Distraction Therapy

The traditional approach to publishing a magazine or a periodical newspaper is often based around a marketing and sales plan that maximises advertising revenue. But as engagement with readers shifts across different types of media, often using multiple forms of media simultaneously, then new strategies and innovative approaches are emerging that need to be tried out and explored. I wanted to find out how Bido Lito! magazine in Liverpool is embracing these challenges, and how Christopher Torpey, the editor, is thinking about models of community engagement, not only to foster a network of contributors who are interested in arts and culture in the city, but also to foster a wider network of community supporters who want to underpin the future development of Bido Lito! in years to come.

What is it that motivates us to become community radio producers and citizen journalists? What are we interested in doing that is different from working with professional and commercial media when we volunteer or advocate for alternative and independent media. It’s not fame or glory! I had a good chat with Matthew Rogers, who runs the Citizen Journalism News Network with support from the University of Exeter. Matthew told me about how he’s built on his work supporting SourceFM in Falmouth, and what he thinks it means to be a community reporter in an age of technological and social change. I’m looking forward to returning to Falmouth and chatting with Matthew about blockchain at some point – I’m sure that might take a couple of pints!

The way that we support our communities and ensure that they are facilitated by a responsible and accountable media is one of the major challenges of our times. With ongoing consolidation of ownership of newspapers and radio stations, in addition to the expanding reach of the tech companies, and against a back drop of widening social inequality, we need to careful think how community media can be put on a sustainable and resilient path.

Meeting up with Clare Cook and Dr Jennifer Jones was a great opportunity to discuss and think about the complex array of issues and challenges that are related to community media, and how the needs of civic society might be supported by community media practices.

When we learn to create community radio programmes, we change the way that we think about audiences and ourselves. This podcast with Dr Katie Moylan and two University of Leicester students, Marian and Daisy, gave us the chance to talk about the values and ideas that we have to think through when we are creating a radio programme that addresses challenges and experiences that we face in a community life. We discussed how we address issues of identity and belonging, and how different types of media use and practice change the way that we interact with people beyond thinking of them as passive audiences.

Katie is the author of the Cultural Work of Community Radio, that looks at community radio as key site for negotiations of social and political issues for marginalised communities.

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...

What distringuishes community media from other forms of media engagement? Why do people volunteer and give up their time to set up and run not-for-profit radio stations? And how should be think about the contribution that volunteers and non-professionals can make in changing the civic culture here in the UK?

I met up with with Dr Siobhan Stevenson and discussed how concept of social gain and social value are integral to the social purpose of community media, and how we can understand the potential of community media as a creative and empowering form of media practice. According to Siobhan our media should be based on meeting people where they are, in the neighbourhoods that they live in, and on the basis that every one has something valuable to offer that is worth celebrating.

 

Why do we need to talk more? That is the question put by Yvonne Murphy who is an independent theatre producer with Omidaze Productions working in Cardiff and South Wales. Yvonne beleives that a more direct engagement between arts and culture orgaisations and the communities that they serve can only be enhanced by providing public spaces that allow people to talk and listen to one another.

Using a pop-up Talking Shop in the centre of Cardiff, Yvonne has been finding out how the simple act of chatting and listening to one another can help our wellbeing, creater stronger social connections, and foster greater collaborative and creative opportunities to share our experiences through participation-based creative arts.

Also taking part in our conversation was Rhian Hutchings, the Partnership Manager for ArtWorks Cymru, and Chrissie Ruckley, Creative Learning Officer for Creative Scotland.

 

It’s often said that community media is ten percent media and ninety percent community development. But what do we mean by community development and how can community media practioners benefit from using techniques of community engagement and renewal? Today I met with Russell Todd who works for Indycube as a connector, and is the producer of the Community Development Podcast. We discussed the limits of mainstream media and the potential benefits of using a more deliberative and social approach to community and civic development. We also discussed how our experience with podcasting has developed and how podcast support a more open and reflective approach to civic engagement.

The final podcast from the Documentary Media Centre gave John Coster, Jurian Visser and myself a chance to explore some of our thinking about media democracy and the way that community media works as an alternative to mainstream media. Thanks to John for hosting these discussion over the last six weeks, and to get into some more complex ideas and thinking.

A fascinating discussion tonight at the Documentary Media Centre with John Coster, Amber Rondell and John Halker. We talked about the unseasonal weather and how record temperatures in February need to be seen as a warning sign about climate breakdown. Then we talked Amber’s documentary about John’s experience in New York during the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, and how he coped with this from a personal point of view.