The brief: Flood warnings widget, hyperlocal news funding + news habits
The Brief begins for another week, taking a look at interesting stuff happening in media, journalism and technology. Here's a round-up of some useful links I've been reading over today and the weekend.
Flood warnings, on your website
Nifty idea from the Environment Agency to get their warnings out there, and a great way for news sites to add value to their stories about flooding (if there is any). You can grab and embed code and show the flood risk in your region. A good example of opening up government information to help inform people all over England and Wales, and relatively simple and easy to do. Added to a story about flooding, or flood threats, it'll help provide up to the minute information for readers.
University puts up funding, backed by Google, for news start-ups
Nice to see my old university putting up some funding - via Google - to develop news startups. If you run a hyperlocal news site, or you're a graduating finishing university, then this fund could be priceless in helping to get your idea off the ground. The key is around finding sustainable business models for news, and Francois Nel, who runs the MADE project which is distributing the funding, specially says "projects could be news and information, hyperlocal news, niche content or issue based." It must be in the public interest though.
A new Signal: Reporting app for iPhone launched in Middle East
There's a lot of new apps coming out across multiple devices for sharing content and stories, this one called Signal seems to be a good step forward. It's only for photographs at the moment, but the cool bit is the Reddit style community voting that lets stories bubble to the surface. So instead of an editorial control it's an audience control, they will dictate what is the story. It's being released first in Lebanon, but Signal plans to expand very quickly and in the Arab states it could be an important reporting tool. It's interesting to see as this technology scales the opportunity for citizen journalism that translates back into content which attracts a readership is growing.
An interesting post with an interview an American academic/journalist about how they get their news. Clearly she's a news junkie and her experience does not reflect the vast majority of the population, what I find interesting is the way her news consumption changes depending on the time of day and time of device. In the morning it's all about tablet/mobile as she's on her way somewhere but then deskptop takes over during work and then the evening will be a mixture of the two.