Leicester……we have a solution!!

It was a great day in Manchester on Monday. I travelled to the AND Festival (Abandon Normal Devices) taking place in the superb Cornerhouse. If you’ve ever visited the place you’ll know how interesting it is and would be great to be able to replicate some of their basic services in our own Phoenix Square.

It was a packed day with lots of interesting people from across the world talking about their personal Olympic experiences and the work they undertake. This link takes you to all the day’s background information and also the speakers.

It is clear to see that the Olympic movement has become an industry in its own right creating opportunities for people from many sectors including research. This was the first time that I fully appreciated the extent of the work that goes into staging each Games every 2 years.

The statistics around the number of journalists who take part in each the Games is simply mind boggling – 13,000 broadcast & 7,000 print journalists. It is quite simply the largest media event in the world. Does citizen’s journalism offer the opportunity to make London 2012 a media festival?

The role of citizens journalists was discussed at length and the general feeling was that this is the first games to be dominated by citizen journalism and a great deal could be learnt from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics experience. These games have been called the Twitter Olympics due to the prolific use of social media tools and saw the emergence of a new kind of reporting that was powered by ordinary citizens. In turn community pioneers developed new support facilities for citizen journalists and this led to remarkable initiatives like the True North Media House and the W2 Media and Culture House.

I’ll try to bring many of these lessons to bear for the Phoenix based Community Media Hub during both games of London 2012 and intend to discuss them in more detail over the coming week’s in my Soar Community blog.

It was a real humbling experience to be asked to present on Citizens Eye and its quite unique relationship with the Leicester Mercury. Also the broad proposal for recruiting 2,012 people to become Community Reporters across Leicester & Leicestershire was outlined and the fact that ward reporting was a positive by product made many interested in the project.  The feedback was very positive from all involved. I hope to see many of these new ‘Olympic’ friends visit Leicester over the next 12 months as they seek to find ways of attracting and organising their community reporters from Manchester to Bristol and Liverpool to Glasgow.

I think I’ve stumbled on something here. Whereas many will be looking to create a network of citizen journalists to report during the Games we already have a group of people in place, that’s expanding daily and reporting on Citizens Eye and on the pages of the Leicester Mercury.

It’s going to be an interesting 2 years that’s for sure.

Powerpoint Presentation - "2,012 Community Reporters By 2012"