What I've been reading: The 19th Network launches, BBC faces local digital market share annual review and the government issues AI framework to its departments

My weekly round-up of interesting links from across the journalism, digital journalism, digital communications and general digital space

Good afternoon,

It’s Wednesday, and here’s my latest round-through of some interesting pieces from across the digital journalism world to get stuck into.

I decided to call this Substack ‘Journalism Innovation’ as it’s a category I’ve found myself dropped into after agreeing to do some guest lecturing at UCLan around journalism innovation. I did my first official session with some third-year journalism, international journalism, media management and business students this week. Most heartening was their interest, questions and discussion about the challenges facing journalism and already I could hear ideas bubbling for what they might explore - you can see my reflections on week one in this LinkedIn post.

Now, to the links…

BBC to face annual review of its local news market share - Paul Linford - as the BBC expands its digital coverage at a local level then this is a promising step from the government who are calling for an annual review of the local news market share. The latest Ofcom report showed how strong the BBC already is within local marketplaces. With increased hyperlocal coverage, the BBC's expansion - if not done collaboratively - would not just harm existing local commercial media outlets but I think could also depress and throttle the reach and operation of independent community news organisations too. As I've outlined in my six ways the BBC's local digital transformation could help the broader local news eco-system it would be good to see the Beeb proactively reach out to have conversations around collaborations rather than loudly trumpeting increased online article volumes. And in fairness, I should get in touch with BBC Lancashire to have that convo too and it’s been heartening to see more off-diary in-depth pieces on places in Lancashire coming through from the BBC in the last fortnight or so.

The 19th Network launches - An interesting collaboration in the US between a group of national, local, regional and special-interest publishers to produce more and share more stories about women and LGBTQ+ Americans of diverse backgrounds. Essentially working as a syndication portal for these stories to then be repackaged and used across wider media, it recalls The Scottish Beacon project from my pal Rhiannon Davies, but also I think we'll see more of these networks springing up. There's strength in numbers, strength in getting content shared and used elsewhere to improve revenue, brand recognition and reach. And there’s a membership model and ask built in from day one too.

AI TOOL: How the Generative AI Framework for HM Government can help comms people - Dan Slee - as everyone grapples with how AI should and could be used, the government’s official guidance on the use of tools such as ChatGPT for its own departments has been issued. While Dan is writing at it through a comms lens, as opposed to a journalism lens, many of the principles can translate across. “You have meaningful human control at the right stage” is the right one for me, what checks and balances are in place to ensure the machines aren’t just running riots producing as much content as they possibly can?

So much media consumption isn't real - Simon Owens - this often happens but Apple changed the way it records podcast stats, linked to the auto-downloading of episodes you were subscribed to not counting as listens anymore. Not surprisingly, many podcasts have seen a big drop in listens. For me it’s a reminder of ensuring you have secondary metrics for any brand/product you’re working on, so while of course listens, views, subscribers might be the main thing you’d focused on there’s a second tier of metrics being recorded that ensure there’s warning signs/bright spots to be seen and considered while the big metric may be fluctuating or hit by a technological change. So if a podcast is also being measured by how many social media mentions it receives or how many responses the hosts receive to each episode, that’s a good secondary metric of growth and engagement alongside listens.

Some good reading there hopefully, and speaking of podcasts I had a listen to a non-journo podcast this weekend and it’s a great listen about how one of the co-funders of Castore - the sportswear brand - grew his business. Plenty of the usual hard graft stuff, but the bit that really caught my ear was how they grasped who their audience was and then went to them and really went after them, from physically standing outside gyms where they thought their type of audience would be. A question for all media outlets, who is your audience and where are they?

And finally, one of the projects I’m involved in, sees the launch of The Bolton Lead this week. The second in a series of weekly deep-dive journalism newsletters we’re launching in the North of England. Launch piece here and how to sign up too for receiving direct to inbox.

Have a great week, keep going and thanks for reading!

Ed