Radio interview with BBC Surrey about public transport and the localpeople.co.uk town survey

This week I was a guest on the BBC Surrey drivetime show talking about public transport and the results of the first annual localpeople.co.uk town survey.

The interview was a response to a letter from Surrey County Council to Transport Secretary Justine Greening calling for greater investment in the rail network here in the south east of England.

Our localpeople.co.uk town survey, carried out last month across our network of 165 hyperlocal websites, found that people in Surrey are feeling let down by public transport and frustrated by gridlock on their streets.

You can listen to the interview here.

Is Facebook Subscribe a social opportunity journalists are failing to grasp?

Facebook’s introduction of Subscribe in September last year and its resulting transformation into an asymmetrical social network has presented a new opportunity for connection – but is it an opportunity that is passing many journalists by?

Social media use has exploded among journalists in recent years. What only a few years ago was considered by many in the industry at best a fad, and at worst a time-wasting distraction, has now become a valued part of the reporter’s toolkit.

And the evidence around me – in newsrooms, in conversations with colleagues and online – suggests that Twitter has become the tool of choice for most. Where once Twitter was an unknown quantity, now it is almost surprising to discover a journalist isn’t using the micro-blogging service.

But is this really the best approach for us to be taking?

#farefail and the cost of rail travel in Britain: a snapshot of life for Folkestone commuters

The story of dramatic rail fare rises in Britain is one of the great annual journalistic staples, along with pretty girls jumping for joy at their exam results around August and the inevitable autumn warnings that a big freeze is on its way.

Today the MailOnline reports, screaming headline and all, that manual workers in Birmingham are paying more than a fifth of their wages on commuting. Pretty shocking to some I’m sure, but surely not the worst of it by any stretch. As I tweeted earlier:

That Mail headline is nothing, on #southeastern HS1 the missus must have been spending almost 1/3 of pay on commuting to London #farefail—
Rhys Griffiths (@rhysdgriffiths) January 03, 2012

This prompted me to do a little light digging. Was my hunch right, or are the working people of Birmingham really experiencing the nation’s worst #farefail?

A caption featured on Have I Got News For You? My life’s work is now complete

While catching up on Friday’s Have I Got News For You last night I was shocked but very pleasantly surprised when a tongue-in-cheek picture caption I wrote for a story about Hermann Goering was featured on the show.

Joanna Yeates murder trial: Why the judge was right to rule out Vincent Tabak’s porn habits

The decision of the judge in the Joanna Yeates murder trial to rule evidence of Vincent Tabak’s use of strangulation porn inadmissible has sparked intense debate in the aftermath of today’s guilty verdict.

A jury at Bristol Crown Court this afternoon ruled by a 10-2 majority that the Dutch engineer strangled the 25-year-old landscape architect at her flat in the city on the night of December 17 last year before dumping her body on a snowy roadside.

Within minutes of the decision being announced the details of Tabak’s pornography habits and use of escorts were circulating freely. Many online observers expressed shock and outrage that this evidence had been ruled inadmissible – but this was the right course for Mr Justice Field to take.

Television, Twitter and the irresistible rise of media stacking

As one of the millions of people in Britain who spend their working days staring at the artificial light of a flickering computer screen, I know as well as anyone how liberating it is to come home at the end of a long day and…. spend the evening staring at the artificial light of a flickering computer screen.

Welcome to the world of media multi-tasking, of tweets and TV, of soaps and surfing.

A study into the nation’s viewing habits has revealed that more than three quarters of us are clearly hopeless tech junkies, keeping one eye on our favourite shows while browsing the web, chatting away on social media and checking our smartphones for the latest update from the virtual world.

In praise of nibs

It’s hard, as a former local newspaper reporter, not to have rather conflicting emotions when it comes to the humble nib*.

Those whose job it has been to scrape together the damn things minutes from deadline as the subs cry out for more copy would happily never hear the dreaded word again, least of all from the mouth of a news ed desperate to get that last page away.

But deep down I’ve got a lot of love for the nib. Although often inconsequential, sometimes little more than a stream of parish notices racked up the side of the page for the sake of style and story count, these small items of news – rarely more than three sentences long – can sometimes contain the magical amongst the mundane.

Rebecca Leighton and the perils of an open (Face)book

A friend working in the murky world of Westminster politics once gave me some very sound advice: “Don’t send an email if you wouldn’t be happy seeing its contents printed in the Daily Mail.” Advice which applies equally to just about every form of electronic communication in the internet age, advice which urges you to think twice before you hit send or upload that passing thought or picture.

Advice which Rebecca Leighton, arrested in connection with a series of deaths at Stepping Hill Hospital in Greater Manchester, might now wish someone had given her before she found her life splashed across the pages of this morning’s newspapers.

My first reaction on reading the coverage of the 27-year-old nurse’s arrest was this: Who in their right mind leaves their social network profiles open to the public? Haven’t there been enough scare stories about privacy in the age of Facebook to make people at least think about what they are sharing online?

Googies and Chambers come out on top

Last Sunday I started a poll on my Facebook page asking people to vote for their favourite place to eat in Kent. It came about because the day before I’d been down to Folkestone harbour to take a look at Mark Sargeant’s new restaurant Rocksalt.

It is hoped this new venture, complimented by the soon-to-open fish and chip shop The Smokehouse, will help attract diners into the old town – the centre of Folkestone’s ongoing arts-led regeneration – but I wanted to know what other restaurants people are passionate about.

Asking questions on Facebook is such a simple thing to do, and I didn’t really expect I would get a massive response to this enquiry. Maybe a few friends would chip in, but that would probably be that. How wrong I was.

Twitter obsessive? Yes. Influential journalist? Maybe.

Today I found out journalism.co.uk has named me as one of the UK’s 100 most influential journalists online based on my score from PeerIndex.

It’s clearly a very selective measure of influence and ultimately means very little, but I’m pleased to have been included in the list because since I took my first steps into the world of social media and blogging I’ve come to see just how useful these tools can be, and why all journalists – regardless of the level at which they operate – should be excited about the possibilities for using social media and the web to interact with their audience.

Establishing an account on Twitter and a professional page on Facebook has allowed me to explore new ways of communicating with my audience. Sharing pictures, creating polls and posting links might not generate a wealth of stories – but it does help build relationships with readers in ways which were not possible before.