JEEcamp is over and everyone hopefully got something useful out of the day, I know I did. The room was filled with an entrepreneurial spirit and ideas were flying around all day.
Even though the industry looks pretty dull, the general feeling I got, was that people have now realised that there is no point in trying to desperately hold on to your job, but now is the time to look forward. Naturally, this forces people to think of new things rather than trying to fix the old, – exciting I think.
There was plenty to talk about, and the unconference format really works well when it comes to networking and spreading ideas. There was everything from failed online ventures like Scoopt, new and exciting start-ups like the local news site SoGlos.com, established success stories like London-SE1 who have made hyper-local work in 10+ years. Newly launched Sweeble.com, the poor journalists printer and distributor was unveiled, Ok, it’s been running for a month, but still pretty new ;-).
James Hatts from London-SE1
The whole event was all about the future of journalism and how to make money in an industry that is changing on all fronts. Hyper-local was one of the main topics of the day, and especially how to make it work. As Marting Belam notes in a short interview with John Welsh, there is no reason why every publication has to cover everything.
“Does every publication need to cover horse racing coverage? the Racing Post does that. Or, are we going to end up with a situation were the Racing Post can concentrate on that audience and selling the advertising for that audience, and the rest of us can point to that?”
He also gave re-assurance that there will be news in the future, but the business model will change, thanks Martin.
Live-blogging JEEcamp
I was live blogging the day on behalf of the Online Journalism Blog and had some great discussions and panels to cover. I did a whole bunch of videos with Documentally about journalists use of facebook, why small-talk is important on twitter, the value of your online network and the next big thing.
Documentally showing off
James Hatts from London-SE1 talked about local news and we also had some great impromptu panel discussions. One chaired by Joanna Geary from the Times, and the other headed by Dave Harte from Digital Birmingham. The full transcript of the live bogging is also available and of course, every journalist, apart from one, live blogged their own experience, so search the web or head over to JEEcamp.com where everything is aggregated.
Kasper Sorensen is an online multimedia journalist with everything that encompasses. Hook up with him on 