At the start of the weekend I dropped in at Radio Leeds, based in the BBC Leeds building just round the corner from Culture Vulture Towers.
Ask most of my friends, and they’ll probably tell you that I’m the kind of man who likes the sound of his own voice. It’s not actually true: I like what I say, but I’m not quite as keen when I hear my voice.
So listening to my stuttering, garbled, and thankfully brief appearance on Friday evening was not much fun. I went to chat to Johnny I’Anson about #ChallengeMark – and you can still hear it on iPlayer (from about 2hrs 48mins) until the end of the week.
When I turned up at BBC Leeds, watching the weather on the lunchtime local news as it was being streamed on one of the screens in reception, I thought of just how many people watch Look North or Calendar, or who glance at the Yorkshire Evening Post, and use these are their only means of finding out what’s going on around them.
Over at The Culture Vulture’s neat new Facebook page, we’ve been asking how you readers find out about what’s happening around Leeds and further afield. As well as the papers and the news shows, you’ve suggested magazines like The Leeds Guide, the Yorkshire Gig Guide, and of course Culture Vulture.
When I posed the question on Twitter, one respondent simply tweeted back to me saying “Twitter duh!” (with an obligatory smiley face at the end, just to show he didn’t mean to be that harsh).
Certainly most of what I’ve been getting up to over the last couple of weeks as part of #ChallengeMark has been driven heavily by Twitter: followers’ recommendations; invitations; conversations.
But the local Twitterati is a small and exclusive bunch, and even within it there are cliques and sub-sets, as its members readily confess.
Some of the events I’ve reported on have gone unnoticed by many until they’ve already happened: Huddersfield Food Festival and Leeds Pride for instance only got a mention on Look North, to my knowledge, when they’d already arrived. The regional newspapers and television are too preoccupied with bad news, and cyberspace too scattered and dispersed, for many normal unconnected people to find out some of the great work being done around their area.
And it is a problem for all of us. Early on in my travels, I visited an IPA Night at Mr Foley’s pub near Leeds Town Hall – something so many people would enjoy but who aren’t on Twitter or who don’t know the local wesbites, and so which passes them by, leaving them with nothing to do but go home as ever and sit in front of the box.
Meeting Twitterers and web-savvy small businesspeople day after day on my travels, I keep thinking back to my mum and dad at home or the stallholders in Kirkgate Market and shopkeepers in the more deprived parts of the city struggling to summon a decent trade. Not Twitter-users; not even computer-users. So much local life and opportunity is out of reach to them because of it, and thousands of others are left with a less active, simply less fulfilled existence too. All because the media (whatever that word means) fails them: it gives them the bad news, but none of the good that’s going on and that could reach them too.
Similarly, those people who are trying to do good cultural or community work and spread the word about local talent to a wider audience are faced with a London-centric national media. The move of parts of the BBC to Salford may galvanize a movement which changes opinions. But it will take more than that alone.
After recording my interview at the BBC, I headed straight off to London where I went to celebrate the birthday of a good friend. Ever since the hack writers pitched their tents on Grub Street, the capital has been home to a fruitful media culture. These days, copies of the free Evening Standard are in every commuter’s hand on the Circle Line at 6pm. The BBC and ITV have their own news shows specifically for the capital.
But not only that, every district – even every neighbourhood – has its magazines and freesheets, its listings pages and websites.
The journalism websites whose pages I scour almost daily for jobs, internships, even unpaid work (a habit I really ought to kick), are teeming with offers from start-up newspapers and websites from every corner of London: Made In Shoreditch magazine; The Kensington Magazine; Square Mile magazine.
We complain about the lack of air-time given by national press to the north, and only know which local magazines or websites are worth our time if we go out searching for them. Maybe we have to do more for ourselves: developing more and better media for local stories and events to reach a wider audience, and for that wider audience beyond the well-connected Twitterati to get more involved in the first place.
I’d be interested to hear what you think. Let’s start a discussion on Twitter @mw_obrien and @culturevultures and tell me your opinions here on the site too.