EYST teamed up with The People's Newsroom and On Our Radar to deliver training to individual community journalists – empowering our communities to Tell Their Own Stories. The project is funded by Lankelly Chase - Funding & Learning for Systemic Change. All the Participants on the project are volunteer journalists. Together we created a bespoke training program which looked at many aspects of journalism, with the aim to build and support a community newsroom which is focused on those who have been traditionally marginalised by the media.

Through this project the Community Journalists learnt and understood how they could use Journalism to create meaningful work, which would have a positive impact on their communities and help find solutions and raise awareness of real issues.

We will continue to create new work and output through the EYST network - exploring and highlighting stories for positive change.

About The People’s Newsroom Initiative 

Building community power through journalism. Newsrooms created by, with and for everyone.

The People’s Newsroom is an initiative to support the creation and sustainability of community projects that reimagine journalism.

The news and media industry are failing to authentically serve and represent our communities due, in large part, to who owns and runs newsrooms and who tells our stories.

We need an industry that belongs to and is representative of all of us. One where we tell our stories with our own voices, respond to community needs rather than the powers at large and spark positive change. We need newsrooms created by, with and for people who are being let down by the existing media landscape.

‘Our dream is for the UK to have a thriving local news and information ecosystem to support community power’

The power to build this already exists in our communities. We just need to unleash and grow the local capacity and resilience that underpins successful, self-sustaining journalism initiatives.

The People’s Newsroom initiative focuses on making this available to everyone. We’ll share infrastructure that makes it easier to design and start up new journalism projects, cheaper to run a back-office and more accessible to produce quality information.

We’re kicking off a partnership with the Ethnic Minorities and Youth Support Team in Wales to build a new community journalism project in Swansea. This process allows us to test, shape and scale the framework ahead of launching a pilot next year.

We want to build this initiative collectively, so we’re looking to grow a community around it. We want to collaborate with those who’ve successfully set up community newsrooms, those building them as we speak and those aspiring to do so. We want to hear from organisations and funders who want to collaborate on this project and help us all succeed.

We’ll be exploring:

- A new pipeline into media ownership. Hands-on start-up support to design innovative journalism projects and invest in community newsroom leaders traditionally marginalised by the media.

- Shared back-office support (legal, operational, production) to lower barriers to entry and share costs and technology.

- Editorial resources to help support the running of equitable community newsrooms that serve the public interest.

From On Our Radar -

This Bespoke training for EYST’s Telling Our Own Stories Project aimed to provide a foundation in helping people to start documenting and sharing their own and their community’s life experiences and stories in order for them to be seen, heard and understood. Community reporting informs by sharing hidden knowledge around lived experience; inspires by showcasing compelling community actions and outcomes; ignites by building a case for action and sparking emotional responses. In turn, this leads to a positive shift in perceptions, policy, and practice.