A quick rant about Local People

Comments

7 responses to “A quick rant about Local People”

1. 

   Annette Rubery

   July 6, 2011

   Really, what is the point of this? It’s badly researched and has nothing to do with what Lichfeldians think. And they missed off the George & Dragon!

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2. 

   Pezholio

   July 6, 2011

   And the Duke of York!!

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3. 

   Andy

   July 7, 2011

   Obviously nobody has voted for more than the top 2 or 3 pubs in that list if anyone has actually voted at all.

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4. 

   Ed Walker

   July 12, 2011

   Have you done the only sensible thing to do? Write your own version for Lichfield Live and get a Facebook poll going?

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5. 

   Philip John

   July 15, 2011

   Haha we haven’t Ed, but that’s not a bad idea 😉

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   1. 

      Rich

      September 8, 2011

      They’ve reserved 1000’s of domain names but so far have only built 400+ sites. There’s communities across the country that will suffer from their model. They are taking passion away from communities and replacing it with trash!

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6. 

   Ross

   August 19, 2011

   I really should read your stuff more often, Phil… ;o)

   Anyway, I have no issue with anyone doing their own thing and I’ve said as much to ‘Elksie’ (as he refers to himself in your screenshot above). After all, that’s exactly what we did.

   However, what I do take issue with is the myth that Local People Lichfield is some kind of caring, sharing site for the people by the people. It isn’t. The clue is at the bottom – Northcliffe Digital. This is a commercial operation with profit at its heart. Again, nothing wrong with that. But let’s be open about it. I had a discussion with Elksie on Twitter about the reasoning behind Lichfield Local People and I’m still awaiting a response to a point I made about why, if it was set up as a place for the community to interact and get hyperlocal news, they hadn’t involved those already doing it at the outset?

   I’m not saying we’d have got into bed with them, but stranger things have happened at sea. We got involved in the Birmingham Mail Communities project when a number of ‘commentators’ suggested the big bad wolf was peeing on us from a great height and taking advantage. We’re not stupid enough to realise that the Mail aren’t getting something from it, of course they are. They’re filling pages which would otherwise need content created, and they’re doing a PR job for themselves on the work they’re doing with the community-led sites. However, we were happy with what we were getting out of the arrangement and went for it.

   But Local People never got the chance to pick our brains and learn some of the lessons we’ve spent the last three years learning because they never asked. But it kind of sums up the general attitude of the traditional print media (a land I once resided, incidentally) – man the barricades and don’t let the commoners in. A small part of the piece I wrote for Journal Local sums a lot of it up, where one editor essentially admitted he knew his website wasn’t really succeeding, but they weren’t prepared to admit defeat as at least they were in a position to stop someone else starting a website (the full piece is here: http://journallocal.co.uk/2011/04/15/trying-to-go-forward-while-always-looking-backwards/).

   And Local People smacks of a spoiler site (look at the lack of coverage they’ve given it in the Mercury – God forbid it should actually start to damage their precious newspaper). It’ll chug along until they need to see off something they see as a threat and then it’ll disappear back in its shell. And who suffers because of a potentially weakened local media due to this attitude? The local people of course. Kind of ironic, really.

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