Green & Local 4: global stories, green pounds
Just some links this morning on different ‘green and local’ issues in the press (and to celebrate UN World Population Day).
The Knight Science Tracker does a crawl of environmental reporting, and reporting on environment each day, and last night picked up on this serendipity of similar reporting across continents:
- In the Times of India, the story was about hurricanes getting worse.
- In the Ottawa Citizen, it was about storms getting weaker.
- In the Tewksbury Advocate (Tewksbury, Massachusetts), a rise in huge storms (from an unattributed activist on the street)
A good example of how a story can be relevant anywhere in the world (and treated differently, locally).
A quick look in at the regional news in the UK via EU Feeds doesn’t show any similar stories, although a nice bit of reporting from the Belfast Telegraph, the ‘European Monsoon’.
The closest we get to a top 10 story about the environment is the Reading Evening Post’s “Town Bins £27m in Food Each Year”.
So. That got me thinking about an article re: classified advertising that I’d just read. One of the problems with classifieds is that their placement is terrible. That’s why display ads fight so hard for good placement–get the ad next to the story that’s relevant, etc… Google Ads and other targeted campaigns are very simple premises that are tried and tested.
But classifieds get bundled together at the back of the paper (when in print) nowhere near the relevant story. For example, argues Bill Ostendorf, do something about that, move the ads to where the story is relevant, and classified ads will start pulling their weight again, particularly online. So, a simple equation:
- the ‘green pound’ is growing in spending strength: more people are buying/going green
- more companies are selling green products (check out www.ecoseek.net)
- online and in print, technology means classifieds can sit next to relevant editorial
- green editorial = green pounds
Knowing, however, that online advertising brought BBC.com only £3m $3m (£1.5m) (measly, says Alfred Hermida: have to agree in the scale of things), it’s not going to save regional journalism, but small measures added up… I’d like to see some research done into the green pound and its local effect on specific regional communities, to see what benefits it can bring for regional press, either in print, or much more likely digital. There was a flurry of talk of the green pound back at the end of 2006, but not much since… If you know of any let me know?
