Posts filed under 'diary of a would be blogger'
What’s the news today? To find out, I have several choices. I can scan the latest electronic updates in my inbox; I can flit through Twitter or other social media gatherings in cyberspace; or I can take my newspaper and cup of coffee into the garden and sit in the sun while real birds twitter in the trees.
In the end I do all three. And though it is much more pleasant sitting in the sun, the news is no better in the garden. The Cumbrian killings, Gaza and a pervading sense of economic gloom dominate world and national news.
Inside, on my laptop I find local headlines gleaned from local bloggers and community websites whose news and views are increasingly taking the place of the local newspaper.
But who has time to track all this down? Today, as it happens, I have time to spare since a morning meeting was cancelled – and thanks to two enterprising young (new media) men I can scan local websites with just a couple of clicks. Ally Tibbitt (whose GreenerLeith website won a hyperlocal blog award earlier this year) and Tom Allan Guardian beatblogger are both exploring the potential of crowd sourcing.
As Ally explains on the Edinbuzz home page:
Edinbuzz aims to crowd source news about Edinburgh, and help more people to share news about their neighbourhood.
This is ‘hyperlocal’ news in action. “Hyperlocal sounds like something from Startrek,” says Tommy pithily but it’s an interesting development of citizen journalism and as a former local newspaper hack I have mixed feelings: I am fumbling my way through the maze of social media networks and I badly need a compass.
Like most people I know, I find local newspapers thoroughly depressing. I hate the negative misinformation that masquerades as news. I pity the shrinking workforce of badly paid reporters. I understand the old (paid for) media is struggling to compete with new media freely available online but the newspaper industry cannot restore readership by cutting quality – I know at least one Johnston Press editor who is under severe pressure to cut staff and increase circulation at the same time.
So I congratulate both Tom and Ally on a generous and innovative move to provide better information for local people. But it’s a challenging project. Can unpaid bloggers fill the gap left by local newspapers? How many of us have time, skill and resources to do the rigorous research that produces a good, well-balanced, accurately-informed newspaper story? How do we guard against simply repeating what each other says without checking the facts – wandering around the Hall of Mirrors, as Alan McIntosh of the Spurtle so succinctly put it at the informal gathering of local bloggers organised by Tom Allan last week?
Who has the answers? For now – thanks to Tom’s roundup – I am glad to see that when I catch the train to Glasgow I may soon be able to enjoy free wi-fi, giving me a choice of struggling with a newspaper or opening my laptop to follow the news. Wherever it comes from.
June 4th, 2010
Stop press: The Guardian has just announced their Edinburgh beatblogger
On a mild and misty morning your friendly neighbourhood beatblogger slips a mobile phone in her pocket and sets off hoping to catch sight of the local community policeman breaking into an old railway tunnel.
It’s a good news story. Opening up the old railway tunnel is just one of PC Simon Daley’s imaginative plans to create a more stimulating environment for young people. As it happens the demolition work has been delayed but I posted an earlier story about him on the Leith Open Space community blog and hope to follow it up soon.
So I am only half joking about the beatblogger bit. A couple of months ago The Guardian was advertising for their first official Edinburgh beatblogger. “The successful candidate will be a confident blogger, know their yelps from their tweets, have a passion for local news and understand how to build relationships with the local community.”
I understood most of that sentence. And hoped a passion for local news and community relationships would count for at least as much as a yelp or a tweet. But wasn’t really clear what it meant. Since then, in idle moments Googling “Beatblogger’, I have discovered different definitions, the most confident one coming from Beatblogger.org:
A beatblogger, simply put, is a beat reporter who uses their blog as a tool to engage their readers, interact with them, use them as sources, crowdsource their ideas and invite them to contribute to the reporting process.
But just as I think I am getting the idea, and before the Guardian’s beatblogger gets a chance to hit the streets, a new kid arrives on the block. Caledonian Mercury, Scotland’s first exclusively online newspaper, went live yesterday (on Burns Night no less), and clocked up more than 30,000 hits before Newsnight Scotland interviewed the new editor – and added two more from our household at least.
It’s a big gamble but the former editor of the Scotsman website, Stewart Kirkpatrick, seems well up for it and (as the Newsnight pundits agreed) the first edition looks pretty good – with perhaps some of the self-confident quality that I remember from the better old days of Scotland’s would be national newspaper.
Where does that leave the beatblogger? It looks to me as if Caledonian Mercury is beatblogging writ large though it seeks to “return journalism to journalists”. I like the positive tone of the opening leader – makes a very welcome change from the Scotsman – but it will be interesting to see how it develops. And who will have time to read it.
It’s getting mighty crowded in cyberspace. It takes an open mind, a keen eye and a lot of time to spot the facts among the vested interests. Meanwhile, there are plenty of stories going untold. I hope the new newspaper and the beatbloggers will be able to find them in the crowd. They will need that passion – and a chance to get out and meet people face to face.
On my way back from Scotland Yard I saw my first snowdrops of the year. Sometimes it’s good just to get a walk in the park
January 26th, 2010
The next instant it was gone – and so was our dinner. Ed Malone in the Lost World
Hot foot in the snow to St Andrew Square to check poetry stakes are still in place. So far so good, though last week I obviously blogged too soon. The Lost World vanished from the garden within a day of me writing about it. Prose, poetry, pictures and willow stakes: gone without trace.
Take 2 (or, actually, please don’t take any just yet): Lost World poems and pictures replanted in St Andrew Square in fading light on Friday afternoon. I shot up to the square on Saturday morning to capture the scene but, would you believe it, the camera battery died just as a group of young people gathered to read poems by the pond. You will just have to take my word for it.
Two days later. This time I’ve got new batteries.
So I catch a couple of readers.
And another one.
That’s it. City of Literature Lost World Read is on for the month of February. It’s anyone’s guess how long the poetry will stay planted in the garden. But if it’s gone by the time you get there, you can catch lots more at the Scottish Poetry Library in the High Street.
A huge black shadow, twenty feet across, skimmed up into the air; for an instant the monster wings blotted out the stars, and then it vanished over the brow of the cliff above us. Ed Malone in The Lost World
February 10th, 2009
This is London, in Edinburgh the living books wore black T shirts
How odd that none of our local press took an interest in this event, Scotland’s first Living Library. In other cities (from the first event in Copenhagen to the latest UK event in Bradford) the place has been crawling with reporters and cameras. If I hadn’t been rushing off to meet my boys and girls for a pre-birthday bonfire party I would probably have rushed home to write about it last Saturday afternoon. Becoming a living book was a really extraordinary experience.
The Lisbon event
I’m treating myself to a birthday blog (it’s three years old today!) though I could be doing some work. But, come on, it is my birthday and one of the main reasons the boys gave me this blog was so I could write (and occasionally rant) about stories that newspapers don’t cover. This time I won’t rant about the old media who don’t know a good story when it is staring them in the face. Instead I want to grab hold of the memory of the Living Library, already almost a week ago, before it fades too far into the past. Since I have no pictures of the Edinburgh event I am downloading some of the excellent images from the Living Library website (and thank you Ronni for saying I can).
Flashback to last Saturday. On the way to the Festival of Libraries I began to get cold feet. Who would want to ‘read’ the blogger? What if no-one wanted to take my book off the shelf? I decided it wouldn’t matter because there would be plenty more interesting books for me to read.
Sadly I never got time to read anyone else’s book. The Living Library brings ‘books’ (real people with a story to tell) face to face with the borrower who wants to ask questions. My first borrower was already waiting when I got into Adam House – a nice, sensitive young man who kindly abandoned technical questions early on in our 30 minute conversation but asked searching questions about the addictive nature of reading and writing blogs and how we can be sure we are dealing with the truth.
A living book in Portugal
For the next two hours people lined up to borrow books from every walk of life. I saw Sikh turbans, Muslim scarfs and big Goth boots. Between borrowings I met up with, Asia, the young librarian from Poland, Alice, the community worker from Zimbabwe, and Shaista the poet from Dubai. I already knew Ryan, the wry Reader in Residence at the poetry library, Simon, the charismatic community policeman in Leith, and Mrs Unis the almost legendary businesswoman. Each one with a terrific story to tell. Each of us different, all of us united in black T shirts with BOOK: BORROW ME in bold white lettering.
The aim of the Living Library project is to overcome prejudice, break down barriers, broaden understanding between people. It occurred to me that an event like this is to some extent self-selecting. People with narrow minds are less likely to venture
into the space. And yet, and yet. I confess that I didn’t expect the Goth to be so young and look so sweet. If only I had had time I would have asked him to tell me his story.
But for two hours I was too busy engaging with questions that probed into the heart and soul of blogging. Fraser invoked Orwell to ask if blogging, like any other writing, is a form of vanity (of course!), George asked how it compares with my former newspaper writing; have I managed to find my own voice (I honestly don’t know, I find it difficult), Christina made me envious because she has just started blogging about being an American in Glasgow (ah, what discoveries) and is sometimes compelled to blog six times a day! Kathy admitted she didn’t know what blogging was and wanted to find out (how open minded can you get) and I was so sorry it was time to go when Ian turned up with a genuine interest in sharing news and views of blogging. He said he would read my blog so I hope he found it ok.
That was just my experience. According to Ewan, the Living Library organiser, there were at least 45 book loans during the day (and some were group sessions so many more people were involved). All power to Ronni Abergel, the man who started it all off at a music festival in Denmark eight years ago as a campaign against violence. After Saturday’s event he sent Ewan a text complimenting Edinburgh on the first event, “You can be proud of your efforts to get Scotland off the ground.”
I like that connection between the mobile phone and the live event. As I sat surrounded by people so engaged with one another it kept coming home to me that blogging, the mobile phone and all the networking groups on the internet, are after all simply means to the end that we were experiencing face to face in the Living Library. It is all about making contact with other human beings and ultimately there is nothing better than meeting in person. Or to pinch a quote from Ronni, “We live in a time where we need dialogue.”
I will also post pictures and a less personal report on Leith Open Space.
A living book in Berlin
November 13th, 2008
Midsummer night’s dream: FOUND in the Palm House while the storm raged outside.
I have written so many words elsewhere about Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo in the past six months I have never had time to express what I really feel about this extraordinary, all-consuming project. I would love to have found a few minutes every day to record what was really happening behind the scenes: health and safety madness; email gems (Kimho’s throw away comment, “I never knew Louise can play cello on stilts”). All the nitty gritty stuff, that’s what blogs are meant to be about isn’t it?
Even now I don’t really have time. I want to take some programmes down to the Palm House in time for Simon and Ziggy’s Q&A session about their wonderful invention, Three Pieces (see the video)
And I really should be packing for my holiday, as well as cutting back some of the undergrowth in the back garden or at the very least planting out the poor seedlings that have hung on to life while I ‘co-ordinated’ the cast of hundreds (tens anyway) involved in last Saturday’s peculiarly brilliant performance in the Botanics.
I had been dreading rain but I never imagined weather quite as bad as the downpour we performed under on midsummer night. And yet, oddly, getting soaked to the skin seemed to bring all the many different artists and musicians together into one smiling and co-operative team in a way that eluded us during the dress rehearsal under beautiful clear blue skies the night before.
At 6pm Jacqui, Jake, Ian and I sat in the cafe warming ourselves for the evening ahead when we saw the first drops of rain. By 6.30 the rain was a steady vertical stream from solid grey cloud but miraculously a line of brightly coloured brollies had sprouted outside the Palm House and for the next 30 minutes people just kept coming. And most of them stayed for the whole show.
Mattie, one of the down to earth horticultural staff on duty that night, had sent word to ask if we were really planning to go ahead with the performance. But there was no Plan B. Unbelievably, Kimho and I had never discussed what to do if it rained. We just went ahead and the result was one of the oddest and most uplifting experiences of my life. As Colin said in an email the other day,
I think the extreme wet (once I accepted it) lent something very special and memorable to the proceedings. The smells were incredible …and the memory of Chang Zhang dancing in costume in the lashing rain will remain with me for a long time. Very beautiful.
Rob comments on the psychology of such stoicism in Dialogues of Rain and Bamboo, “I had the sense that sheer bloody-mindedness would prevail…”
I treasure the memory of Chang (she dances beautifully but she is also a lovely person) along with a
moment in the Palm House when I looked up at the rain battering on the glass while the building filled with the sound of FOUND steaming up the windows: my son’s band playing in one of my favourite buildings; surely this is not happening.
Oh yes, and Louise did play cello on stilts.
That’s it, hardly the nitty gritty (maybe I will get back to that eventually) but I have 20 minutes left to gather up programmes, snip a few overhanging branches and when I get back from the Palm House I really must pack for holiday. Two whole weeks away from email, websites, and Scottish weather. Ray says its hot in France.
June 28th, 2008
This is Susie Brown’s beautiful bamboo sculpture – let’s hope we get the blue sky
Not much more than 24 hours to go now and I am determined to write a little bit about this extraordinary event for my own blog. After months of hard work behind the scenes and miles of emails flashing back and forward between New York, Hong Kong, Thailand, Edinburgh and even London, Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo is about to go public . Yesterday I went more public than I expected when I found myself in a dance workshop in the Botanics as Garden staff wheeled their barrows around Susie, Nick, Anne-Marie and myself in the midst of our meditation walk exercise. (and no that’s not my foot in the picture). Hope to get back to this soon, but right now I am late for the rehearsal.
June 20th, 2008
It took me a while to find the right place tucked away between high rise flats. By the time I got there the rest of the team were inside having coffee and my blurry mobile picture shows a community garden without people. Even so, the sun was slanting between high walls and if you squint you can imagine what it might be like once fruit trees are showering the ground with blossom.
Community gardens are spreading across Edinburgh. So far I know of two within short walking distance from my front door. And plans for at least another three nearby.
Two weeks ago I went to a wonderfully cheering meeting in the appropriately named Persevere Room at Leith Community Centre. I had been watching Monty Don’s new BBC television series, Around the World in 80 Gardens, and wistfully imagined what Leith might be like if we could capture some of Cuba’s enthusiasm for growing organic fruit and vegetables in every spare piece of land. It didn’t seem likely. Leith is not Havana and we are not facing a food embargo.
But the meeting was full of community groups keen to use common land to encourage local people to get together to grow healthy local food. As a member of a small voluntary organisation, I found myself agreeing to share a plot in the new space (although a voice inside was muttering, ‘you’re crazy, you don’t have time for this’).
So my next visit to the Persevere Community Garden will be armed with a spade as well as my mobile to take part in a tree-planting ceremony with three other groups led by the wonderfully optimistic and persuasive Ally Tibbitt of Greener Leith. At the same time, the garden opening will mark the launch of Edinburgh’s Children’s Orchard – inspired by the fantastically successful Children’s Orchard in Glasgow.
Perhaps Leith could be more like Cuba than I imagined!
(This post, or a slightly tweaked version of it, also appears on Leith Open Space blog)
February 8th, 2008
This won’t do. It’s 11.35 am and what have I got to show for the day? Half an hour too long in bed, two cups of tea, two cups of coffee, half an hour too long reading the paper, 17 minutes drumming practice (ok, really 20 mins). Time I got down to some work but first I am making my New Year resolutions; so many it is hard to know where to start: eat more fruit and veg, drink more water, walk further, generally get more out of the day (more reading, more gardening, more cooking)…plus at least 15 minutes drumming practice, 15 minutes dancing practice. All that on top of a good day’s work and no more than 20 minutes blogging? Here’s my cunning plan.
I have been thinking about this for some time. There are so many things I want to do more of and better that there are not enough hours in the day or days in the week. So I have decided to try one thing at a time and log (as honestly as I can) how I get on. Four weeks for four main resolutions.
Five a day – I am embarrassed to say how difficult I find it to eat five fruit and veg a day and I know that is only the recommended minimum daily dose. So this will be a challenge but interesting to see whether it makes a difference to the way I feel.
Two and a half litres a day – I was delighted to read before Christmas in the Guardian (so it must be true) that we don’t need to try to pour 2.5 litres of water down our throats every day. That is some kind of urban myth, no doubt nurtured by the bottled water companies. Tea, coffee, soup and fluids in our food all count towards the recommended daily intake. However I still think I don’t drink enough so here goes.
10,000 a day – walking steps. A couple of years ago I asked for a pedometer for Christmas confident that as my office is at the top of two flights of stairs (46 altogether) I would soon clock up the recommended daily exercise. I soon became very depressed. Even on days when I ran up and down stairs, walked across town to meetings and carried shopping bags up the hill from Tesco, I still barely reached 9,000 steps. I finally gave up after accidentally wearing the pedometer to my dance class which sent the poor thing into overdrive and it never recovered. I really don’t believe I managed 25,000 paces that day.
No more than 20 – restricting my time on the blog to 20 minutes a day will be difficult (I have already spent 30 minutes getting this far). But if I am to get more out of the day I know I have to spend less time on the screen. Facebook, blogging, googling and generally faffing about with emails that don’t need to be read or written can be an enormous waste of time. Fun too so there’s no need to give up altogether but I want to become more disciplined.
So where do I start with my four week plan? On the water I think. Now for some work.
January 16th, 2008
Ray has just come in to wish me luck, he hopes I won’t get arrested. Sadly work prevents him joining me on the Guantanamo demo organised by Amnesty today in Edinburgh, London and Belfast.
Once Tommy arrives I shall go and collect the six orange boiler suits I booked online in an impulsive moment before Hogmanay. Now it looks as if I will have three or four to spare. Still, according to the email from Amnesty, there will be 140 of us kneeling in front of the American Consulate in Edinburgh when the 1 o’clock gun sounds from the castle. That should make a good picture.
January 11th, 2008
Just a bunch of…me and my mates growing old disgracefully on a trip to Orkney after Frances spotted the potential of the church name.
I used my bus pass for the first time today, cupping it in my hand so only the driver would see it, dousing that half hope that he would refuse to believe it. I hardly believe it myself. ‘Surely not’ he might say but he didn’t. ‘Darling, they never ask,’ my mate Peter told me when I said he would need to bring his bus pass to prove that he was eligible for a pensioner’s discount at a Fringe show last September. So there is nothing for it but to grow old disgracefully.
It’s an odd feeling. For the first time in my life I have been shy of admitting my age. Sixty sounds so bloody old, so truly past it, and – until I catch sight of myself in a shop window on a bad day or, come on, even on a good day – I don’t feel so very different than I have done for a couple of decades. So I jumped off the bus with a sprightly little hop just to show I could in the liberating knowledge that I could jump straight back on to another bus whenever I felt like it without having to rummage in my bag for the right money. And I can keep on doing that for the rest of my natural…unless the government cottons on to the fact that people like me are filling the buses.
Despite myself, I do feel occasional twinges of liberation. When I am in the company of friends the same age (any age for that matter) we laugh, drink and talk dirty just as we always have done. Becoming 60 seems to bring odd echoes of adolescence especially if you are fit and still earning: claiming my state pension and cashing in a private savings scheme has almost doubled my precarious freelance earnings, while (when my vanity allows) I can benefit from discounts at the cinema and theatre, at dancing classes, and on the trains, and I no longer have to pay National Health Insurance.
Almost everyone I know agrees on two facts about ageing: wearing specs is a pain but the bus pass is an incredible gift. Fran got a free ride home from Oban when she, er, forgot which car park she had left her car in (she got home in time for the police phone call to say she had parked it at the Co-op not Tesco so she took a free ride back up to Oban to collect it, enjoying the trip again). And there are other perks. Celia and I fancy getting cheap train fares for a day out enjoying exhibitions at pensioner prices in London, maybe a night too if we decide to take advantage of discount hotel rates. Ray and I are thinking of travelling the length of Scotland always taking the long way round. From Edinburgh to John o’ Groats via Greenock, perhaps. Rock, as Dougal would say, and roll.
No, really, I can see a new world is opening up. I am still paying taxes so I don’t need to feel guilty about these sudden perks and I can always let on to myself that other passengers might just think I am flashing a season ticket instead of a bus pass.
January 9th, 2008
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