Norgdom

If you are on Twitter you can now subscribe to our feeds by following SydneyNorg, MelbourneNorg, BrisbaneNorg or PerthNorg.

For those who are new to the Norg, the guy in the Twitter feed pic was on a house ad we had on the site for ages and now he’s been immortalised as the face of our Twitter feeds. I call him Norgman

As you all would have noticed - and for the few who may not have - PerthNorg is not a lonely Norg anymore and has grown to include Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane as well as our special Election07 Norg.

All Cit Js have access to all the sites, so we are a connected community. Norg.com.au now hosts the feeds from all sites.

We’re working on a cross posting function that means you can push a story out to all sites if it’s not just a story with local interest. Let me know how you want this all to work, as our motto here is “what the community wants”.

We have a lot of work to do, but I trust that our other communities will come to love and contribute to the Norg as we have here in Perth.
Thanks to Myles for all his great work.

Go forth and norg it

Cit J Matt Didicoe has created a nifty little plugin that shows the top stories from the norg to be displayed on your blog. He’s created it so it can be customised to pull news in from any of our sites, as we’ll be moving into other cities soon.

It looks like this:

I asked Matt to send me some info on on the plugin - so here it is direct from him:

About

The Norg Media plugin offers the ability to select how many items you want to show and which city to take a feed from. This last part is somewhat pointless at the moment as there is only PerthNorg, but I’m hoping that eventually the Norg will spread to other cities.

Getting

Download the file here: http://sandbox.didcoe.id.au/norg.zip

Installing

After downloading, unzip the file and upload to the /wp-content/plugins directory
In the plugins menu of your WordPress install, active the Norg Media plugin
Go to the options tab and look for the sub-tab of ‘Setup your norg feed’
Change the number of items you want to show
In your template file, where you want to display it, add . This will produce a header with the appropriate city information and the list of the latest articles (you can see it working at http://didcoe.id.au in the sidebar on the right)
Support

If you need a hand getting it working, head over to here and post a comment.

Top stuff Matt.

This caught my eye on the weekend in The West Australian and if it’s true it is totally outrageous.

Under the headline “Fairfax hires Labor lobbyists” it read (the story does not appear to be online):

“Eastern States media group Fairfax has hired Labor strategists Hawker Britton to help in its negotiations with the State Government as part of its plans to set up a news website in Perth.

The West Australian also understands Hawker Britton has employed former premier Geoff Gallop’s chief-of-staff Sean Walsh, who ran Dr Gallop’s office for five years.

Hawker Britton’s Perth office is run by John Whitelaw, the former chief-of-staff to Police Minister John Kobelke. Former Labor MP Megan Anwyl was a director of the lobby group before leaving the position last week.

Mr Walsh could not be contacted yesterday, while Mr Whitelaw did not respond to requests for comment and Mr Anwyl refused to comment.

The West Australian revealed yesterday that the WA Government and its senior public servants were meeting senior Fairfax executives to discuss plans for their online service.

Paul Giles, acting manager of strategic communication in the Government Media Office, said in a letter to the public servants that the meeting was a chance to “discuss news format, editorial stance and media mix along with advertising opportunities, promotional activity and any other matters of interest.”

There have been rumours of Fairfax coming to Perth for some time, I blogged about it in March. So the move into the West Australian market is not so surprising, but what are they talking to the Government about? Since when do news corporations talk to the government about editorial stance?

There is no need for Fairfax to talk to the Government about launching an online news service for any legal reasons - online news remains out of the scope of media ownership laws.

The West Australian has a somewhat strained relationship with the current Labor Government - Health Minister Jim McGinty called for editor Paul Armstrong to be sacked over a health story that eventually made its way to the Press Council and which The West subsequently lost. So the doors are open for another news organisation to court favour with the Government - after all they are one of the biggest spenders of advertising dollars.

I don’t think replacing one media bias with another is a positive thing. And mainstream media wonders why we are so cynical? They make it too easy.

We have gone back to the drawing board with our classified site. But we need your help.
Good news is it’s fun and doesn’t take much time.
So if you can help out, head on over here . The exercise will help us better understand how you sort information.
Thanks all

R/WW has a post up called “Online Citizen Journalism Now Undeniably Mainstream” which says that:

It’s interesting to see how the techniques and technologies of amateur, citizen journalists are adopted, co-opted, and integrated by the mainstream media.

The post is a reponse to Nokia announcing a partnership with Reuters to provide a “mobile journalism kit” for their reporters. They have taken a standard N95 and added a bluetooth keyboard, basic tripod to help in video interviews and a Sony microphone for directional audio recording and reducing background noise in interviews - this required a special adaptor plug that was made by Nokia for the project.

As some of you may be aware we have had a similar arrangement with Nokia for some time, when it gave us some Nokia N93s to give to a few of our Cit Js to enable mobile reporting. The phones have been fantastic for this, but in Australia the limitations are often technical and nothing to do with a phone’s ability to record quality video, because of our slow and costly mobile data transfer. At the end of the day, I still think raw and unpolished images have a place - they seem more real and exciting to me.

Myles and I have talked a lot about making the Norg easier to use from mobile so that Cit Js can send stories in to us in the easiest way possible.
But the technology is just one part of the equation. The more important part is ‘us’ .

The thought of giving all of us the immediate ability to report and share on the world around us is really fascinating. In the year since I launched PerthNorg, a lot has happened to open people’s eyes to these possibilities. The latest and probably most widely reported example has been the fires in California. As R/WW points out:

In order to report on the fires ravaging that part of the United States, many news outlets have solicited, and subsequently used, submissions from people capturing news with cell phone cameras and on blogs (and Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.).

Twitter, has also brought another immediate and responsive element to news. I remember a few months ago when I noticed reports of an earthquake in San Francisco coming through as it happened from my Twitter friends. You can’t get any more real than that.

The challenge for all of us the is to take part and join the conversation and not to underestimate what we have to contribute.

The Nokia and Reuters deal sounds great and I’m glad they recognise the possibilities that mobiles have brought to news, but at the end of the day I think we can do it better. There’s no guarantee that when news happens that those reporters will be there. A community of Cit Js will always be stronger. We don’t have a new role in the media - we are the media. Let’s step up to that

Election07 Norg s a place for you to have a say on the upcoming Australian elections. We wanted to offer something a bit different to other elections sites out there. So this is a place or you to have your say.

No doubt, we’ll be hearing where our politicians stand on everything in the upcoming weeks, but what do we think? Election 07 is a place for you to be the eyes and ears of the Australian election and have some hearty debate along the way.

All Cit Js do not need to register as there is cross login across the norgs.

But help us spread the word and happy norging.

PS. I was almost tempted to declare PerthNorg an election free zone, as there are some out there who have requested a news site without election news. But will leave that up to you.

Read you round the Norg.

Congratulations to Cameron Reilly, CEO of  The Podcast Network, on the news that John Cleese (that John Cleese) will be hosting his podcast with them.

John Cleese is to release Headcast, a series of online videos, which he describes as “some humorous, some more thoughtful, giving me a chance to sound off in my old age.”

A free version will be made on The Podcast Network, which John says is “rather good, run by Australians, and none the worse for that.”
The Podcast Network is an Australian privately owned media company with over 80 audio and video podcasts in production and a monthly international audience of over half a million people.

Congrats to Cameron.

Let us know if you don’t receive a sign up email. Make sure you check your spam box because sometimes the emails land up there.

And continue to let us know about any problems.

We are aware that emails are not being sent out to users who are registering or trying to retrieve their password. We are working on it and should have it working shortly.

If you would like us to alert you when we have it fixed, email us at admin@norg.com.au and we will contact you as soon as it is fixed.

Sorry, about this folks ….