Hyperlocal news sites are increasingly making the running for stories that blow up to go Nationwide. It’s happened for years with local newspapers, but now it’s the Hyperlocal Websites that are setting the pace.
Our friends over at fellow hyperlocal site Eastleigh News (just over the water in Southampton) are a notable and recent example. They’ve had two scoops in the matter of a week.
Theresa May aping Nigel Farage
The first – identifying that Theresa May’s ‘cat’ Human Rights speech (you remember the one that led to the fallout between her and straight-talking Ken Clarke), was aping one, word for word, delivered by UKIP’s Nigel Farage.
This all came to light because Stephen Slominski at Eastleigh News attended and recorded a talk by Nigel Farage back on 20 July, 2011, where the ‘cat’ story first came to the public.
Having heard Theresa May’s version, Stephen dug back in his recordings and came up with gold.
Details, details
You’ll notice that Nigel Farage’s version is a little different – he said the person was was Peruvian (he wasn’t, he was Bolivian) and that he was a murderer (he wasn’t). The memorable “I’m not making this up” is there, as is the Cat line.
The BBC has done another version of the recordings that fade between the two just showing word-for-word how they mirror each other.
Chris Huhne’s Tweet – “I do not want my fingerprints on the story”
The second scoop was spotting Eastleigh MP Chris Huhne broadcasting the Tweet, “From someone else fine but I do not want my fingerprints on the story. C.”, instead of sending it as a private message.
This story spun out through Peter Henley’s BBC Blog to gaining attention from the National press.
Crediting sources
Refreshingly Peter Henley credited Eastleigh News both times. (You’d be amazed/shocked how many of VB‘s stories are taken by other media with zero reference to where they lifted them from.)
Final twist
The final twist in the tale is that both of these Eastleigh News stories are connected. It’s emerged that after much chasing by journalists, it turned out that Chris Huhne’s ‘fingerprint’ comments related to 27 minutes in to this Sunday’s Politics show, Chris Huhne himself said that he checked the Eastleigh News Website (There are four or five mentions!) and chatted to a Guardian columnist about it, leading to his unhidden ‘I don’t want my fingerprints on it’ Tweet.
Not a bad week for Eastleigh News, long may it last for them!
Footnote
Stephen Slominski tells VB that when he started Eastleigh News he “got an email out of the blue – from Huhne on House of Commons headed-paper with his best wishes for EN saying how good he thought it would be for Eastleigh to have its own news site and how he intended to read it to keep up with local news!” … bet Huhne didn’t ever think that Eastleigh News might cause him headaches on the scale of the last week.
