Thursday 6 November 2008

I posted a message on Twitter today...



... because I thought this feature on one of our Flickr group members was so good it was worth sharing.
And then I got this message back...



And you know what? I was so wrapped up in the idea of the Post getting a story out of our Flickr group that it never occurred to me that all we were doing was telling the tale again.
It took Nick Booth (@podnosh) a second to read my tweet and see the flaw in it.

It gave me a bit of a pause actually. Because I like to think that I'm all up with the idea of sharing, engagement, communities, and newspapers. But really, all I did was spot a story on Flickr, suggest to a writer that he get in touch with the photographer; they collaborated, and then it got published in my paper.
I lifted it, if you like, in the same way we might spot the germ of a story in a national and expand on it. (Although the feature is Link City and there are hyperlinks on the web version to the Flickr page).

So I guess I didn't pay close enough attention to Here Comes Everybody after all. It's not nice to get something wrong, but I'm chalking this one down to a learning experience, and have posted a message on our Flickr group's board suggesting that if they have a story we could follow up they might want to let us know. Fingers crossed, we'll have some more stories like Hobgrumble's to share with our readers.

To twist the film's line "There are eight million stories in the internet. This has been one of them" ...

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