Bridport noticeboard becomes focus for flood coverage

The noticeboard has been set up for eight months now, so it was already relatively established and I was confident that n0tice.com would be the best way to share all sorts of media, in the event of a big news story. Experiments with embedding images, video and tweets all worked really well to create a media-rich news report which could link together different reports from different sources. One day, I accidentally pasted the link to a tweet and, to my surprise and delight, n0tice automatically generated a nicely designed tweet box.

I was actually out of Bridport when the first few news reports started coming in – my colleage at Watershed PR, Sara, said that I should get out of bed and start reporting on Bridport n0tice. I was awake, just away from my computer! Jonathan got the ball rolling with some excellent tweets, which can be seen at the bottom of this report. He had reported on floods in Bridport when he was working for the BBC, but he tells me that he’d never seen anything like this before – the situation was getting worse by the minute with rising water and spreading areas of flooding.

Like myself, there seem to be quite a few local people who are interested in reporting news as it happens. I think it is in everyone’s interest to try and help people out in times of need,  so people exposed to Bridport n0tice wanted to help out. I’ve already sat down with a few people and chatted with them on how n0tice works and the basic mechanic of putting something on there.

Alongside the massive traffic to the page was a huge influx of new locals visiting the Bridport n0tice Facebook page. Updates on here directed people to the relevant reports on n0tice (the flooding as it happened, the day after cleanup report and Beaminster Tunnel closing). Most people interacting with the Facebook page were posting their own content, which I then curated and re-posted onto n0tice, but a few, such as Tim Harrap and Josh Kelly, contributed their own updates. It was handy for them to do that, but a little training may be required, as Josh was initially posting new reports for every image, rather than updating the main report. But overall, the reporting was enhanced by others contributing.

Bridport n0tice contributor Charlie Ward had his photos published on ITV Meridian’s website; I’m not sure if these were pushed by the n0tice report, but the first image was certainly the one that I remember most, as it was quite early in the day and  shows the picture in Burton Bradstock pretty well.

The sheer volume of visits did take me by surprise, but we at Watershed PR know that there is an enormous hunger for local news information when a big event happens. Whilst the big international news entities such as ITV and BBC were focusing on Devon (which had flooding, but not as bad or as widespread as Dorset) and obviously had a large number of people looking at their stories, Bridport’s hyperlocal n0tice page had a different sort of success, with a very large number of local people looking at tailored local news. The great thing about using n0tice and the connected Facebook page is that I could be agile, finding the very latest photos and videos in seconds, rather than being a large media group which I’ve found can sometimes be quite slow moving. Although it was time consuming, I had complete control over what was put on the n0tice page, and a few simple search terms on Twitter and keeping an eye out on local friends’ Facebook pages was all I needed to get the ball rolling with accurate, quick and impacting reporting.

Watershed isn’t in the business of trying to compete with local media – they’re essential for many of our clients to get news stories out there. But local news reporting is something we’re passionate about. n0tice seems to be a great platform and we really hope that more people nationally (and internationally) pick it up and run with it.