Talk About Local newsletter

[Clare-Marie White]

hello everybody, 

below is a newsletter we've just started for the Talk About Local networks - if you would like to send any news, tips or questions for this you would be very welcome (these can be added to the Google groups if you want to start a discussion or sent via email).

best wishes

Clare

Talk About Local Newsletter

Issue 1 

Welcome to the first Talk About Local email newsletter. We've put this together to share the latest news from the Talk About Local network, advice and inspiring ideas. You are welcome to send your own contributions and links and please let us know about new websites we should be following at in...@takaboutlocal.org.

What's new around the talk about local network:

- The blog has a guest post about hyperlocal news from Brazilian journalist Melissa Becker
- Nicky brings a round up of what's happening during Gypsy Roma Traveller month

- Guest blogger Dave Harte describes how he's updating his running club site to bring their sense of community online  

- We welcome Smallwood Church in Cheshire and Visit Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent

- Will writes about what happened when local websites were given material on last week's budget to get hyperlocal responses

- Mortonhamstead Hub, in Dartmoor, is also now on Facebook.

If you want us to share any updates, send them to in...@talkaboutlocal.org.

Featured quick tip

Post or article idea: Introduce your safer neighbourhood team to the community

Why not introduce your local Bobbies on the beat to your readers with a short post about them, much like Newcastle Rocks have done in this simple post, which includes details of the Newcastle PSNI station, Who’s Who and statistics on How They’re Doing.

Try reaching out to your local Safer Neighbourhood Team and asking if they’d like to send you locally relevant information to publish on your website to reach the community.  William Perrin often receives press releases and appeals from the Caledonian Ward Safer Neighbourhood’s Team, which he publishes largely unedited on the Kings Cross Environments website.

If the local police force recognize your site as a means through which they can talk with the local community, you could find this generates incredibly useful content for your website or, in the case of Tamworth Blog, some incredibly exciting content when the authors found themselves invited to accompany the police on an early morning drug raid as part of Operation Nemeses!!

- More quick tips
- Got a quick tip to share with other local websites? Please send it to in...@talkaboutlocal.org

 

 

Featured blog

Barely six weeks old, It's happening in Heeley is quickly becoming a talkaboutlocal team favourite and a case study in the things that make a hyperlocal site tick well. Run by the Heeley Development Trust in Sheffield as an addition to their quarterly printed newsletter, it uses a great Wordpress template, Inuit Types, perfect for news websites. Simon and Penny in Heeley take stories from their own printed newsletter and copy-and-paste them into the site. Now they are adding new stuff to the site as they go along, rather than waiting three months for the newsletter. 

They have added the Subscribe widget, so people can get notified of new posts by email without any laborious signup procedures, and has all the site's categories right in the middle so that people can quickly browse to topics they are interested in. 

There is good use of pictures and services like FixMyStreet are added down the clean green right hand blocks so that residents can report and view local problems. 

Finally, its 'Get Involved' page, prominent at the top left has a clear introduction, with an equal-sized welcoming photo, setting out exactly which areas are covered by the site and explaining the different ways people can contribute in simple terms, without assuming that everyone will be familiar with the concept of blog comments, for example. 

It's so good, I'm feeling tempted to rebuild my own blog... 

Featured guide: creating interest groups in Wordpress

With just under a month until Ning starts phasing out its free platforms, site owners using Ning should be well advanced in thinking about whether they can raise the money to switch to one of Ning's premium plans or try something similar (we've been testing grou.ps and others). If you haven't started this conversation yet, do it now or risk suddenly losing your community. A feeling amongst many experienced Wordpress users though is that Wordpress has a lot of flexibility that isn't always obvious when people start their first conventional site. With this in mind, Mike has written this guide, which shows how you can change the default front page of your blog to a static page and then how you display posts from different categories (groups) on different pages. To see these really handy tips in action, here's his demo site. 

Help!

This section is part of the Talk About Local Exchange, but we need your problems to get started. Maybe you have been handed a massive spreadsheet after a Freedom of Information request and have no idea what to do with it, or maybe you just want to know how you could add some sort of clever box you have in mind to your website. To get things rolling, please send your hyperlocal problems (not the potholes, try FixMyStreet for them) to in...@talkaboutlocal.org and we'll seek out people who might be able to help. 
 

This newsletter is brought to you by the Talk About Local team. Your contributions, suggestions and questions are very welcome to in...@talkaboutlocal.org. 

[Steven Clift]

Where do we subscribe directly?

Is it on the web too?

Thanks!

Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
  Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org
  Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy
  New Tel: +1.612.234.7072

[Clare White, WEA Stoke-on-Trent]

hi Steven and all, 

Yes, it is online with a subscription form here: http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/talk-about-local-news-letters/

Clare

--
Clare-Marie White
Community Health Education Project Manager
tel 01782 831911 mob 07766497173 ~ cwh...@wea.org.uk
Find us online: http://www.westmidlands.wea.org.uk/stokehealth

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