The fresh air that sweeps across Falmouth from the Atlantic is bracing but refreshing. This might not be news to the people of Cornwall, but it was an excellent backdrop to my visit to the University of Exeter, and the Community Media Association workshop on Exploring Citizen Journalism, with fellow community media practitioners, supporters and researchers from across the South West of England.

Matthew Rogers, our host for today at the Penryn campus, opened the first session by sharing his experience as a Human Geographer, and why he feels that community media is an important practice to help us better understand the places that we live in, and the people that we interact with when we live there. While delivering courses at the university on Citizens Journalism, Matthew has also been developing and incubating an alternative social media platform that can be used to support independent and dispersed citizen journalism. This is a tool that Matthew hopes will help citizen journalists in rural areas who are not able to meet-up easily due to proximity and transport issues.

Matthew explained how he believes that citizens journalism, or community news, is a vital component in providing a sense of identity for people living in communities and places that are otherwise underserved and underrepresented in mainstream and commercial broadcast media. Matthew’s aim is to develop a network of social collaborators who can share elements and component parts of stories, using a an online platform that is designed to help share the workload when producing community news stories. The platform forms the base from which these stories are shared with other community media networks, using the social media networks of supporters who have indicated similar interests.

The workshops and talks that followed then focussed on thinking about the practical issues that are important in the development of alternative approaches to civic news. Our focus was on exploring the challenges that need to be overcome if we are to widen the range of voices, and the diversity of the people who contribute to telling stories about life in our neighbourhoods and communities.

The workshop session I ran asked what and how news is understood and constructed? What is news to me, I suggested, might not be news to other people? If we ignore the little things that are news to ourselves, as individuals, and we also ignore the news that is relevent to other people as individuals, then we might also miss the patterns that emerge from these experiences. Patterns that demonstrate that many of the challenges we face in daily life are connected and are affecting many other people.

What makes something news in mainstream media, I suggested, is too often focussed on the exceptional and the surprising, and there is little space for people to discuss and share their experience about the everyday things that affect them. Like busses being accessible, or bins being collected, or plastic packaging for products sold in supermarkets. These might reflect something that is individually vexing when they get in our way or go wrong, and they might not seem to be of much importance, but when they are pulled together and connected, then they form a bigger picture.

I suggested that Hanzi Freinacht‘s argument in his book The Listening Society is relevant to this argument. Freinacht argues that the politics of the future will be determined by Hip...