Outside the M60

Self-proclaimed 'hyperlocal' news blog 'Inside The M60' seems determined to continue to court controversy.

It all started so well...  As early as March 2010 freelance journalist Nigel Barlow announced a manifesto for a hyper-local news website for Manchester on his own blog here:

Fellow freelance journalist Louise Bolotin in more publicity for the project stated:

"What we're looking to create is a hyperlocal news service that keeps itself at a grass roots level - filling the gaps that have been left by retreating local papers."

The site launched a couple of months later to general indifference and shortly afterward inexplicably began to be accused by press journalists as amounting to not much more than unedited press releases with little original content.  Or at least that is what the 'Inside The M60's founders read into David Ottewell's blog at the Manchester Evening News where he had made some general criticisms of hyper-local news sites.  Even though he had not explicitly identified 'Inside The M60' as one of his targets, Ottewell eventually found he had to spell out his position:

Louise,
I’m certainly not criticising you, or your website, or the principle of hyperlocal journalism.

The day after this Barlow pursued Ottewell onto another on-line journalists blog to demand:

September saw the introduction of a rather strange Tweet-fuelled animal known as the 'Inside The M60 Daily'. Stories posted here by numerous 'contributors' (read Twitter-ers) are unadulterated, unedited pieces that often appear on many other news sites, under general headings such as Politics, Entertainment etc., the only visual difference being the CSS template the posting arrives dressed up in.

By October 2010 Barlow was disagreeing with journalists who described 'Inside The M60' as "hyperlocal".  One could not really blame them - they were getting the description from the website itself - but he went to great pains in this audio interview to explain that he no longer wanted the term 'hyperlocal' to be applied to 'Inside The M60'.  In addition to this, first Barlow and then Bolotin posted separately in the comments underneath the interview defending their use of press releases:

By December Bolotin and Barlow were again sparring with blogger The Marple Leaf because he had dared to suggest that tweets Barlow was sending from a protest march direct to the 'Inside The M60' twitter account seemed to imply he was enjoying the frisson of impending violence.  A site called 'How Do' was amongst those that reported this spat, and sure enough Bolotin was first in the comments to say:

So much for accurate reporting - do you not call first to get your facts straight?

On April 11th  this year, the website stretched the definition of 'local' beyond breaking point when it attempted to include a trip to the International Journalism Festival in Italy as content fit for their audience, solely on the basis that Barlow would be speaking there:

By early May Louise Bolotin had "resigned" from 'Inside The M60' citing "professional differences" with Barlow, although she gave Barlow her blessing to continue the site..

So it seems that whatever the original ambiguous ambitions the two co-founders of 'Inside The M60' set out to achieve, it has all been for naught.  All that can really be said for the name is that it is - thanks to its links and RSS feeds - something of a 'brand' now, but a somewhat schizophrenic one.