Wester Hailes gets funding from Carnegie for community news
WHALE Arts has been awarded £10,000 by Carnegie UK Trust as one of the five projects named in the Trust’s Neighbourhood News initiative.
WHALE is at the forefront of the project to bring The Sentinel back to life. This was a newspaper which foundered some time back, but which had a great community following.
The plan is to revive the paper online, in the form of The Digital Sentinel. Carnegie UK Trust have revealed the Wester Hailes project as one of the five winning projects of its £50,000 ‘Neighbourhood News’ scheme. This project has been set up to help develop innovative ways of producing local news.
At present there is a website, and the group have been running taster sessions to try and drum up citizen reporters.
This is a separate project from the Prospect Housing blog called From There to Here which narrates the social history of Wester Hailes by using some historic content from The Sentinel and bringing it up to date. They also have a Facebook page.
Other winners are Port Talbot MagNet in South Wales, ‘Your Thurrock.com’ in Essex, ‘Brixton Media Ltd’ in London and ‘Cybermoor Ltd’ in Cumbria. These were selected from nearly 80 applications from across the UK and Ireland to become a ‘Carnegie Partner’ in the Neighbourhood News initiative.
In return for £10k funding support each, the winning organisations will be required to participate in an external evaluation of their new local news project – so that their experiences and learning can be shared with policymakers, practitioners and funders across the UK and Ireland.
Douglas White, Senior Policy Officer at Carnegie UK Trust, and Chair of the Neighbourhood News Advisory Group explained:-“The way we consume our news has changed hugely in recent years. Much of the content we now access comes from online sources, including online newspapers, Twitter and Facebook, while traditional sources of news have been under pressure. We are concerned that the supply of local news is particularly under threat.
“If people can’t access news about their local area then this creates a dangerous democratic deficit. The Neighbourhood News project was established to help test new models of delivering local news to meet demand.
“We received some fantastic applications from projects where local groups are producing great news outlets and creating a real sense of belonging for communities.
“We are delighted to be supporting all of our winners, and look forward to working alongside them to help make their vision a reality.”
The Carnegie UK Trust claims a long-standing interest in the relationship between the media, civil society and democracy, stretching back to the 1940s. Most recently, the Trust published a report revealing where the nation sits on media ethics ahead of the Leveson report being published.
To read more about the Neighbourhood News project, click here.