Lucas Batt explains how Greater Community Media is piloting a series of workshops that turn the Co-Creational News Media Toolkit into practical training for people working in journalism.
If the decline in trust in news, its declining revenues, and the fraying social fabric in towns and cities across the UK tell journalism one thing, it is that it cannot continue with business as usual. We know a new approach to journalism is needed: one built directly around communities. But how do you actually do it?
We’re providing a new series of free co-creational news workshops to help journalists learn together how to put communities at the centre of how news is produced.
Co-creational media is an approach to news that goes beyond journalists investigating and reporting on events on behalf of everyone else. Instead, it centres communities, prioritising listening, understanding and responding to their needs, and collaborating with them.
There is a rising wave of organisations pioneering co-creational and community-centred approaches to media. From community magazine Greater Govanhill, and community-owned investigative newspaper the Bristol Cable, to open source investigative community Bellingcat and collaborative network Inclusive Journalism Cymru.
Over the last few years these organisations and others have co-created a Co-Creational News Media Toolkit which forms the foundations of codifying their shared approaches. This work was led by PINF, University of Warwick and University of Stirling, and brings together insights from across the co-creational sector, organising them into a set of ideas, examples, and guiding questions for others to do the same.
The toolkit provides a framework for underlying how the core principles of co-creation approaches (participation, truth-seeking, accountability and care) interact with the news creation process, enabling communities to better participate, and ultimately producing journalism that is more trusted and valued by communities.
Since its launch, the toolkit has been well-received for those interested in co-creational media. However, the toolkit was never designed to be the endpoint for the co-creational project.
Greater Community Media is picking up the baton. With our backgrounds in leading two of the organisations involved in shaping the toolkit (Greater Govanhill and the Bristol Cable), we are keen to enable more people to learn how to take co-creational approaches, and share how they’re already doing it, as part of developing and spreading the practice.
With support from the University of Warwick, we are offering our first series of free, practical training workshops on co-creational media, built directly from the toolkit. Delivered across February and March, the training turns the toolkit into hands-on learning.
There are four interactive online workshops, each lasting for 2 hours. Each session focuses on one area of practice: content creation, fact-checking, impact, or governance. Participants will work through real examples, and practical exercises. The sessions are designed to support reflection, discussion, and application to their own work.
The training is for anyone working in journalism. That includes people thinking about setting up new, community-centred projects, as well as those working in more established organisations who want to change how they relate to the communities they serve. As this is a pilot programme, it is free to attend.
If you are interested in how you might involve communities more meaningfully in your journalism, we encourage you to apply. The deadline for applications is 12pm GMT on 27 January.
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