Government legislation will create subsidised news consortia bringing together blogs, newspapers and independent regional television news.

This was the plan set out by Creative Industries Minister Sion Simon (Lab Erdington) when he spoke to me during Labour's annual conference. A Bill will be bought in this autumn, he said.

While there's been a lot of discussion about the future of regional and local news, I'm not sure there's been a great deal of debate about this. The plan, as set out by Sion, is for the Government initially to subsidise the scheme, but in the hope that a business model will eventually emerge which does not require public funding.

How exactly local bloggers will feed into it remains to be seen. I wonder whether they will be happy for their work to be included in a commercial operation if they are not being paid themselves? Or maybe the plan is to pay bloggers too.

Ministers are apparently planning three pilot schemes, in Scotland, Wales and an English region which has not yet been named.

Sion spoke to me about the policy when I interviewed him in partnership with Yoosk, a web-based service which allows members of the public to pose questions to politicians, with journalists sometimes acting as middlemen. Apparently I was the first newspaper journalist to set up an interview like this with Yoosk.

The question he is answering, as you will hear, is actually about the Birmingham Mail. As I said, all the questions I put to Sion that day were chosen by users of the Yoosk website.

Here is what Sion said:

 

 

                   

Below is the full text of Gordon Brown's speech today to the TUC. You may wonder why I am posting it here. It's because I have written a post on the Birmingham Post blog site comparing Mr Brown's speech to one delivered by George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, and wanted to link to full copies of both speeches.

Believe it or not, while the Conservative website has a copy of Mr Osborne's speech, the Labour website does not have a copy of the Prime Minister's words (and it is a Labour speech, not a Government speech, so it's not on the Downing Street site either). So I have posted a copy to this blog for me to link to. Here it is:

                   

Read more...

As I have stated many times on this blog, I am in favour of aggregators which make it easier for people to find content from across the web, although I think there are some limits on what they should do.

I have begun work on an aggregator for Birmingham blogs, to replace the rather poor "blogroll" on this site.

If anyone has any thoughts on whether this is a good idea or not, I would be very grateful for their input.

Work on it has only just begun, and it will be a long time before it is anything close to comprehensive (I'm sure it will never be complete).

Take a look at http://birmingham.localbounce.com and leave a comment, either at the "about" page on that site, or right here.

                   

I've been chatting to a friend in America who tells me that the evils of our NHS have become a favourite topic among opponents of Barack Obama's healthcare plans.

Tory MEP Daniel Hannan (South East) has made a number of appearances on US television to explain to America why our healthcare system is so bad.

Mr Hannan became something of an internet sensation after his eloquent speech condemning Gordon Brown, in the European Parliament in March, received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube (currently 2.4 million).

Despite this, he doesn't get a great deal of attention in the mainstream media in the UK.

But his comments in the US have nonetheless been highlighted in the UK by users of Twitter.

The "micro-blogging" tool has been used by supporters of the NHS to defend the health service against the attacks by Mr Obama's critics, using the hash-tag #welovethenhs.

And some of these have also had a dig at the Tories - demanding Conservative leader David Cameron disown Mr Hannan.

Mr Cameron has insisted that he also loves the NHS, and spoken in a positive way about the Twitter campaign, on the official Conservative Party blog.

There was no mention of Mr Hannan, something that has been noted in comments left by the blog's readers.

But Mr Cameron has distanced himself from the MEP's comments elsewhere. It seems that Mr Hannan has become an embarrassment to his party.

And while the mainstream media has picked up on the story, from what I can tell it all began on Twitter.

                   

Mark Blackstock, editor of TheYamYam, has contributed this reply to my earlier post about his website. JW

------------------------

Hey Jonathan. Thanks for commenting on the YamYam.

The simple reason why the YamYam sometimes scans stories from newspapers and posts them on its own website is because the stories are not to be found anywhere online.

This is often the case with the Express and Star, where many excellent stories about Walsall, of interest and importance to local people, appear in newsprint but never find their way onto the E&S website. Believe me, I would much prefer not to have to take the trouble and time to scan stories but simply link to the original content online - scans also look rather ugly.

I have raised this issue with the Walsall editor of the E&S. Unfortunately, it has been explained to me that publishing all of the E&S content online is beyond the capacity of the newspaper's small internet team. I suspect this is as frustrating for the Walsall journalists who write these stories as it is for me, and for you who may perceive this as ‘theft'.

A story scanned and published in the YamYam is always credited, it is always reproduced as an image file, the article is not OCRd and stored as text in a database. So unfortunately, it is not possible to provide a link to an original article if the article does not exist online in the first place.

Readers appreciate articles being scanned, not just for their news value but also for the record. Much of the value added by a site like the YamYam is it's attention to links. Obviously links to specialist websites are a useful resource for someone researching or wishing to find out more about a particular subject, company or institution etc. But a story published in newsprint can often be isolated and read out of context.

Historical links can add meaning and tell their own story on a subject. So scanning an article is also important historically for telling the full story in links for when the subject appears next time. This is of particular use to people and groups campaigning around local issues.

As for your reference to using RSS feeds in your previous comment, I do wish it was so simple. Unfortunately many newspaper RSS feeds are unreliable and I spend many hours in search engines hunting down and selecting content. And for the record, there are no computer automated feeds going into the YamYam website - it is all human activity.

Many of the headlines and intro paragraphs (not all) are rewritten, for reasons of space or clarity on the page design or RSS feed, since what makes sense on a printed page often doesn't translate into a different web context.

                   

Read more...