I AM aware that this page has been dormant for a fair old while without any update, for which I can only apologise.
It was never my intention to put the blog on hiatus but I suppose there are worse excuses than the fall-out from a global pandemic.
I had desperately wanted to continue keeping residents informed during Covid, when reliable sources of local information became more important than ever. Early on I chose instead to share the relevant articles from my full-time reporting role, since trying to produce similar but separate content for here would prove an immense challenge.
Also to be honest, from a purely selfish perspective, writing about the crisis day-in-day out gave me a limited tolerance for continuing that after hours as well and for my own sanity I needed stuff in my life which wasn't focused on coronavirus. So in the long evenings of lockdown I returned to my other loves of reading, growing courgettes and painting small metal models of goblins.
As we emerged from the worst in 2021, I also took the decision to embark on a career change - which brought the curtain down on a 15-year stint (part-time and full-time) in local journalism. This meant a tough decision on whether I should try and continue this blog.
I genuinely had loved running this site for the best part of six years and deciding to give it up was a tough call, but there were a few reasons I decided it was the right time to call it a day.
1. Time and money: Updating the site, checking emails, doing social media and other commitments took at least an hour an evening, which is obviously a sizeable commitment alongside other things. There are no doubt ways of cutting corners but not without reducing the quality of the journalism and quality journalism was for me the whole point. The project also came with a financial cost through paying for each page of the e-paper to be designed each month. Our wonderful sub-editor Justine, who was the other member of our two-person operation, is a mate and had offered to handle the pages for free. But I'd seen enough good journalists working for free to know that was never something I'd be prepared to endorse and so I ensured, from the outset, she was paid for the design work. Obviously meeting that cost when I had a salary to draw on was feasible. After returning to full-time education it's rather harder!
2. Facebook's algorithms: A real pleasure of nurturing this blog was seeing the audience for stories gradually grow over time. But a few years back I suddenly found that the readership of articles dropped dramatically after an extended period increasing, chiefly due to changes in the way Facebook promotes content. It's now much harder as an independent outlet to circulate articles on social media. No doubt I'd improve my reach by starting writing extensively about Piers Morgan's hated of vegan sausage rolls and those other hot topics beloved by social media types. But as a hyperlocal that always put the emphasis on local that was never really an option.
3. More scrutiny: When I started the blog almost a decade ago, coverage of North Solihull was particularly patchy. Rather disturbingly for an area of 50,000 or so residents not a single outlet was giving any meaningful attention to council meetings. At a time when parkland was under threat and services were collapsing under the weight of austerity this was deeply concerning. Fortunately the local situation has improved since then. For several years my day-job was with the Local Democracy Reporting Service, a BBC-funded scheme which has helped reverse the long-term decline in local government scrutiny. Solihull also has dedicated patch reporters who have been providing first-rate on the ground coverage of recent events, such as the tragedy at Babbs Mill. While regional reporting country-wide continues to face significant challenge, it's pleasing to know that coverage in our particular area has been expanded in recent times. As things stand there is no longer the gap there was when this site was established.
More generally I have no doubt that hyperlocal operations will continue to be an important part of what I will rather pretentiously call the media landscape. When I started there was still a sniffiness about so-called "citizen journalism". The term extended largely to community pages with an abundance of doorbell camera snaps of "suspicious characters".
These do, I'm afraid, still exist and if poorly moderated they can descend very quickly into breeding grounds for dangerous speculation and debates about migration in which few people mention migration but lots of posts say, very pointedly, "it's not like that now."
In recent years however more and more professional journalists and interested amateurs willing to put the work in have taken the leap to set up independent outlets. Many are run purely for public information, although a steadily increasing number actually manage to make money as well!
While Other Side of Solihull never succeeded in making the leap to a print edition as perhaps I'd once hoped - the thought of the admin and having to sell ads horrified me - I'm pleased the project was part of a new generation of news source which has steadily taken advantage of new technology. I'm aware there are a lot of "news" in that sentence, which helps explain why I paid for a sub!
For my part I loved covering a patch where I was born (like many of my friends I was a child of Marston Green Maternity Hospital) and where I went to school. I never believed this blog should gloss over the challenges this area has faced and continues to face, but I felt it was high time to break the cycle of every report about a Chelmsley Wood man continuing "has appeared in court..."
Unfortunately crime does almost as well on the algorithms as Morgan's vendetta against meat-free baked goods. But the blog has also tried to bring you stories about Bafta winners, community litter-picking squads and public art projects which represent the very best of this area.
It's not to say that running this site has been entirely plain sailing.
I was aghast during the darkest days of Covid when I shared some stats about Solihull's infection rate - then among the worst in the country. Within 12 hours I'd received an angry message from someone who was quick to point out they were a journalist. "This is poor reporting and scaremongering when people need facts," she told me. I was happy to send tables with figures for the area which confirmed what I was saying was 100 per cent accurate. The message proved to me, however, that there was an enduring contempt for some smaller outlets from some who couldn't imagine the person running them was
themselves fully-qualified and capable of fact-checking.
Conversely I'm still staggered that the Coleshill and Castle Brom Post - which delivers to thousands of local homes - thought it was acceptable a few years ago to print some of our stories verbatim and uncredited. Apparently they'd been "sent" the articles - by whom and for what purpose is uncertain - and hadn't thought to question their origin. To be fair they insisted they wouldn't have done it if they'd known they "was yours" [sic].
These incidents were, I'm happy to say, far outweighed by the pleasure I have taken from the good results I've been able to report on over the years. Meriden Adventure Playground, whose fight for survival was the basis of our first full-blooded campaign, mobilised the community after an end to council funding and is still playing a vital role locally. Michael Sheen's favourite chip shop, Chelmund's Fish and Chips, is still doing a roaring trade as the area's premium community takeaway. And after a gestation period which has lasted longer than the council meetings which charted its progress - and trust me, that really is saying something - work is finally underway on redeveloping Kingshurst Parade. True the area's bus services are still bloody awful, but you can't expect miracles.
All-in-all journalism looks totally different today than when I started back in 2007 (a now seemingly ancient era which was post-typewriter and pre-Twitter). I can't pretend I think all the changes that the digital revolution has brought with it are good. The loss of dedicated print titles in particular has hit many communities hard. And yet the need for the principles that underpin good local journalism - accuracy, even-handedness, empathy and accountability - remain as important right now as ever they have.
Whether it's reporting on election hustings, planning decisions or Kingshurst's dizzy duck race this site has tried to uphold them. Hopefully it mostly succeeded.
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