Digbeth is Good
Digbeth is Good is a hyperlocal blog and community news site for Digbeth, the industrial and creative quarter immediately south-east of Birmingham city centre, published at digbeth.org. Founded by Nicky Getgood, it became one of the best-known examples of the first wave of British hyperlocal publishing in the late 2000s: a low-cost WordPress site that set out to cover the arts, events and community life of a single city district, and in doing so to change how that district was seen online. It was cited in national discussions about the future of local journalism, used as a teaching example by the hyperlocal support project Talk About Local, and studied by Cardiff University researchers examining the value of UK hyperlocal community news.
Founder Nicky Getgood
Digbeth is Good was established by Nicky Getgood, whose own summary of her work says that her love for the communities she has lived in led her to establish the Digbeth is Good hyperlocal profile. Contemporary journalism coverage identified her plainly as the founder of the hyperlocal Digbeth is Good blog. Getgood later worked as communications manager at Talk About Local, the project that helped people across the UK create community websites and online profiles, where her role was enabling others to find a voice online for their own communities — work that grew directly out of her Digbeth experience.
Her approach was collaborative rather than proprietorial. Presenting Digbeth is Good to community website workshops around 2010 and 2011, she appeared alongside other pioneering hyperlocal publishers, and the site was used as a worked example of what a single committed resident, using free or cheap tools, could build for a neighbourhood that mainstream media largely ignored or defined by crime stories.
An early hyperlocal pioneer
The blog was already established by the autumn of 2008. In November 2008 the Birmingham digital writer Nick Booth, of Podnosh, credited a hat tip to Digbeth is Good in a post about how a neighbourhood's shape can be defined by the tags its residents attach to photographs of it online — a small early sign of the site acting as a curator of Digbeth's digital identity. That same Birmingham blogging scene was incubating new forms of civic media: the first social media surgery for community and voluntary organisations was held in a Digbeth pub in October 2008, in the milieu in which Digbeth is Good operated.
The site also featured in debates about trust in journalism. Writing about a Journalism Leaders Forum panel at which the claim that blogs were rubbish had been aired again, the journalist Joanna Geary highlighted Getgood's response: bloggers were not asking journalists to trust them blindly, but journalists who approached blogs without an open mind risked missing first-hand accounts, community information and focused local reporting. The exchange captured the site's standing at the time — a community blog taken seriously enough to be part of a national argument about what counted as journalism.
A ten-pound-a-month model
Talk About Local's presentations described the economics frankly. Digbeth is Good was a WordPress blog costing around £10 a month to run, covering what the slides called a gritty industrial area of south Birmingham, with arts, events and positive stories. William Perrin's presentation concluded that Digbeth is Good had redefined the image of Digbeth online — a significant claim for a publication whose entire infrastructure cost less than a round of drinks, and one that made the site a standard example in discussions about how little money a credible local news presence could require.
The model depended on the publisher's own time and local knowledge rather than on staff, premises or print. Its archive, organised by the ordinary rhythms of the district — exhibitions, gigs, planning arguments, community meetings — accumulated into a record of Digbeth life that no other outlet was keeping at that granularity.
Improving perceptions of Digbeth
The site's editorial mission was explicit: to portray Digbeth positively. Cardiff University's research project The Value of UK Hyperlocal Community News, based on content analysis, a survey and interviews with hyperlocal producers, interviewed Pamela Pinski of Digbeth is Good and reported her motivation as improving perceptions of Digbeth — an area of which she was very proud and for which she was a passionate advocate. The researchers noted this as part of a wider pattern among hyperlocal producers, many of whom made a conscious editorial decision to promote the good things happening in their places.
That did not make the site a mere cheerleader. Talk About Local's teaching materials divided its subject matter into themes including the area's artistic life, its Irish heritage and community news, happenings and events, hidden gems and creative work — a mixture that treated Digbeth's Irish Quarter identity and its creative economy as assets to be documented rather than problems to be explained away.
What the site covered
In practice, Digbeth is Good published the kind of material that defines a hyperlocal: arts and music coverage from the district's venues and studios, event listings, interviews with local figures, and the paperwork of community life. The Digbeth Residents Association posted its minutes on the site, making it a channel for formal neighbourhood business as well as culture. Forum posters in Birmingham's development community pointed readers to it in 2010 for material such as its interview with the owner of Digbeth Court, the building next to the Rainbow pub, about how that building's refurbishment was progressing — the sort of street-level development intelligence that rarely reaches citywide media.
The Custard Factory and Fazeley Studios area, the canals and the Duddeston viaduct arches all belonged to its territory: a district whose blue-brick railway arches, built in the nineteenth century, and converted industrial buildings were becoming home to a design, media and arts scene even as large parts of it remained working industrial land.
Reclaim the Spaces
Getgood's activism extended beyond the screen. One summer she staged a series of Reclaim the Spaces guerrilla picnics in Digbeth, intended to rediscover and enjoy some of the district's many wasted spaces and to help local people move beyond feeling powerless about large chunks of land left to deteriorate by those responsible for them, fenced off from everyone else. She spoke about the picnics and what led her to that form of protest at the Greenbelt festival, in a talk listed under her roles as Talk About Local communications manager and author of Digbeth is Good — an illustration of how the blog's reporting, campaigning and place-making blurred into one another.
Talk About Local and the hyperlocal movement
Digbeth is Good became a reference point for Talk About Local, the project Getgood went on to work for. Talk About Local helped communities create basic but effective websites, offered ongoing support to local website managers, partnered with UK online centres, and was funded by Channel 4, Screen West Midlands and Advantage West Midlands; its training reached over a thousand people through dozens of trainers across England and Ireland. In its slide decks — used from village hall presentations to a Polis summer school session in July 2010 and a Talk About Local session in May 2011 — digbeth.org appeared alongside sites such as Kings Cross Environment and Pits n Pots as evidence that communities could define themselves online for around £10 a month.
The founder's later path
Getgood's subsequent career, summarised in her own profile, took the Digbeth model with her: helping people across the UK create community websites with Talk About Local, supporting e-learning design for Cardiff University, providing communications and administrative support to the Building Communities Trust's Invest Local programme, creating a group for fellow local parents in Cardiff and organising a residents' group in Llanishen through Facebook and face-to-face meetings. She graduated with a BA (Hons) in Humanities from the Open University in 2019, studied towards a master's in art history, and worked part-time as a museum custodian in Stromness, Orkney, volunteering with the Orkney Arts Society. The trajectory underlines what Digbeth is Good was: not a media business that scaled, but a piece of civic infrastructure built by one resident, whose methods its founder then spent years teaching to other communities.
Significance
Digbeth is Good matters in British media history out of proportion to its budget. It demonstrated, early, that search results and online reputation for a place could be reshaped by a resident-run publication; it gave Digbeth's residents association, artists and venues a shared noticeboard; and it supplied researchers, trainers and policymakers with a concrete, quotable example — £10 a month, one founder, a whole district redefined online — whenever the hyperlocal idea needed explaining. For the district itself, it remains one of the earliest sustained attempts to tell Digbeth's story from inside Digbeth.
