“We’ve put pictures of Brad Pitt at the recycling space to see if that helps,” says Kitty.

Natmags were London’s 100th company to join the Green500, an initiative started by then-Mayor Ken Livingstone to encourage 500 companies to cut 1.5m tonnes of carbon emissions from their businesses in time for the 2012 Olympics. Kitty, who is also Country Living’s Eco Editor and writes their green page, explains why they took part.

“To become a part of the Green500 is a rigorous process,” explains Kitty, “with detailed evidence of reduced environmental impact. But it’s worth it, and we really hope to win, as it’s something we can use to show that, even in a recession, it’s worth investing in green initiatives.”

Along with Diane Thorpe, Natmags’ Facilities Director, Kitty drives forward the company’s environmental practice. She got things going with recycling in 2003, and there are now 40 environment champions in the company who meet every quarter with the Chief Executive and Finance Director to suggest new plans. “We try to have someone on every floor and in every department,” explains Kitty, “so they can keep an eye on things, and encourage people to keep going with their commitment. The committee works well, because as we’re meeting with the Chief Executive then ideas from the staff can feed through quickly.”

The fact that the ideas come from the staff and not the management is critical to Natmags’ green credentials. “What we’ve certainly seen is that the plans work if they’re bottom up, so we encourage that. We have a monthly competition where anyone can suggest an initiative, and if it’s workable, they get £50.” So far ideas include a Country Living meadow on the roof, time out from the air conditioning, and a wormery—although there was no waiting around to see if the directors agreed with a living compost site in the building.

“Initially we did that without permission,” says Kitty. “In Country Living we did a ‘Wiggly Wrigglers’ feature on wormeries, and decided to put one on the roof without asking as we never would have been allowed if we had asked. It was only when people started noticing others running up to the roof with bucketfuls of scrap food that we confessed.”

Those buckets are leftovers from the Good Housekeeping recipe testing, an example of how environmental practices extend to editorial. In May, Natmags ran a soft launch of their 30 Days of Green Living, where Country Living and five other magazines developed a coordinated editorial programme to encourage readers to take steps towards low-carbon lifestyles. It was a success which they hope to repeat next year. Kitty agrees that green practices in the workplace have definitely had an effect on what the magazines produce.

“I think across the publisher you’d be hard pushed to find a magazine that doesn’t have a green correspondent,” she says, “and that’s a great thing, that it’s gone mainstream and isn’t just left to niche magazines. I think it’s because of climate change—you can’t help but read about it. We believe that individual people can really make a difference. And as a publishing house talking to millions of people, we can have a major impact.”

Kitty believes that green messages wrapped in a glossy feel-good magazine make them all the more powerful. “People don’t want to be lectured,” she says, “they get enough of that. What’s important, for my readers at least, is that they see that a lovely home can also be a well insulated home—that they can have the home they want and be green, and that green doesn’t mean minimal. Our reader panels tell us that, although it’s not the main reason they buy the magazine, they like the green awareness—as long as it’s done with that light touch and remains enjoyable.”

Breakfast seminars from the likes of Futerra’s Ed Gillespie on the subject of Greenwash also help editorial staff develop better environmental practice. “Now our editorial teams know what to ask when PRs call pushing ‘green’ products for us to cover,” she explains, “is that wrapper biodegradable, for example.” (Natmags’ polybags are made from 100% biodegradable material.)

Whatever the colour of the prize tonight, bronze or platinum, Kitty and Natmags will continue to make the publishing company as one of the greenest in the UK. “It’s Country Living’s 25th anniversary next year, and we’re going to take on 25 projects for a ‘good home’ – and while they might not all be directly about environmental issues, they will all be good things people can do that will reduce their footprint. For the company, our next project is rainwater harvesting, to flush all the toilets in our two buildings. This needs investment, of course—rainwater harvesting costs £12,000—but it pays for itself in just three years. And then some of the other magazines are getting their own ‘roofs’ – there’s going to be a coastal balcony for Coast, and maybe even one for Zest, our healthy living title

Natmags, which publishes Harpers, Country Life and Esquire among others, came 2nd overall, and top for medium and large companies. It is up from 10th in 2008. The Times’s survey commended the company for “offering London’s birdlife a retreat from the city with its Soho roof garden, which is home to compost-producing wormeries, too.” Natmags is also ISO 14001 certified, and spent £108,000 on green initiatives last year, including a monthly staff competition (£200) for ideas. You can read the Natmags green report.

So what makes a company green? According to the results, these are some of the highlights:

• The boss matters: “You can have all sorts of formal management processes in place but often it is an inspirational boss or leader who makes all the difference in terms of engaging staff and taking them along with him or her.” (Sarah Davidson, technical director at environmental consultancy Bureau Veritas)
• Communication matters: Toby Robins, operations and environment director at office equipment company Wiles Greenworld, ranked sixth overall for My Boss results: “Everyone who understands the issues will be green. It’s a matter of education.”
• Detail matters: “It is difficult to motivate anyone to do anything that you’re not willing to do yourself,” says Zoe Robinson, sustainable development manager at Warren Evans (I can vouch for their beds). “We have an individual green policy for each area of the business, from delivery to the showroom.”
• Integrity matters: “If there isn’t integrity — if you’re expecting people to do things you wouldn’t do — it’s just a marketing gimmick.”

Natmags was the only publisher to get into the top 50.

I’d certainly like to know how these organisational environmental benefits work their way into the outputs of the different businesses. For Warren Evans, for example, the furniture manufacturer, that’s a little easier to see – the choice of wood, the choice of fuel to run their delivery vans. Warren Evans have also won Observer awards for their ethical retail. But what about publishers – the choice of paper, the mindsets of the editors, the distribution channels and the content of their magazines (not to mention the advertising messages from their advertisers).

It’s a question I’ll be putting to Natmags in the next week, I hope.

The Mail, of course, rather than focus on the environmental elements of the story, prefers to discuss a) the Princes’ outfit, b) the Princes’ back problem, and c) the Princes’ battered knuckles.

So, I thought I’d head over to the environment section to check out the related feature (but there isn’t a specific environment section for this campaigning paper of the year). The only recent story on issue of climate, for example, is rather ambivalent about the impending crises: Britain’s warming climate is attracting moths from France.

It isn’t a surprise from the Mail of course to miss the environmental story. Between Jan 2004 and July 2008 the paper ran five stories (yes, five) about the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC, the only international agreements on tackling climate change (Media and Climate Change, ch.15, Peter Lang: Oxford, forthcoming). Mind you, the Times is just as bad: apparently, the tie and concrete on the trousers is the most important element of the story

For those interested, the eco-home in Watford is the Natural House, an alternative approach to sustainable home building. There is a little more detail about the house in the Telegraph, but nothing in the Guardian yet. Maybe the tie was the killer. And there’s also:

• An overview from AZOcleantech
• Press release from the BRE with enough facts to check for a story
• Advanced analysis from Inside Housing, the trade magazine

The first return didn’t show results, but did lead to links that found more than enough, in a very useful, user-friendly way. However, I’m unhappy with the equation of distance (137 miles) with ‘flight time’ (15 minutes) between Derby and Sunderland… This seems a small point, and an ‘automatic’ search term response, but is indicative of much invisible thinking in how products and services don’t embed environmental responsibility into their activity and the choices offered to individuals. (Response based on the emissions damage caused by aviation.)

As someone who has chosen not to fly, or as little as possible, as one response to growing ecological crises, then I will now at least be aware of the need to participate in rethinking what Paul Bradshaw calls a potential ‘game-changing’ technology as the semantic web becomes real. I’ve now written to them to ask for ways to contribute to their rewiring of their service so as to put green ideas first.

UPDATE: 7.45am Wolfram’s founder explaining the semantic web on Radio 4’s Today Programme. The technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones asks John Humphries for a question to test, and he suggests: “Which population is shrinking faster, haddock in the north sea or populations of sparrows?” Nice John, good environmental question! C-J’s response: “Well, that one’s not going to work…”

UPDATE: 7.48am Wolfram search engine fails to respond to which population is shrinking faster.

Thinking Digital is taking place in Newcastle, organised by Codeworks (twitter search at #TDC, Twitters from Alastair Smith and ConferenceBore). The first session, the Social Media Masterclass, is chaired by Stowe Boyd, who sets up the meeting on his blog, calling for a reclamation of a New Spatialism – “to rethink web media and reclaim the social space that is supposed to be central to so-called social media.” And what he wants to talk about are the failings with ’social media’, a term which he rejects.

Failings with ‘Social Media’

“Each time we do something to connect, those outside of what we’re doing consider as some breaking of a covenant,” says Stowe. “Particularly those who don’t use flow apps.” And the problem is:

• Web is not as social as we think
• Blogging limited to a small proportion of the population as it’s just too hard; not the greatest format for socializing
• Comment migration – blogging comments gone down as other flow apps rise

“We need to take a new pass at long form journalism. Just as we have seen the New Urbanism movement in architecture, to look at the space in social settings to think about people first, where teenage girl walking a dog can feel as comfortable as a garbage truck; we need the same rethinking of socia media. And to get there, we need to rethink web media. The goal is ’social’ media, but what we have right now is web media.”

“It’s going to take new types of entrepreneurs, working with new kinds of tools, and new principles for how we’re going to collaborate in this open space.”

Some questions and confluence with JP

Stowe: “How can short form flow apps (e.g. Twitter) interact more productively with long form journalism (properly written blogs)?” Stowe Boyd suggests looking at tools like Bittily, so blogs are prepped to interact.

JP: Long and short form are merging. AudioScribbler as the example. But then someone comes along and produces Twittitude, and puts the two together: surface and deeper level information together, but importantly it is ‘gift-marketed’ to the receiver so they are not blasted with noise.

Stowe: “So where is this going? What shape is it going to be?”

JP: Example from food — brought up to be able to invite as many people as wanted to dinner. Expandability of the food was there: a little more rice, more water. In England, stern lessons – “when we’re having lamb chops and counted potatoes…” Food here built around a scarcity culture. Culture, the way we do things, impacts our ability to share… So we have built constraints that we have to undo.

Stowe: Paths are not only places where we need to walk, but paths need to be free of garbage trucks.

Ideas from Alex, head of online at Virgin

A: Beginning of social media is talking, trying new things. Coming up, the Virgin Eye, sources 5,000 news sources for Virgin and presents them visually, working with DiggLabs etc on how to visualise. Then looked at breaking into social media space. Richard (Branson) now has a blog (that he also writes, videos).

A: People want to share moments in time, regardless if they’ve never met. So what can we do with social media to make this sharing happen? Information, e.g. restaurant review in Tokyo, if it’s useful for another person then the provider is given currency, whic increases their social site status.

Stowe: Questions of social acceptabiity and rules of interaction are still central to the issue of how social media will develop.

The Terrified Twitchhiker: the infrastructure of Twitter, activism, bullhorn

Local boy, started in radio in Darlington when he was 19, copywriter, producer, BBC7, and then took a 30-day twitchhike around Europe after going freelance.

Stowe: Gets interesting here: conversation about journalism and how more people will end up with portfolio careers as more are finding the long careers of journalism are no longer there.

Twitchhiker: Inspiration for the Twitchhike came hungover on a Saturday morning in the Gateshead Tesco. Twitter is hugely important to my life. It’s not a social network, that’s an injustice. It’s a geographical, support and leads network–particularly for freelance writers/journalists.

Stowe: We are going to see more of this, but can we harness this to do something larger?

Twitchhiker:It’s where Twitter goes next – a user-defined infrastructure. The entire LA porn scene is all on Twitter: colonies and cultures all existing. But what are they doing?

Stowe: Million worlds inside Twitter… jewellery buyers and sellers, QVC on Twitter. Dozens of these crypto-cultures. Something fascinating here-social activism, how people will spontaneously use Twitter, especially when events, traumas, come along… it’s likely to fall to us to respond.

Twitchhiker: Problem with that as well. Using Twitter like this is a bullhorn, can go like wildfire, and the problem was that in 24hours no-one did the research to check if it was true or not. (Yes, but only 24 hours).

“The Euphoria around blogging has gone -as has the value of writing”

FakeSJ: Euphoria around blogging has gone. Got out at right time. Got a job at Newsweek, who were making it a part of their website. And now doing long-form journalism, long pieces, and it’s nice to do it rather than keep a blog going with 20 posts a day, keeping the audience up. Twitter: mostly useless crap.

Stowe: But people like Jay_Rosen are making really good pointers, e.g. future of New York Times… What’s coming in journalism?

FakeSJ: Train wreck coming. Newspapers own fault, didn’t reinvest, milked it, advertisers are not coming back. Business model based on scarcity of information and monopoly, but that’s gone. Leaders of these big organisations just don’t know. No-one is making big money on the web. WRITING IS WORTH ZERO. Enough people willing to write it for nothing, as there’s no way to rope it off and charge for it.

JP: Back to OpenSource: changed the economics of an entire movement. Characterised by losses are privatised, gains are socialised. If it has value, the society gains. Exact opposite of credit crunch (gains privatized, losses socialised). In abundance economics, you have to be able to monetize socialised gains. The business model comes when you find something of value to the community.

Stowe: I’m not a journalist, but I did consulting with big orgs, six or seven editors in the room, yelling and spitting at each other, with no view. Do you see the big media orgs go completely under, and new forms of media emerge?

FakeSJ: Daily papers are dead. News magazines ok – Economist doing great. Should be ok. What’s the point of the daily newspapers? They’re in denial, but they are dead. Ultimately, they re-aggregate, use free stuff, think like Politico.com, people who bailed out of Washington Post and started from new -that’s how it’s going to happen.

“How to fund quality local journalism”

The bottom has fallen out of the traditional publishing business model–and with it goes the hefty dividends expected by shareholders (e.g. £48.4m in 2008 for the Trinity Mirror Group). The future of local quality journalism can only remain with the current crop of regional newspaper publishers if they radically change their expectations, and innovate.

That might not happen. If it doesn’t, they will die off, and the future of quality local journalism will take a huge – but not definitive – blow. Then the future lies with new initiatives and the local communities themselves – passionate and entrepreneurial people, only some of whom will be journalists. What about local council initiatives to publish newspapers and local information? That’s not the way to go – covered in Part 3.

But how to fund it? Here are seven suggestions for the future of local journalism funding:

1. Save the big regional publishers through a public subsidy? The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, has already ruled that out: no state subsidies for beleaguered local newspapers. In some ways, that is good. Let’s not shore up businesses that have met requirements of shareholders over those of the local community, and which have – with a few notable exceptions – failed to innovate.

2. But… as Andy Price argued on the  OJB blog yesterday,”The regional press is the only institution with enough professional journalists to really cover civic Britain successfully.” So where public money is available, e.g. through the Digital Britain programme, efficiencies in government funding are necessary. As the authors of After the Crunch, published last week, write, “The DCMS, BERR, DCSF, Treasury, DIUS between them, spend a lot of money in the name of ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’, but much of their effort is frustrated by the lack of a coherent approach.” If quality local journalism is a public service, then what portion of the public service budget could go to newspapers? And only on the basis that they reform their structures (as suggested by @Geoffrey Gevalt).

3. That could be knitted together with a second point made in After the Crunch: that “the small-scale nature of creative industry enterprises connects more easily, and more productively with smaller-scale government.” The government could streamline legislation and funding frameworks for supporting media organisations at local levels without the baggage of outdated business models. They can work with Business Link and entrepreneurship schemes to offer many more bursaries and small business grants to new ventures that establish in their business plans a commitment to produce quality local journalism covering local democracy issues. These will most probably be started by two groups of people: those local journalists who have been made redundant, and who are deeply passionate about local democracy and community; and new entrepreneurs who can see the potential in investing in a portfolio of local media products using new, free technologies and mash ups.

4. Where regional publishers can prove they are adapting to the new media environment, individual papers or sub-regional groups (similar to what Peter Preston called for in the Observer two Sundays ago) could be cut out of the dying corpse of their parent company, and given subsidies to see them through the migration to a new business model.

5. Reduce costs through ditching daily print routines. Newspapers become professional news magazines published once a week but constantly updated online by continuing to grow community engagement and news as a conversation, and by investing in non-traditional ways to access information, e.g. these maps empowering social change through using local information (h/t @JoshHalliday).

6. Media organisations, both new and traditional, turn to community-owned, community-sourced local journalism.  Two-hundred years ago it was pampheteering. In 1932, it was nine interested individuals fed up with newspaper oligarchs who raised £40,000 and set up their own local paper, the Bristol Evening Post. Crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding has always been a part of the future of media. As argued for by former Northern Echo editor Peter Sands this morning on the Radio 4 Today programme.

7. Take a leaf out of new magazine membership models, as developed by numerous brands but articulated here via Alyce Alston: sell bundles of information

8. Fund training programmes for current (recently redundant?) journalists in new technologies and entrepreneurship so the next generation of media organisations are prepared for the constant need to adapt to the rapid pace of media change – so, put more money into projects such as Infuze

What the typical local media organisation might look like?
So how about this? The future of quality local journalism is published immediately online and weekly in print, probably in magazine format.

• A small group of editors, journalists and community managers work with a network of contributors to develop feeds in a number of formats, e.g. news stories linked to local maps, for geographical and issue-based hyper-localities: all of this online, using APIs to mash together maps, local government records, planning information etc.
• A printed version provides a format for the weekend read and brings in advertising—similar to the ways the best Teesside hyper-local content gets published in weekly papers.
• The media organisation supports investigative reporting through entertainment, sport and feature copy that attracts advertising and sponsorship.
• The magazine is distributed freely around the local region.
• This local brand was set up with a government grant, including ongoing training in technology and entrepreneurship. The magazine is owned by the community through a crowd-funded structure (ten thousand people each pay £20 as a yearly debenture – not a subscription) and that community then have a vote on the governance and issues covered by the magazine… Want journalists to prioritise investigations into local planning decisions? Then pay for it.

Think of it as a combination of The Age of Stupid meets Spot.Us.

What other ideas are there?

As the strapline says, there is a catastrophe going on at sea. According to the article, the “UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation estimates that 70% of the world’s fisheries are now fully exploited (ie fished to the point where they can only just replenish themselves), overexploited or depleted.” Which is why the standfirst is justified:

And which also makes turning the page from this powerful opening all the more unbelievable:

The Guardian has been criticized before for writing one thing and then advertising another, particularly around issues of aviation; running articles on climate change and the need for reduction in GHG emissions, but taking advertising money from airlines or gas guzzlers, for example. It’s slightly unfair – at least the Guardian is doing the editorial part. But how much is their editorial stance undermined by the taking and placement of such advertising within their lead features? I’d say almost completely – what is the point of such an article when the advertising money that sustains it fully counters it arguments for sustainability.

I wonder what the author, Andrew Purvis, makes of it?

“The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information”

The final views of the committee will depend on how much the inquiry sees local newspapers responsible for local journalism – a little, a lot, or completely.

Writing in the Observer on Sunday, Henry Porter pretty much called them the same thing. For many who work there, the death of newspapers is disastrous for access to local information, not least due to the historical positions those papers have held.

The closures of the Glasgow East News and Ayrshire Extra, the Black Country Mail Extra, Wolverhampton AdNews, Daventry Post and Ashby Herald, the Lincoln Chronicle, the Northallerton, Thirsk and Bedale Times, and dozens of others that have either closed or felt the swingeing impact of mergers and office cuts, are devastating for their communities. These papers have been the homes for ‘hard’ journalism – reporting of the essential court and council stories that really matter to local lives.

Los Angeles Times reporter, Joe Matthews, quoted widely on this, has made clear the dire implications for democracy of the loss of quality journalism. Matthews wrote: “Much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can’t be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom.”

Those trained ears may have left the newsroom – but are they the only ears open to the whispers of local corruption?

Active participants, not passive recipients

The problem for existing traditional newspapers is that it is not part of their business model to innovate ways for local people to engage directly with the democratic process. The newspaper model is one of a journalist doing the work – being the eyes and ears of the local community. But the online model is one of seeking out direct democratic action. Of having direct access to information, rather than waiting for someone else to report on it. To report on it yourself (not simply to have an opinion, but to fact-find, and fact-check).

Other (and often better) ways to access information within local communities, including news and issues of local democracy, already exist. It was not a local newspaper that developed www.theyworkforyou.com, which, with its team of volunteers and email alerts, is perhaps the best way to keep track on what your local MP is saying and doing.

And every day innovators are opening up access to information – just last week, MySociety launched ScenicOrNot, which took a crowd-sourced image project and put it to local democratic use.

One impact of the closure of local newspapers could be to open up the space (and revenue opportunities) for media organisations based, from the outset, on community engagement and crowd-sourced gathering / production / distribution. Where the local community are active participants in, rather than passive receivers of, the local information that matters to them.

Does that explodes the idea that a patch has no ears if it has no ‘newspaper’ journalist? People are on that patch. Innovative, passionate and entrepreneurial, and nosy. The people for whom that information matters – a geographical community who wants to hold local powers to account over planning decisions, education provision, bins and holes in roads.

Some of them will be journalists. The future of local journalism is so pressing that it’s persuaded Roy Greenslade to go back to basics and cover his neighbourhood – Kemp Town in Brighton – for the local paper, as a community reporter.

Most of his fellow community reporters won’t be trained journalists. But all of a sudden they are all in the same category: the people who want access to the information and who are willing to work for it. In this, and many other cases, such as the award-winning Teesside postcode hyper-local sites, the community reporters are producing local – quality – journalism.

Journalism need saving, not newspapers

What is important here is not the newspaper’s historical position. It is not the paper’s brand that make this local journalism worthy of the stamp ‘quality’. It is the standards of journalism itself, which can exist independent of the structures of a local paper: the fact-checking, the transparency, the reporting for the public good. And that can be done by Roy at No.53 on his own blog, or by a crowd-sourced MySociety project. (So what about the money…? There’s a post coming on that, this Friday.)

What is important is that it offers a structure to innovate and create community. Although, very little of what the community contributors produce actually gets printed on paper itself.

This new-newspaper activity must be supported. One of the worst impacts of the closure of local newspapers would be the end to this support of hyper-local communities, the empowering of engaged citizens with tools, in local democratic action. It would be a blow to the work done in encouraging journalists to see news as a conversation with readers, rather than as a one-way flow.

Where this work is developing, local newspapers should be given as much support as possible to survive. That’s because journalism is crucial to local communities. It needs saving. Whether in the form of large organised publishing groups is up for debate.

Local newspapers hold a privileged position. As the guardians of democracy and access to local information, but also as established competition to potential new initiatives, new ways of approaching democracy in local communities. If their demise is to be seen as a disaster, it will be because they found ways to make sense of journalism as a participatory process, engaging with and opening up access to information, and not a static product.

What are your thoughts on the future of local journalism?

So, what puts you off about climate change in the papers or on the TV? Or what makes you sit up and listen? It can be any aspect of coverage – so please do share.