TheYamYam RSS feed for the TheYamYam tag
found 11 stories.
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BrownhillsBob 28 Feb 11
Today is the last day of that wonderful Walsall institution, The YamYam. Yes, I’m afraid that the site that was instrumental and continual in support for The Brownhills Blog, is being mothballed.
Walsall will never see a better champion. Tomorrow, without the YamYam, we will all be the poorer…
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News and Views about Pheasey Park Farm 28 Feb 11
The Yam Yam got me into starting this blog. I was looking for news about Pheasey and came across it with it’s wonderful list of bloggers and news stories from Walsall.
Now at the end for today it ceases. It is a massive blow and for people of Pheasey where we get little news about Walsall. We have lost a valuable and much loved resource…
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Derek Bennett The EU-Sceptic 28 Feb 11
If you visit Walsall today and notice flags flying at half mast, it won’t be because the Queen has died or the local brewery has closed, but because one of the best local web-sites in the town is shutting up shop and calling it a day.
For quite some time now the Yam Yam web-site has been giving local news, linking to local blogs of all political persuasions…
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Stuart Williams Bloxidge Tallygraph 28 Feb 11
Today is the end of an era. Walsall’s first, and so far only, online news aggregator – TheYamYam.com – is closing its curtains, shutting its doors, giving up the ghost and turning a proverbial Norwegian Blue.
And while this may not perhaps seem a matter of such moment as when the near-150 year history of the dear old Walsall Observer was callously screwed up and thrown away like so much chip paper a couple of years ago, 28 February 2011 does have some of the feel of the dark day when that sad demise was announced.
When The Yam Yam’s website arrived on the scene, things looked up considerably for local news in Walsall. The Obbo was on its way out, the Express & Star was getting ready to flog off its expensive new Walsall offices and decamp to Wolverhampton and West Brom, and the Advertiser had never really been a Walsall paper in the first place…
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Bob Piper 28 Feb 11
So, it seems today may well be the last for the The YamYam. If it was just another blogger calling it a day it would be sad. But let’s face it, life’s like that.
People have a burst of enthusiasm, blog dementedly for a couple of years, then move on to twitter, facebook or… just get a life. It happens all the while. But, believe it or not, even when (self-proclaimed?) blogging ‘experts’ and ‘superstars’ like Iain Dale and Tom Harris exit stage left, people respectfully express their regrets and move on. The cemeteries are full of people who they or others thought were indispensable.
But The YamYam has meant something different to a small black country town like Walsall. We are talking of a place that has no newspaper worthy of the name. The nearest you could come to that description is the…
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Jayne Howarth Media 28 Feb 11
So, today sees the end of The YamYam. I – and the growing number of readers who have been drawn to this unique site – will miss it and can only hope that some financial help can be sought to bring it back online.
Where else can you find such a variety of business, news, sport and comment about Walsall online? The beauty of The YamYam is that it pulls news about the borough from a variety of sources – local newspapers, BBC and a growing lobby of local bloggers, who pull no punches when it comes to voicing their opinions about the town and how it is run…
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Andrew Hollyhead Two cultures, one mind 23 Feb 11
The Health Centre’s up and the Anchor pub’s down
Brownhills Brownhills, it’s a hell of a town!
Ahem..
Anyone who talks to me for more than a minute will know that I am Midlands born and bred. Friends from down south call me “the Brummie Git”, and when abroad natives have looked at me frustratingly and said “I know you’re from England, but which part?” unable to work out quite where.
I am West Bromwich born, went to school in Wednesbury, and lived in Tipton and Darlaston (and a caravan in Shropshire for six months), before settling for fifteen years in what was always optimistically called the ‘village’ of Featherstone – let’s be honest it’s a huge housing estate the likes of which we rarely see built nowadays…
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Mark Blackstock The YamYam 18 Feb 11
Following my announcement that the YamYam will cease producing daily editions at the end of this month I would like to thank you for all your comments both on this site, on Twitter, on Facebook and your private messages of support which have given me reasons to be cheerful.
My apologies for being absent on some discussions and not replying to all of you but as you may appreciate, this has been an awkward process for me.
Whilst I am genuinely grateful for your kinds comments I still feel thoroughly gutted having to make this difficult decision particularly as the YamYam has been growing steadily and become so popular. But as I said, my personal resources are depleted and it is no longer possible for me to carry on in this way.
The site will not disappear on the 1 March, but will be placed into a static holding pattern and the two year archive will remain accessible.
It is clear that there is a great deal of frustration around my decision from both locals and expats. Readers and bloggers have made some helpful suggestions on how to get around this impasse with ideas of a blogs-only site, or a weekly round-up or even of people collectively producing the site.
I am quite open to all suggestions on how to reinvent the YamYam in a more sustainable form and I will be in a better position to facilitate those discussions when I become unburdened from the daily tasks of production. I am also prepared to discuss formal structures such as setting up a trust if that helps people get involved. So I will attempt to address the feasibility of each of these suggestions in further posts and I will make as much information about how the site is produced publicly available so people can decide for themselves. Personally, I want the YamYam to survive in some form.
But first, I thought it would be useful to give a brief account of what I wanted to achieve with the YamYam over the past couple of years.
I started the YamYam out of frustration that there was nowhere to find comprehensive daily news on Walsall or comment in the mainstream press about what was going on in the borough, and there was less than a handful of fragmented local bloggers. Newspaper websites, dominated by Birmingham and Wolverhampton news, only provided partial coverage of Walsall events, and search engines returned dubious, random and repetitive results – and still do.
I was also concerned that local newspaper circulations were reducing, papers shrinking in size, local editions and even titles disappearing. Indeed during the past two years we have seen the Walsall Observer close (the town’s oldest newspaper) and the main business paper for the region, the Birmingham Post, go from daily to weekly production and the Express & Star close it’s Walsall office.
With the decline of newspapers we have seen the growth of the PR industry with most organisations now churning out their own spun ‘good news’ stories onto the internet. Newspapers, with depleted staff, simply regurgitate many of these ‘news’ reports unquestioningly.
The general wisdom was that ‘citizen journalists’ and ‘hyper locals’ were going to fill the news and analysis vacuum left by newsprint, but there was little evidence of this in Walsall, or anywhere else really. Even today, for example, I don’t see independent citizen journalists/bloggers covering court proceedings or attending council meetings, in fact you would be lucky to spot a journalist from a mainstream newspaper in these places either. Instead we rely on the spin machines, or, the story goes unreported.
I believe that a free and independent press which dispassionately informs people of events, provides context and analysis and a range of different viewpoints, is central to a healthy local democracy. How else can we hold our public and corporate institutions to account?
So I set about gathering and aggregating small extracts of content already published on other websites, organizing it into subjects, distinguishing between fact, PR fiction and opinion, ranking stories, adding value with archive and resource links (setting stories in context), with the aim of providing a simple, easy to scan and navigate news site which credited authorship and directed readers to the source websites where stories could be read in their entirety.
The aim was to position the YamYam not as a competitor, but as a partner, a marketeer of mainstream news sites and most importantly drive traffic to voices ranting into the ether, the independent blogs which couldn’t easily be found in search engines, bring them into the mainstream debate and network them together. If good news PR stories were going to be published then it would be the bloggers who would deconstruct them and expose the underlying truths.
I also intended to a create a website which didn’t relentlessly try to retain its users for as long as possible on site but embrace the whimsical nature of social media and encourage reader promiscuity – confident that if readers like what they see they will return for more and that sourced websites will reciprocate with links back to the YamYam.
Most importantly, I wanted to demonstrate that aggregation can be dynamic, engaging and retain a critical edge, be respectful of copyright and maintain journalistic integrity – to show that aggregation can dispassionately provide reliable information as well as a range of opinion across the political spectrum to a large community increasingly being deprived of relevant and local news.
There have certainly been many more editorial and technical features I would liked to have introduced to the site, such as more self generated content – but only enough to fill the gaps missed by others, or to cover stories which never found their way from print to online – more sections on specific subjects reflecting the town’s diverse cultures, more arts coverage, showcasing more work by local photographers, more junior football and minority sports, a what’s on guide, a business guide, discussion forums, a more engaged role with other social media rather than the ‘broadcasting’ approach adopted, more video and so on. But I have had to limit the site to what was achievable and repeatable on a daily basis given limited resources.
The YamYam has grown at a steady pace, despite no marketing budget. There has been a regular core readership of between 5,000 and 7,000 unique readers generating 80,000 to 90,000 page impressions per month – about four times busier than our weekly newspaper’s website, although I estimate it is about seven to eight times smaller than our main daily newspaper’s online Walsall traffic.
Some 720 days and 11,500 published stories later, Walsall now has a thriving community of bloggers, with some 40 odd websites of their own and many more microbloggers on Twitter and Facebook all joining in a collective conversation. On several occasions that community has come together to influence the outcome of events.
The problem with a one-man-band is that I have been tied to an intensive and mainly manual editorial production system (which I will talk about in a later post) and I have not been able to develop more automation or get out and network, recruit volunteers, bring in enough advertising, develop commercial services and seek sponsorship for the YamYam. In that respect I have failed but the website itself has been a success and if the underlying production issues can be addressed, it could continue.
There is no magic bullet to making money through a news site – otherwise we would all know about it. Few corporate and independent news providers have managed to achieve commercial viability with news websites – with associated costs often being attributed to marketing, an exercise to extend the core product’s brand reach. And of course many print newspapers are unprofitable too and instead survive via separate commercial ventures.
Commercial viability, if it is to come, will be through developing multiple revenue streams, offering a wide mix of commercial services, merchandising, events, games, classified and display advertising and so on, which through increasing audience volume will start to gain a momentum.
However, I am fairly certain that within a year there will not be one national quality newspaper that has not adopted some form of subscription paywall on its website, and as usual, the regional and local press will try to follow some considerable time later.
Ultimately, I do believe that a local site based on aggregation, which pays its workers, and addresses the needs of very specific geographical niche markets, should, in time, be able to at least become self-sustaining, perhaps even turn a modest profit. The YamYam model which focuses on providing a small core production infrastructure which feeds off other independent citizen journalists and bloggers, which in turn feeds material back into the mainstream press, is still a lot leaner than a traditional website with larger overheads.
However, the timescales for developing a sustainable infrastructure, building a large audience, securing commercial features and reaping the benefits are much longer than the usual three-year business plan required by a banker.
The immediate answer would be for the YamYam to find like-minded business investors that share the readership’s vision and passion for Walsall, see the project for what it is and not primarily a money making exercise, and invest in it to the point where it can be self sustaining.
After all, the YamYam has not only provided a news service for people living in Walsall but I would like to think that, in its own way, the website has promoted Walsall, its people, business and sport out across the region too.
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Mark Blackstock The YamYam 16 Feb 11
The last edition of the YamYam will be published on 28 February 2011.
I have been producing the YamYam on a daily basis for the past two years and have reached a point where it is no longer possible for one person to continue working full-time delivering a free service which generates little income.
I would like to thank you, the readers, for your terrific support, the professional journalists whose content has been aggregated, the advertisers who have covered my server costs and of course, Walsall’s bloggers, most of whom I have never (knowingly) met but many of whom have become good virtual friends.
I do believe that Walsall now has a very distinctive and increasingly powerful blogging voice in the region and that the local online community will continue to grow but now, sadly, without the YamYam. I wish you all well.
Up the Saddlers!
Media comment
Jonathan Walker's blog 10 August 09
The YamYam’s publisher replies to accusations from the Political Editor of the Birmingham Post and Mail, that the YamYam’s scanning of content from other websites is theft…