West Leeds Dispatch has become the latest offering to hit the city’s groaning treasure chest of community-run media operations. It’s the idea of myself, journalist and lecturer John Baron, and Emma Bearman, who has a rich history of creating blogs, starting with the now infamous Armley Tourist Board and then moving on to the multi-author blog The Culture Vulture. We’re both west Leeds residents and wanted to give something back to our community.
The aim of The Dispatch is to highlight some of the great things happening in our communities and encourage people to get involved in local activities or even set up their own groups and projects. We hope to stimulate civic awareness and community spirit and encourage volunteering. And, of course, we also aim to tackle some of the area’s big issues as well as hold politicians and the local authority to account.
We’ve also started up our Feeding West Leeds campaign, which highlights food poverty in the area and features some of the intiatitives to alleviate the problems. We believe we’re filling a considerable gap in the market for really
localised community news that gives local people a voice.We’re encouraging local residents to contribute to the site and help us tell the story of west Leeds. Community reporter courses are due to start next month.
As well as traditional storytelling, we have a rolling live blog featuring news, traffic and events. Actually, it’s a live(ish) blog as we’re all volunteers and being ‘at it’ 24/7 is a tad unrealistic! Regular readers will know we’ve experimented with infographics and data visualisations and also draw on social media to help tell and supplement our posts. So we believe we’re combining traditional journalism skills with modern-day digital storytelling techniques, as well as collaborating extensively with our audience.
Moving forward, we’re keen to get more people involved. And we’ve got plans to go into print as a monthly tabloid.
So the BIG question – how is this sustainable?
So far everything’s been done by volunteers but moving forwards we do have plans to become at least partly self-sustainable so we can start to pay our editor and contributors. We’ve been having conversations with some of our fellow Leeds ‘hyperlocal-ers’ about the possibility of coming together re selling advertising across maybe half a dozen sites. Watch this space for more.
Oh, and before we go we just wanted to mention and thank the Centre or Community Journalism – we’re using their free WordPress theme on our site which we think works rather well!
Images accompanying this article are copyright West Leeds Dispatch.
