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How Flooding Reversed The Flow Of News


You might have seen in the media, it's been a bit soggy in Berkshire over the past couple of weeks. They say necessity is the mother of invention and because of the flooding we bought forward the launch of our new news page by a few months.

The page is still a bit rough round the edges in its design, doesn't yet do all it will, but we took the same line as the Government Digital Service, and release something that's certainly a Minimum Viable Product.

It'll eventually show a summary of latest blogs, events listings and most recent consultations, but for now it just provides the additional functionality of a feed of news.

What's so special about that? Don't most council sites have a list of press releases?

As well as our news content, including the service status of over 100 schools, libraries, car parks, children's centres and more (something we introduced during the snow of 2010) it gives us the ability to import tweets into the news feed.

The LocalGov Digital Content Standards ask "Is the content original?" and being able to import tweets from other organisations means we don't have to repeat their messages; we just republish them and link to their content.

Take a look at the feed and you'll see messages from partners like Thames Valley Police, the Environment Agency and Public Health England, but you might notice something else.

Right at the top is a tweet from the council.

Many organisations publish news on their site and then tweet about it, or use something like Twitterfeed to automatically tweet it.

Our news feed gives us the ability to reverse this so that we tweet stuff, then import it into our site. Effectively we've reversed the flow of news, instead of flowing from our site to Twitter, and it's running from Twitter to our site.

The import isn't automated. The page editor can pick and choose which tweets from whom they decide to include. This means that something that shouldn't be on the site is far less likely to appear, although it's not impossible for this to happen occur due to human error.

Of course we'll still need to publish some news content on our site first, but for quick 140 character updates we'll be able to put them on Twitter then add them to our site.

In content strategy terms, this isn't anything new. I've often read that content should be published not all in one place, but in the best place for the each specific type of content and this also fits in with what I wrote in 2012 about Twitter just being a big database of content.

So that's how the floods helped us reverse the flow of news.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else in local government and beyond has take this approach. We've only been doing it week, so I'm keen to hear the experience of anyone who's been doing it longer.

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