community journalism


leaders who are traditionally marginalised by the media • Shared back-office services (including legal,


operational and production) to lower barriers of entry to journalism through reduced costs • Sharing of some editorial resources, including public


interest projects, local data and open newsroom events. While the bureau is already involved in activities of this type, including sharing public interest stories, Lucero wants to see more initiatives in the pipeline, along with attempts to reimagine what news is, and how stories might be told. She is also aware that local news has taken a hammering


over the past 10 years, with some parts of the country lacking any meaningful news outlet. “We can’t rebuild every newsroom that once existed, but we can collaborate over infrastructure that supports community news,” says Lucero. Shirish Kulkarni recalls how, when working for an


As well as helping to bind people together, Greater


Govanhill shows the potential for journalism to reveal a different side of communities that may receive unfavourable attention in more established media. “There is a crisis in journalism,” Davies adds. “People get their information elsewhere because they don’t see themselves reflected in the people that report the news.” In June 2020, Joshi Herrmann launched The Mill, a


newsletter sent out by email to people in Greater Manchester. The newsletter is published five days per week for subscribers (and is available free of charge two days). It focuses on news that tends to be overlooked or covered in


little depth by larger titles. It also avoids a relentless focus on crime that seeks to alienate and humiliate people who are less well off, he says. “We don’t get involved in ritual shaming of lower-income


groups who are in some sort of trouble,” says Herrmann. “It’s about being more constructive and looking at patterns of crime and what is behind it.” The Mill has about 1,000 subscribers in Manchester, where


it employs five staff, including two part-timers. Another journalist is based in Sheffield, where an offshoot newsletter, The Tribune, was launched in May 2021. The newsletters tend to adopt an informal tone, with Manchester readers greeted as ‘Millers’. Herrmann explains: “We have a relationship with readers that feels organic and natural. It’s a bunch of independent-minded people sitting in an office writing for people.” The Bureau for Investigative Journalism


has proposed three main ways to develop community journalism: • Start-up support for innovative


journalism initiatives, including newsroom theJournalist | 13


international broadcaster in the late 2000s, he would argue in vain that it should report not only when people were arrested on terrorism charges but also when they were released without charge. “Every other day, five brown men would be arrested in the Midlands. Our cameramen were there in force because they knew about it beforehand,” he says. “I would say in the morning meeting we should either report the release or not do the arrest.” More than a decade later, journalism is still seen by some as part of the problem, not part of the solution. “Journalism represents an important part of community


power and community engagement,” says Kulkarni. “Having different people coming into journalism and saying there are other ways of telling a story might be transformative for the profession.”


Reputation versus reality


WHEN Rhiannon Davies moved across Glasgow to Govanhill in 2018, she was struck by how different the area was from its image. “There was a discrepancy


between how it’s described in the mainstream media and the reality,” she says. “I found a thriving, buzzing community, full of amazing people who try to do good.” A more accurate


picture is now reflected in Greater Govanhill – a website and


quarterly print


magazine set up by Davies at the start of the pandemic. While contributors


sometimes meet up in an office that is rented one day a week, they tend to write from home. After setting up a website


for Greater Govanhill in summer 2020, Davies launched a crowdfunder that raised more than £3,000 for the first print magazine. This involved 50 contributors from 12 countries, aged between 12 and 89 years. “We wanted to be inclusive to people who don’t have


English as a first language and show that these languages exist side by side,” she explains. Davies, who once


freelanced for Positive News magazine, stresses that Greater Govanhill is not trying to compete with the Glasgow Times or Glasgow Live: “It tends to be slow or solution-focused journalism.” Many articles cover social


issues such as recycling or the cost of renting. Another showed how Govanhill’s Roma community helped out during the pandemic by delivering food parcels. Copy is never changed too


much. “We try to keep people’s voices,” says Davies. “We don’t want to change the way people speak.”


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