Don't know where to start with your CV?
Give me the info and I'll write it for you.
Don't know where to start with your CV?
Give me the info and I'll write it for you.
At the end of next week, I’ll be leaving Leys News, the community newspaper I’ve been editing for the past two years. I’ve learnt a lot in that time, but the biggest epiphany was this: community journalism is a sector in its own right.
My background is in mainstream journalism, and before I started working at Leys News I assumed that community journalism worked along roughly the same lines. Major culture shock followed, including the discovery that I was the first ever editor of the paper to have any journalistic qualifications. When I realised this, I felt that my main task was to use my professional training to set standards and improve the quality of the newspaper.
Or, to put it more bluntly: I went into community journalism believing that my years of experience in the mainstream press gave me a mandate to show others how it should be done. I held training sessions, introduced a house style, began writing mini-guides to different aspects of journalism.
I do think my actions have borne fruit, in the shape of a more professional-looking, internally consistent newspaper. However, what I didn't appreciate when I embarked on this course of action is that community journalism has an ethos of its own and a lot of valuable qualities that are completely missing from the mainstream media.
In my farewell editorial for Leys News, I explain why I now think community journalism is so important: “[It] is a sector in its own right, one filled with potential. If people are losing faith in mainstream media, I believe the answer is to increase people’s sense of ownership over the media they consume. Keeping things at a micro-local level is a way of ensuring that a newspaper remains accountable to the community it serves.”
People working in the regional and national press could learn a lot from how community newspapers work.