Thurrock for those of you who don't know is that bit the other side of the Dartford crossing, and possibly the future of local broadcast journalism.
As many of you will be familiar, I have written on more than one occasion about local media, particularly publicly funded broadcast media as propagated by Paul Carter and his Tory crew on Kent Council.
You'll no doubt be familiar, also that Kent councils television project will cost at least 1.4 million pounds but with an additional rumoured, top up from Kent's generous taxpayers of another 400,000 pounds, this will probably move closer to two million pounds.
Anyhow apologies for preamble but I was recently made aware of an broadcast enterprise created by Michael Casey, called yourthurrock.com which is a community based website that contains a mix of local news, sport, politics, entertainment, education and more.
Why you're wondering should this be of any interest, to those of us here in Kent, well it's quite simple really, this successful experiment in Internet broadcasting, has since the 1st of September 2008 produced five hundred films and achieved 80,000 hits per month.
Now a question which Michael Casey posed to me, when referring to Kent TV was this " Is there a Kent County Councilor who may want to ask the question as to why two men in Thurrock can create the same product that a fraction of the cost?
I'll say no more but suggest you have a good gander at YourThurrock.com and then compare with perhaps Kent TV.
In all honesty, I have no objection to local authorities dabbling in broadcast media, however clearly a sense of proportion is called for and this is certainly a model that any local authority ought to consider before handing over large sums of cash to big media companies.
Perhaps those who run the Kent Council, could see what's possible on a small budget, using YouTube rather kissing * away and millions.
I understand around the world that journalists are being culled, for want of a better phrase, almost on a daily basis, maybe what Michael Casey is doing is the future, it certainly looks impressive to me.
* I meant to use another word but have used the voice dictation and Microsoft can be so fussy.
The above comments represent my opinion, and are protected by article 10 of the European convention on human rights and should be considered "without prejudice".
As many of you will be familiar, I have written on more than one occasion about local media, particularly publicly funded broadcast media as propagated by Paul Carter and his Tory crew on Kent Council.
You'll no doubt be familiar, also that Kent councils television project will cost at least 1.4 million pounds but with an additional rumoured, top up from Kent's generous taxpayers of another 400,000 pounds, this will probably move closer to two million pounds.
Anyhow apologies for preamble but I was recently made aware of an broadcast enterprise created by Michael Casey, called yourthurrock.com which is a community based website that contains a mix of local news, sport, politics, entertainment, education and more.
Why you're wondering should this be of any interest, to those of us here in Kent, well it's quite simple really, this successful experiment in Internet broadcasting, has since the 1st of September 2008 produced five hundred films and achieved 80,000 hits per month.
Now a question which Michael Casey posed to me, when referring to Kent TV was this " Is there a Kent County Councilor who may want to ask the question as to why two men in Thurrock can create the same product that a fraction of the cost?
I'll say no more but suggest you have a good gander at YourThurrock.com and then compare with perhaps Kent TV.
In all honesty, I have no objection to local authorities dabbling in broadcast media, however clearly a sense of proportion is called for and this is certainly a model that any local authority ought to consider before handing over large sums of cash to big media companies.
Perhaps those who run the Kent Council, could see what's possible on a small budget, using YouTube rather kissing * away and millions.
I understand around the world that journalists are being culled, for want of a better phrase, almost on a daily basis, maybe what Michael Casey is doing is the future, it certainly looks impressive to me.
* I meant to use another word but have used the voice dictation and Microsoft can be so fussy.
The above comments represent my opinion, and are protected by article 10 of the European convention on human rights and should be considered "without prejudice".
I think you could be right Tony. I never did see the point of reinventing the wheel. Especially when the one you invent is square and bendy.
ReplyDeleteI see what your saying tony, to be fair though, yourthurrock content is pretty low quaility, not very well produced, and seems to have no guidance, the site seems ridiculously old as well, from the 80s or something. 80,000 hits is a big deal though! When did they get the figures from? Amazing seen as its free, suppose the difference between your thurrock and kenttv, is quaility of journalism and production. Yourthurrock seems more community shout out then county channel!
ReplyDelete80,000 hits isn't amazing, although on their site it now says they got 160,000 hits in March.
ReplyDeleteHits are very different from visitors as hits are just hits to the server which could be from images etc being loaded, where as vistors obviously gives a truer account. See here for a better explanation.
I can on my site claim to have had 165,311 hits on my site in March ( a true fact), but my unique visitors for the month were actually 5487 who contributed 9902 visits and viewed 45,732 pages.
I wish yourthurrock all the success though especially as it is not being publically funded and is doing as good a job.
Adem I believe I got 89542 hits on one of my websites in March see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/stats/ lies dammed lies and web stats.
ReplyDeleteMichael - that figure you gave was from April... in March you had 96481 hits!
ReplyDelete