The latest edition of The Lichfield and Burntwood Independent is out now 🗞️ Find out where to get your copy here 👉 lichfieldlive.co.uk/lbi-map/ Don't forget, our volunteers rely on advertising to produce the paper - for details email [email protected]

A manic deadline this week thanks to fly-tippers, burst pipes, school closures, abandoned dogs and even dead sheep - but we got there again in the end 🥵🗞️

First paper of 2025 is out - great work by a team completely made up of volunteers. But the challenge of keeping us in print and online is an ongoing one 🥵

🚨NEW PUBLICATION🚨Our US rural journalism team ( @ljlincoln.bsky.social , @mediatingmimi.bsky.social Jessica Fargen Walsh) here in Journalism Practice reflects on the intense labor of being the only person, or one of the only people, in a rural newsroom. 1/5 www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NDMQC...

Out of office is on for the Christmas break - the dog clearly got the memo about how I'd like the next few days to look! 😴

Despite living close to Lichfield Cathedral for my whole life, it is easy to forget just how stunning it is architecturally inside and out, so it was great to visit last night. Whether you're religious or not, it's a powerful place (even if you do get a stiff neck looking up at all the details!).

"We must support and protect a diversity of voices in the news industry so journalists can continue reporting stories critical to their local communities and our democracy," Juanita Islas writes.

Plenty are having a say on the local government shake-up plans, but from a journalism perspective there does need to be assurances that localised accountability and transparency will remain. County councils tend to deal very much in breadth, whereas readers want local detail that matters to them

Light show at Lichfield Cathedral - it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas 🎄

Final class of the semester this morning is being used as a bridge to their next modules in the new year. Great work is being done on transition into university at the outset, but there's lots to be said for "handing over" students to their next phase of learning and helping them join the dots too.

So much of this aligns with the independent media outlets who are directly tied to their communities through circumstance initially - knowing what people want to read (and will trust) is about more than merely data and stats, it's about empathy and depth of understanding 👇🏻

For those looking to tune into support being offered to newsrooms and journalists, we created a Starter Pack of journalism support orgs. Sign up here. bsky.app/start/did:pl...

local Detroit journo Sam Robinson has words about the Axios Local approach as he launches a Substack. (@axios.com laid off 10% of staff in August.) detroitonemillion.substack.com/p/detroit-on...

Not a surprise given the way X traffic has fallen through the floor - thankfully @lichfieldlive.bsky.social had already been able to move away from reliance on it (which is a shame given Twitter was the platform which got the whole journey up and running all those years ago)

Edition number 20. And to think I wasn't sure if a four edition trial was a good idea! Demand on the rise, lots of inbound advertising queries and more content than we can squeeze in - local news (and newsprint) is well and truly alive. One more to go before Christmas! 🎅🏻

The local newspaper where I started as a trainee reporter doesn't even exist in its own right anymore. I loved the energy of that newsroom and how much I learned in it. It's easy to focus on the 'big' issues with the national media, but local reporting matters just as much to people's lives.

Not sure these Champions League nights at #avfc will ever get boring!

"May the best hellsite win" futurism.com/the-byte/met...

I was asked to write a short explainer about Bluesky for The Conversation - I hope I haven't done anything to annoy the more committed community members (I was an ambivalent and pretty slack early adopter). theconversation.com/what-is-blue...

People are often surprised when I tell them this: both Twitter and Facebook/insta/threads are now specifically engineered to downgrade, hide, suppress real journalism. If this platform is different, that's a huge change

And here's our Lichfield starter pack, a list of suggested people to follow. go.bsky.app/N2piiuD

AI companies' media deals are "pure lobbying," argues journalism professor Jeff Jarvis the-decoder.com/ai-companies...

I don't know where she gets it from, but the girl seems to be half-decent at this Irish dancing lark! A sixth regional Oireachtas championship title added to the collection at the weekend 🏆1️⃣

The #CIPR, PR's professional body in the UK, is ceasing posting on X, because of "growing concerns over declining engagement, platform governance, and the proliferation of misinformation." Transition away to be completed "by early 2025." Bluesky presence coming newsroom.cipr.co.uk/cipr-to-ceas...

Time to spend the day going through the whole report , but Baroness Stowell is right: "The general narrative about the future of news is one of managed decline. That needs to change. We need decisive action from the Government, and soon, to put the right legal and competition framework in place."

New article in Journal of Communication looking at changes to trust in news across 46 countries in the last 10 years. Trust in news declined in just over half of countries. It decreased more in countries where TV news use has declined, and/or where social media news use has grown. A thread:

Another newspaper written, laid out and ready for proofing over the weekend before going to print - still amazed that as a group of volunteers we are pulling off 32 page publications every fortnight 🗞️ And I'm even more amazed that what started as a short a trial is about to publish a 20th edition 🤯

Our Digital News Report 2023 found a strong correlation between higher exposure to news media criticism and greater levels of media distrust. But it's difficult to say what way the relationship goes. Read the report here: reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news...

For anyone interested in the experiences of deaf people in the UK TV and film industry a research report conducted by Erika Jones and myself for the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity is out today. You can access it here - bcuassets.blob.core.windows.net/docs/unmuted...

An addition to the headline issue is that the construction of articles on some outlets is increasingly abandoning the good old inverted pyramid in favour of trailering to make you have to scroll past the ad to get the who, what, why, where, when, how info.

Quite pleased that @lichfieldlive.bsky.social was even earlier in planting a flag on @bsky.app www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2024/news/re...

1/ I’ve become an unofficial evangelist for Bluesky. (I don’t work here.) As a former dir of product mgmt @Twitter, I’m impressed w/ the innovative and courageous choices Bluesky has made. They’ve come up with a better way to do social media. Some have asked me how I explain this outcome. A🧵>>>

I must be going soft - changed my lesson plan at the last minute this morning so the students don't have to go out in the snow. I look forward to seeing this moment of empathy in the NSS comments in a few years!

I don't think I can remember a year where it hasn't snowed the week of my daughter's Oireachtas 🌨️❄️

Someone asked today how long I'd been running @lichfieldlive.bsky.social (and now a newspaper too). Told them - and realised it's been more than a third of my life. One day I'll work out why I can't just stop and take up a normal hobby (or a second job that actually pays!).

Good morning! If you've found my 'UK news and politics' starter pack useful to get you up and running on @bsky.app, please spread the word to new users by giving this a repost. Cheers! go.bsky.app/VNsC9bL

Nail on the head here. Even at the local level, that place became packed with vitriol by those empowered by an owner who blew the dog whistle as loud as any

Asked to deliver a lecture to a class on #hyperlocal #journalism, but have quickly found myself once again making the argument that we need to ditch the H-word altogether (in the same way as we used to talk about and teach online journalism until it became, well, just journalism).

The mess we're in follows more than two decades of mismanagement by both parties, and a disastrous shift towards tuition fees and consumerisation which has nearly destroyed the idea of higher ed as a public good. First step to fixing this is to admit your mistakes www.theguardian.com/education/20...

A starter pack of starter packs for UK media & politics. UK Journos New, Podcasts go.bsky.app/VB1hZZk UK MPs go.bsky.app/LrPkHJJ FT Journalists go.bsky.app/FuqnwdD BBC journalists go.bsky.app/8gWbLmD Channel 4 News Journalists go.bsky.app/6HZ1mvW Prospect journalists go.bsky.app/Vk8j7vP

Another busy day yesterday as our small but fantastic team of volunteers distributed the latest edition of The Lichfield and Burntwood Independent 🗞️ Find out where to get your copy here 👉🏻 lichfieldlive.co.uk/lbi-map/

“we can do this because our business model does not rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants’ algorithms” Good. Organisations, not just individuals, encode their value system in their platform use. www.theguardian.com/media/2024/n...

There's something to be said for legislation to provide protection for the monetisation of content by third parties. News production isn't free - and we need to do more to reinforce that argument (but without denying access to trusted info for those who need it most) www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/a...

Interesting to see The Guardian decision - but for local indy news outlets it's the diminishing returns in a post-Musk Twitter and the ability of other platforms (including this one) to gather geographic communities together that will be a major factor www.theguardian.com/media/2024/n...

News groups seem to ignore the value of an editor aligned so closely to a title and the community it operates within. For my PhD one of things that came up in interviews was how intertwined the identity of the publication and editor can be in local news www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2024/news/ed...

Having seen early Twitter grow @lichfieldlive.bsky.social into the media organisation it has become, it's so frustrating to see what has happened to X - but seeing the ridiculously low traffic it now generates for us, any *need* to stay and keep a presence there is diminishing rapidly day by day

OpenAI basically telling investors “our business model is ruining education.” c/o @marcwatkins.bsky.social

How can we grow Community-Centered Journalism so that the practice becomes stronger and more prominent? From raising awareness of what this type of reporting is, and why it matters, to educating funders and future journalists, here are five things we can do now. medium.com/damian-radcl...

Edition number 19 of The Lichfield and Burntwood Independent newspaper is with the printers - it's been an amazing job from the @lichfieldlive.bsky.social team as pages have been torn up and redone as stories change. Now to try to meet the demand for more and more copies from our collection points!

Has this place livened up since I was last here?