaller blogs is one I’ve been predicting for several years now. Blogging 2.0, if you want to call it that, is smarter and more professional. The first age of the professional amateur is, in my mind, largely over.

But this isn’t a blogging is dead post, as the medium isn’t – far from it. Blogging wouldn’t be getting more professional and commercial if it didn’t have something going for it.

And while an older, busier generation of amateurs reluctantly hang up their keyboard to spend more time on their career and family, a new generation arrives and, if anything, this bunch have the potential to be even more exciting.

Obviously you’ll get natural churn and new bloggers entering the field each year as a new generation discovers blogging. That goes without saying.

But this generation – through circumstances beyond their control – find themselves living through a very deep and damaging recession where jobs are scarce. And that means more time on their hands.

There will undoubtedly be some very smart, unemployed young bloggers out there. Bloggers and those with general web skills who have a lot of time on their hands – and are willing to innovate and play by different rules, both for blogging and the web in general.

And that’s not only exciting, to me it means blogging isn’t going anywhere just yet.

written by Gary \\ tags: blogging, Huffington Post, social media, twofootedtackle podcast

A new year, a new shiny toy to play with in the shape of Quora, the social question and answer service.

Since Tuesday, Twitter – and Quora – has exploded with hype, counter-hype, naysayers and people somewhere in-between trying to work out if this is the next big thing in social media.

There’s a few interesting points to be made around the bubbles around these services, which I’ll come to in a bit, but to answer the Quora question, my initial thoughts are probably not, but it’s an interesting and potentially very useful site that could gain a reasonable amount of traction.

Taking out the obvious self-publicising answers that appear on the site, the quality of the answers is very high and in-depth and there’s a very knowledgeable crowd on there.

There’s also potential for mainstream media and other companies to use it. For journalism, it seems like an excellent place to gauge opinion and reaction that’s likely to be more considered than, say, Twitter, as well as cultivating potential contacts.

You can also see how this could be useful for specific radio or even TV shows, while it offers good opportunities for brands to enhance their profile if they’re willing to engage with this community.

But – and I could be very wrong here – the strengths of Quora is also probably the reason why it probably won’t go mainstream in the way that Twitter did (and Gigacom also has a few potential pitfalls as well).

Firstly, the more users Quora gets, the greater the potential for the quality of the questions and answers to go down. The voting element adds a safeguard of kind, but if, say, you see the sort of mass adoption in the style of Twitter, then the user base changes.

Secondly, would a mainstream audience necessarily want to become regular Quora users? If there’s a lot of specialist knowledge there, will it discourage the average Twitter user from regular usage, if they just want to socialise?

Unsurprisingly, Quora is also very to-heavy with marketing, technology, PR, media and social media queries, which may put others off. The quality of answers is usually strong, and fascinating, for these topics, but stray away and the level of answers is somewhat hit and miss. Will this put off people who don’t specialise in these areas?

I’ve asked two questions – and followed several others. One was on SEO, which had short, sharp, snappy, useful replies. The other was a question on managerial sackings in football, which I’d hoped would attract a couple of thoughtful responses.

So far, I’ve had no responses and a quick look through the other questions asked around football aren’t exactly on a par with those in the social media section. That said, the growing food community on Quora is quite useful and interesting.

Perhaps the area, or social media site, that Quora could impact on the most is LinkedIn. The type of discussions are very similar to a lot of the groups I’m a member of and opening it up to a wider audience taps into even more expertise than individual LinkedIn groups can offer.

As with anything social media related, if the site, app or whatever is to break through into the mainstream it needs to reach out beyond the early adopters and those who rush to praise it off the back of this – normally the social media and tech community – without alienating those who have vocally supported it.

It’s why I’m not rushing to hail it as the future of social media or the next big thing from this area, although the amount of use and the ease with which the new users are embracing the service suggests this isn’t a flash in the pan. How far it can go is another question.

And this leads neatly onto a finishing tangent, which Quora neatly highlights. The big mainstream social media sites that are breaking through are few and far between now, despite everybody looking for them. But those, llike Qoura, that appeal to an informed niche will pick up a lot of traction.

Several years ago, I remember musing to colleagues that niche would be the next big thing. In hindsight, I was probably a bit too early but there’s no reason to reverse that prediction. The problem with networks or sites that appeal to a nice audience are they will never become as big or as sexy as Facebook or Twitter, but they have the potential for decent growth and even a business model.

Other than niche, the other obvious areas for exploding in 2011 are mobile apps and social TV. In the former, smartphone usage is becoming more ubiquitous (about half the people on my bus today had an iPhone). All it needs now is a social mobile app that changes the game completely. Foursquare isn’t quite it, though.

With the latter, you only have to tune into Twitter and Facebook during any TV show with a decent amount of viewers to see how important social media is as a backchannel. With Google and Apple moving into the TV market and a generation comfortable with social media as part of their everyday life coming into more disposable income, the potential for growth in this area is huge. When somebody makes the right product, that is.

Now, having said that, expect me to be shown up as the ignoramus I am as all these predictions turn out to be gubbins by December.

Additional: Vicky Chowney mirrors my thoughts on Quora in a much quicker, cleaner and more intelligent way.

written by Gary \\ tags: 2011 predictions, LinkedIn, Quora, social answers, social media

I’m not generally a huge fan of cross-promoting football writing on here, as I know what all five readers really want is another fish pie recipe. I’ll make an exception for the last piece written for twofootedtackle though.

The title’s Why the Premier League has failed every one of the League’s 92 clubs. The content is exactly that. To me, it’s increasingly clear that the road the Premier League is currently going down is storing up a lot of problems, financially, not just for the 20 clubs in the top flight, but all the way down the league (and even into the non-league game as well).

The Premier League in itself isn’t intrinsically bad in my book, but the circumstances it has ended up creating will (and I use will instead of could here) lead a large number of club down the road to financial ruin, while simultaneously killing off any hope England will ever have of winning a major tournament.

I’m a naturally pessimistic person, but I don’t think the above is hyperbole.

And all the while, I – and many others I know – are getting increasingly disillusioned with the Premier League. A few people have asked me what my opinion has been on the Rooney saga over the last week and all I can muster is a ‘meh’. Frankly, I couldn’t really care less about where he goes or what he does. The finances behind Manchester United are much more interesting to me than a highly paid megastar throwing a strop for more money.

And all the time, the level of fandom seems to be getting more extreme (although I suppose that’s what the ultimate definition of a fanatic is). Any level of debate that contains just the slightest smidgen of nuance is drowned out by the clamour to blame it on the ref, the manager or one player, and often looking at it through some of the most one-eyed tinted glasses.

Any level of perceived criticism, no matter how balanced the piece, is leaped upon as an example of bias against the club or evidence that said writer is a closet fan of a rival team.

In truth, I’m finding myself skimming over a lot of Premier League writing and highlights without always taking in a huge level of detail. Many Premier League focused blogs, which are the worst examples of the above, have been culled from my RSS reader. I’m not even that bothered about missing Match Of The Day these days.

Even though my team has never had, and probably never will, have a hope in hell of reaching the Premier League, I’ve always followed it with a fair level of devotion, taking in twists and turns and tuning into most games that I could. This season is the first season I’ve not quite had the will to take much other than a passing notice.

I’m not quite sure if there’s any quick fix to pull in those like me (and I’ve spoken to a surprisingly large number) who are turning their back on England’s top flight, and even if there was, I wouldn’t trust the governing bodies to implement it properly.

I still love football. I still watch much more of the game than is probably healthy. But every time I watch the Premier League, my soul dies a little more.

written by Gary \\ tags: England football, football, Premier League

Like an ageing celebrity, some web companies, startup or otherwise, feel like they’ve been around forever and you assume they’re in rude health until you see a news story flash up that they’ve died.

And then you remember they exist, feel a bit sad, relive the happy memories and move on.

12seconds.tv, sadly, is that aging celebrity.

At that start of the week, the video microblogging (or microvlogging, I suppose) site announced it was to close later this month. It It was lacking: Lack of a revenue model, lack of time, lack of interest all seemed to conspire to kill it off.

Which is a shame in many ways, as every now and then you’d see a nicely worked PR campaign, or piece of community growth around the site, usually from people who knew what they were doing when it came to social media. It mark spark a bit of extra interest or a mental note to re-explore the possibilities, but then it’d usually get put to one side.

And that was probably the biggest problem – lots of people who liked the site, could see what it was for, and liked what 12seconds was doing, but never actually used the thing.

Jemima Kiss wrote a very good analysis of why video chat communities suffer – they’re high cost, the communities are often small and video chat or video microblogging still feels a bit weird. I agree – it’s one thing to type a 140 witty retort on Twitter. It’s much harder to do that well with a camera pointing at your face.

I’ll confess, I don’t think I’d even considered using one of the several vlogging sites in any kind of professional capacity or brief for about nine months now, if not longer. I don’t think I’ve heard too many people in my field mention 12seconds or Seesmic for a good while either. And I played with it a bit a few years ago but never really used any of the communities much on a personal basis.

About two or three years ago, video microblogging or live streaming felt genuinely exciting. Certainly, there was a fair bit of buzz, even from the technophobes in my then office, when the people promoting the fourth Indiana Jones film got Steven Spielberg and the stars to do a Q&A via Seesmic.

I remember looking into the possibilities of Qik, Seesmic and 12seconds, and others, for work purposes (chiefly PR at that point in time), but gradually it seemed to become less relevant to the brief. There were people using these sites but it seemed to make more sense to focus activities elsewhere.

Journalism-wise, as well, 12seconds was an interesting tool. But then, although there wasn’t the immediacy, YouTube was still the daddy (with Vimeo clinging onto the coat tails) and, for a variety of reasons, it made more sense to post elsewhere, especially if you wanted something longer than 12 seconds.

And then Audioboo was doing a nice job for the audio side of things – and you felt a lot less self conscious using this. Plus, the quality on Audioboo is generally good no matter where or what you’re using. Making good video is a lot more time consuming.

But I genuinely don’t think video blogging sites like 12seconds are completely on the way out. The innovative campaigns that were run using 12seconds and the felt the technology is getting a lot more mobile and easier to use, while increasing in quality, means you’ll always get a steady number of people working in the area.

There’s definitely a niche for a more intimate, immediate, community vlogging site that isn’t directly competing with YouTube or Twitter, although if I knew what that was, I wouldn’t be writing that now.

Certainly from both a PR and journalism perspective, there are wonderful chances to get very creative with video and some portable tools. It might even be good for the health of this particular area if it was written off – it would give those who are genuinely passionate about it the chance to build something away from the limelight a little.

Video’s such a ubiquitous medium that I’ve no doubt someone, somewhere will come up with a great idea. In the meantime, there’ll be one less place to experiment with. 12seconds.tv will be missed, but probably not for much longer than that length of time.

written by Gary

Friday 27th August: The day the station formerly known as Lantern FM was finally killed off. Outside of North Devon it’s doubtful any tears were shed, but it’s just one of a number of Global FM stations that are disappearing off the map.

It’s a subject I’ve returned to often and one I have an avowed interest in. Lantern were one of the first stations to give me freelance shifts. I can’t say my reporting was that great (North Devon’s never been an area I’ve ever been overly familiar with) but the station got by.

One thing always struck me though: just how much pride North Devon took in their station. Mention you worked for Lantern and you were treated like royalty.

Lantern may have been a very small station in comparison to its sister stations and the news was often less than scintillating, but it knew its target audience and its target audience appreciated with plenty of love and respect.

In many ways North Devon was one of the more unusual patches a station could have to deal with. It’s not uncommon for local stations to be based around one major town or city and cover the surrounding rural area, but Lantern was almost completely rural, with several towns but none of them quite big enough to get top billing.

To the Lantern FM audience, Exeter was a world away and Plymouth may as well have been a different planet. Hyperlocal mattered more to North Devonians than the rest of the county, even if the word hyperlocal hadn’t really been coined back then.

Lantern, so we were frequently told, was a profitable station (I guess local advertising was a pretty good way to reach a high dispersed audience). It was well loved. The RAJARs were decent. But it wasn’t exactly a sexy or enticing station.

So, as part of Global Radio’s plans to make local radio more profitable, Lantern was rebranded Heart FM and had more networked programming inserted into it. A small part of Lantern’s soul died, but listeners could still wake up to breakfast DJs Hopps and Chapple and find out where the roadworks were and if any schools were closed, and any of the other day-to-day essentials.

Then, as part of Global’s plans to make local radio more profitable, it was announced that the station formerly known as Lantern would be closing, along with other stations in Plymouth and the South Hams, and one Devon wide superstation would be created, based in Exeter.

Hopps will be departing, as will Chapple. Plenty of other talented local DJs across the Devon Heart network who live in and love their communities are also departing. There’s more networked programming. Listeners in Ilfracombe will probably, rightly, wonder what the hell this new station has to do with their area and when, or if, their northerly coastal town will ever get a mention on air.

Although it’s dangerous to interpret Facebook groups as a general popular groundswell, there’s currently 3,410 members of three separate groups to save Lantern FM. Not bad for a part of the country where internet usage is lower than the average.

There’s a demand for local radio in a place like, for sure. How to get it to pay for itself is another question completely. Former Lantern DJ Ian Starling has set up his own limited reach community station. It will be interesting to see if this continues to grow as disenfranchised listeners turn elsewhere for their local fix.

It’s a situation that’s being repeated across the country as local radio fans protest about Global’s decision to axe several stations. It’s unlikely these protests will have much effect.

As somebody who’s worked for plenty of local radio stations it’s heartbreaking to see what’s being done to once-loved local institutions.

I won’t disagree that local radio occasionally needs a shake up, nor that they may not always be profitable. But the continuing cuts are straight out of the manual of how to lose and alienate local audiences.

In an age of increased listening choice, local, more than ever, is a USP. More networked shows covering a wider area with little relevance to specific communities isn’t the most inspiring recipe for success.

It’s easy to sneer at the music, but this has never been the important bit of local radio. As long as there are familiar and catchy songs then people will listen. What really hooks them in is a good DJ talking about how much fun they had in Bideford a couple of days ago. Or a great ice cream they scoffed at Westward Ho!

A local councillor once told me that the local commercial radio stations were they first places she called when she wanted to highlight a campaign – because we’d talk to the audience in language they understood and could make it feel important to them, locally, she’d always see a huge rise in phone calls the next day from members of the public.

That was several years ago. I doubt if she gets the same response now.

Hopefully something will spring up to replace Lantern FM. And other local radio stations. And other local newspapers, that are also suffering, through a mixture of shifting readership and management incompetency.

Local media is much-maligned. It’s also the lifeblood of a large section of the community. And well loved too. I’m sad to see Lantern’s demise but not, I suspect, half as sad as a good number of people in North Devon.

written by Gary \\ tags: Devon, Heart Devon, Heart FM, Lantern FM, local DJs, local radio, North Devon

Last week’s news that Global Radio is to shut half of its local Heart stations is thoroughly depressing, not least if you’re in my old area of Devon, where the five local Heart stations in Barnstaple, Exeter, Torquay, Plymouth and the South Hams will be merged into one Devon-wide station based in Exeter. My thoughts go out to my former colleagues who will face a battle to keep their jobs.

Let’s put the sentimental aspect of a former GCap employee out of the way for a moment. This is a further blow to teenagers and graduates wanting to start a career in broadcasting.

Local radio, especially commercial radio, is an excellent breeding ground for new talent. In part because of the lean operation that most commercial stations run, anybody on work experience can be expected to get a chance to really immerse themselves and get proper practical experience. It’s great for inspiring a passion in broadcasting.

Similarly, for broadcast journalism graduates, local radio is a fantastic place to start your career (and indeed continue it).

Again, due to the lean operation, you get pitched into everything competing against other local media with far greater resources. It’s one of the best ways to learn the craft in a very short space of time.

As you can guess, I’m a huge fan of local radio. It may have plenty of faults and detractors, but when it’s done well it becomes an essential part of community.

Yes, I’m biased have started my career in local commercial radio, but it was one of the most enjoyable parts of the job when people told you how much they enjoyed listening, how much they appreciated the local chatter and the support for events that other media may well ignore.

And what really made it worthwhile were the times such as when a local councillor told me she’d always make a point of speaking to us first as when we covered an issue, she always had a surge of enquiries on the topic. Local radio can make a difference.

Obviously I’m coming at this from a journalism point of view, but everybody – the DJs, marketing team, everybody, played their part in making a station a hub and barometer of the community.

And that hub has gradually been eaten away at over the past few years.

Yes, we know times are tight. Yes, a parent company of a commercial organisation will always want to do what’s best to protect its bottom line. But that has increasingly come at the expense of what makes these stations unique: local content.

Without it, why would a local audience tune in to a station that plays the same pop music they can find elsewhere yet has little-to-no relevance to their area.

A well-run commercial radio sector is good for the industry, but a sector that cuts back and cuts back, takes away the most unique aspect of their offering and then complains that regulation favours their competitors isn’t going to win fans or listeners.

Interestingly, during my time in the South West, we were always told that the Devon stations were profitable and that they had the greatest local reach, especially in the more rural areas.

Quite whether that’s still the case, I have no idea. And commercial radio is always a lean operation that has to fight to make money.

And there are some DJs with a great local touch who, along with the journalists, know and care about their patch and connect with the audience. A ‘personality’ in a studio in London (or even Exeter, if you’re in Plymouth or Barnstaple) doesn’t quite have the same relevance.

I fear for the future of my old colleagues.

written by Gary \\ tags: commercial radio, Gemini FM, Global Radio, Heart Devon, Heart Exeter, Heart FM, local radio