 Well, thank you very much for coming today. I know it's nearly the end of the day and everyone's very, very tired, but I was very surprised that my talk about how WordPress would save the media was actually selected, so I come here on a bit of a back foot. But I'm absolutely delighted to be involved with the WordPress community and I hope to do more in the future as well. My name's Luna Murphy and this is Brian Peele and I'm together with quite a few decades' experience of journalism in the mainstream media in broadcasting. I've worked for BBC, UTV, RTE over the years producing news, current affairs, documentaries. Brian came to view digital as a production journalist also as a feature writer and together we've combined to work on a digital first product which goes out in the form of a magazine, a digital magazine and stories about social affairs and community issues which are now on the WordPress website. So I'll let Brian say a little bit more about his background if he likes to join the party. Well, I left school at about 16 and I didn't know what I wanted to be. I'm still kind of bigger than really, but I did become a journalist eventually. I worked for a number of newspapers and magazines here in London, Wales, Dublin, Cork. Come back here with five years who would want to be a bus telegraph but I kind of had enough of newsrooms, worked in newsrooms and no digital thing was taken place there. And for a lot of people who have embraced that and moved into another one, my generation were terrified at and decided to want to ease themselves out of that world where I thought the word of actually publishing, whether comes out of great responsibility and pressure, but the concept of publishing, they're actually controlled by the leverage of publishing and publishing your information to an audience. With all the tax and balances of journalism and responsibility was something that I just couldn't resist. I'm still learning from doing it, but I actually love it and WordPress give us the vehicle to do it without a doubt. So currently we're a member of a new UK steering body which is called the Independent Community News Network and it's basically the impetus came from Cardiff University in Wales where I studied for a Masters over 20 years ago and had the opportunity to go back to my old journalism school and to be part of a new exciting genre which is community journalism. We're not a group of murder, we don't have loads of money in our pockets but we are part of the community as everyone else is and we want to do journalism for the benefit of our community. So just now we've been selected to be part of the BBC Local News Partnership and that means we receive stories that we can't get to ourselves, local councils, stories in dairy, health and education boards throughout Northern Ireland and it means that we have more content to put on our news site. So we're a social enterprise, we've gone along the non-profit model because as I say we're not Rupert Murdoch and the type of journalism that we do I think works in the sort of community, social enterprise type of milieu. So if you wanted to have a look at our website it's a WordPress website where we keep our magazines primarily so as I say we're digital first but for most recent edition where we looked at maternal mental health we were scandalised to find that there's not one specialist mother and baby unit on the whole of the island of Ireland if a mother experienced psychiatric problems during pregnancy or after the birth. So we thought that would be very good to work with a campaigner in the local community to highlight that issue. Just on that, we went through a number of versions and I had a host of magazines, one of them was UD, people who made me familiar with UD, YDEU, had problems at one time over a weekend, nearly lost in the whole issue and I was trying to find that during the week we were fine but it was quite difficult to get support at the weekend so I said that said I couldn't do that again because I just can't work at the island, I'd treat myself for work at the island so it's kind of weird. That's what it's more like very often. So we then went to the issue and yeah here it's here so basically the magazine has published that it's going to come out now, okay I'm bigger bigger, okay so it's online basically. Now the thing that we're still working on the model is what you see printed is kind of what you see online but to do with resources, we have a big audience but now we've built it up from north when we first started off this magazine. I remember the 21st issue we decided to make it a theme magazine before we had a range of stories so now we do a magazine about a single thing and every magazine is about that same. A lot of these two cases you can see that there are and there's links obviously in the stories will take you to the other stories so that that's the magazine there and that's what I'd say about that in terms of mental health. So we also print the magazine and distribute it round free to all the libraries in northern Ireland and increasing into the Republic of Ireland Dublin City Library all their periodical section will have copies. If you go to the Isleic Centre in Dublin you'll see it in their business section and Trinity College National Library of Ireland as well as all the libraries in northern Ireland take a free printed copy because we still believe in libraries as a great open source for information as well as WordPress. So we're very passionate about the idea of overcoming the demographic deficit when it comes to media because we believe that the means of production are in everyone's pocket nowadays when it comes to content and we as professional journalists want to connect to the community we live in to produce really interesting journalism accounts. So basically we're part of a whole swathe of people doing this across the UK and Ireland and Bristol Cable the Ferret in Scotland. There are other examples of similar community media organisations who are also part of the independent community news network. That's just a few of our front covers so we cover tough issues from prisons to justice to child poverty, suicide. We really felt passionately as journalists that the social affairs are not well covered in this community which is, you know, we'll spend a lot of our time talking about politicians who are not in storement and we thought that we need to get back to the community and talk about some of the stories that count and some of the people who are really campaigning to improve things here. The thing of the modern magazine is that it's kind of a niche magazine in the way or it's developing that kind of a niche magazine. If you're interested in saying you work in the field of suicide, social worker and academic, that should kind of very help the professional, you will possibly read our magazine. That's a new world. You will have an interest in it or you've been affected by the issue of suicide. So that's what our magazines are like. We have an audience specifically who will be interested in that topic and subject and they're doing 32 pages concentrated journalism on it. It builds our profile up as well. So since we start doing it to where we are now a number of people will actually approach us now to what collaborative we're supposed to produce a magazine. So it's got that state of mind. We have plans for the future but that's kind of where we are now. So we'll just go on to the next slide here okay. So basically as I said we used it as a shop front for the magazine first of all but now we're now producing regular stories and you know put in the most as well as put in the most recent edition of the magazine in. So the the type of stories that put in most recently was a review of a controversial play about identity and loyalist identity which was on the Mac. Stephen Reyes the star and it's going on to New York causing a bit of discussion locally. Put it mildly. And Robert Redford's son was discussed in Dairy City Council the other day who would believe it but he's been just a really interesting film to help kids overcome trauma in early childhood and health and social services in Dairy we're trying to convince the local council that it should be introduced into all the schools and we thought it was a really nice photograph a really nice story so we obviously got a photograph of Robert Redford at the Sun to go along with 200 words on it. But I think fundamentally what we need to do is test out how we can finance journalism properly. What we're doing is tricky it's different from what we're used to working in the mainstream media most other journalists who work in the mainstream media don't have to fund themselves before they can do the journalism but that's exactly the model that we've had to undertake with the the magazine. So we've tested out different ways of financing and getting different revenue models so we've had sponsored pages in the magazine we do ancillary services like production we make videos for other people usually charities we help people communicate their stories digital and traditional media and we sometimes do some consultancy for charities when they ask and we've just introduced a new view champion member scheme so it's like a membership scheme people who want to back journalism and a tired of Robert Murdoch can maybe divert some of the resources towards us and we actually produced a short video which brand is a star in and if you'd like to show that brand you can link on the the thing the thing as well is that sorry I could just jump ahead about policies here just getting us here oh yeah I think I'll jump ahead yeah okay and the word press is key I mean recently as I say what I've done with word press phenomenal just a phenomenal two minutes free okay you have to you have to pay for where to be at the pace to be hosted et cetera the excellent product itself and I came from a print journalism background I had never worked really in computer technology it was my background everything was paper and typewriters I'm not old and telephones and people smoking in the newsroom that was the culture in the newsroom and then they brought in computers the newsroom kind of felt silent and the culture changed at least I'll say one thing about the old days you never lost a story but but new technology come in as they call it one of the common things in the newsroom was Jesus Christ what's happened to my story you know and an advantage somewhere in the ether and I think people are going around screaming you never got that at least so we're all like a rod paper was paper this is that fact you know the paper and the paper was there but word press was um was phenomenal only once in what time you've not had a word press and it wasn't a word press thing per se I would probably malware a plug-in the cycles had corrupted whatever you clicked on the link I was kind of funny when I first seen it now I'm like oh god this is a real apartment it'd be about nine days to get a sort of commercial model with developers basically you clicked on the link you went to Japan well we're advertising helicopters for sale why not buy a helicopter but uh no one could have I said to buy a helicopter but anyway I've got a patch on that it has been phenomenal I've got a little bit lacy and that's what happens because some of the stuff that you use you see but of course you put the photograph you put the image you put the hairline those videos from then there's a lot more to word press than that and plugins and as we develop I would actually like to have a web developer access to the organization um freelance but preferably staff some of you know a lot more about me about basically how you utilize all of these not just word press but digital technology yeah okay so the reason that you need to support good journalism is probably illustrated in the next slide where um the woman on the right exposed what the man on the left was doing on the right your left but she's my hero and he's not and he makes all the money and the guardian will put an appeal at the end of the page and please support us please support us and you know I feel very guilty but I don't so it's not a good effective business model to support journalism so what we thought about and what we were looking at in terms of research moving forward is how you can actually pay for a fraction of a penny for the articles that you read on the website and we're very interested to look at the ethereum platform with the uh blockchain technology which obviously is where bitcoin comes from and if everyone was to pay a fraction of a penny for an article when they read I'd have that work out you know well obviously this is blue sky thinking because we're a small community media social enterprise you know in terms of resources it's not something that we can very readily decide oh let's get the r&d team to have a look at this you know because that's us and we have to do the journalism but you know what if you could link in the open source of the wordpress with the open source of this ethereum platform and use this blockchain technology for every one of our readers and like 10 000 people could get a few pennies for us you know to to read the content on the website because why we can monetize the magazine well with the sponsorship it's a little bit trickier we find because everything is free on the internet to actually you know get a good business model around the news on the news site so we thought that we would look at civil which is a new publishing platform launching in america in the spring and just see what they were up to so they are going to be using you know ethereum tokens like an offshoot of bitcoin and it's going to be the creation of a new media economy and we're obviously saying watch that space because that's possibly where it could be going you know people could be incentivized once we get over being afraid of cryptocurrency and you know the black dark web and and all the boogie men sort of idea about it you know if we could all pay a little quarter of a penny towards reading a bit of journalism it might might make a good business model for us so this is just a little audio clip of the guy from civil karmat cold bridge where he talks a little bit about you know what he's trying to do if anyone would like to listen to that clip yeah just okay well so basically he's explaining the background to it but they're setting up little news hubs around the states at the moment and they're all going to be blockchain technology so you know in in terms of saving your content you know if your website goes down and you just lose all your content that's not going to happen anymore because it's all going to be saved in different computers and i'm not a techie so i don't know the ins and outs about friends just reading up on these things but we did discover this one um micro payment platform with a word press plugin which we'd like to look at a little bit more and basically they're launching an experiment with digital micro payments to um you know trying to we're looking at it to sort of validate whether it's something or we could be using whether it could you know get our readers to to pay a little bit for the journalism that they read on our website without invest in significant capital and there's already been one example of it to cross the water next slide so the this tech news website has just just said this month that they're going to be using this particular payment of digital currency and to pay for some of the digital content that they produce on its website so we think it's very interesting development i don't know if it's going to go anywhere beyond that but we think it's a good way to think about the business model around supporting good journalism and whether you know these are the sort of monetization schemes that we should be looking at in the future and i mean we do need to think about monetization of the media unless you always want to run the risk of having fake news on facebook potentially overthrowing democratic elections by the russians um you know are these the things that we are going to say is okay in the future should we be going back to a media which is actually helping democracy not hindering democracy so therefore monetizing publishing is important in terms of overcoming the democratic deficit not in northern Ireland not in the UK not in the public parliament but perhaps worldwide and that's why we believe that wordpress can save the media because i think it has a vital role potentially in the future to helping us monetize journalism properly and happy birthday wordpress