Bylines Cymru is taking a community-led approach to reporting on the continuing effects of austerity. Editor-in-Chief Dr Rachel Morris unpacks the approach in this week's blog.
Bylines Cymru, the tenth and newest in the Bylines Network of volunteer-run powerful citizen journalism platforms, turns two on 1 March. Our first year was spent just getting the word out and finding writers in, of, or in love with Wales to contribute. We exist to give people a place to have their say and to be heard. To start conversations, develop skills, and hold those with power accountable. And to plant seeds in the news deserts of Wales.
Our second year has partly involved using funding kindly granted by Media Cymru to research citizen journalism in Wales and what it could be. We intended to focus mostly on inclusivity, but realised we were putting the cart before the horse. To have an inclusive environment in which writers can be supported to share their work, first you need a community. I tried different ways of building that from long before launch. But it proved ineffective to keep people gathered reliably around something as amorphous as a publication.
I’ve long wanted to spend time focusing on austerity. So many people have been killed by it, but no one really talks about that. There’s no annual poppy-thon or statue to memorialise them. Now it seems there are to be more austerity measures targeted at people who are already struggling. While much has been written about austerity, it’s been piecemeal.
Focusing on a specific issue about which people care deeply has proved to be a swift community builder. As soon as our research was completed, I put the call out, and dozens of people came together. We decided to devote the whole of February to austerity, with weekly Zooms to assess, agree, and adjust. Part of 2024’s project involved testing the coaching of new writers, which has flowed well into this project. We have a WhatsApp group, shared spreadsheet, connections on social media, and a moribund Substack I’m in the process of reanimating.
The ‘normal’ news model, snapshots of events in time and space captured then left behind, doesn’t reflect how life works or how communities work. We want to explore ways of starting and having ongoing discussions about complex issues that last for years and affect many if not most people. The Austerity Project is just the beginning of this experimentation: capturing and creating not just individual stories and community news but ‘news’ as community and as conversations.
You can read more about the Austerity Project in my opening editorial, and see the articles published so far in the hero section of our website. We’ll publish new writing most days in February, republish some of our own or other content where relevant, and ask a question across social media on Tuesdays. This week’s was: ‘did austerity ever really end?’
The three main areas arising from our research were community, purpose, and format. We’ll also try out a few other mediums this month – not because that adds anything to the high quality of the work our community contributes, but to reach people who may not know of us, engage with news, or seek information through reading articles.
Our research got me questioning so many assumptions: about what news is, how it’s made and consumed. About the dynamics of each individual story and the relationships between writer, publication, and readers. We’ll keep looking for answers, together with other people to whom independent news, and hearing from people who perhaps aren’t used to being heard in authentic and meaningful ways, are increasingly important.
The term ‘citizen journalism’ is taking a beating lately, thanks to people like Elon Musk, suggesting that ‘just asking questions’ or filming something on your phone is in-depth civil discourse. We’re using ‘participatory citizen journalism’ for now, though it’s a mouthful and for me doesn’t always describe what we’re feeling our way towards. I hope to do more themed months a few times in 2025, perhaps about Covid, Universal Basic Income, devolution, or migration. It’ll be up to our growing community to decide.
With the Austerity Project, we hope to focus more attention on deeply painful and unequal yet overlooked, normalised harms like extreme poverty. Austerity has of course impacted – and continues to impact – people all over the UK. So please do support us and get involved if you’re interested. We’re not yet sure where all this will lead; we’re dropping pebbles into a very still pond. But we won’t move on from austerity just because February ends – this is our wall of hearts. Please help?
Read our writers’ superb articles on the harsh realities they’ve studied and lived through.
Tell us about how austerity has affected you, your families, and communities in testimonials, which can be anonymised.
Follow and boost us on social media.
Contact Rachel: editor@bylines.cymru to get involved. Diolch o galon!