The Ferret and Greater Govanhill’s Community Newsroom showed how community perspectives can shape meaningful storytelling. This article is part of the People-Powered Storytelling collaborative series.
“Everybody has a story,” starts the tagline above the shop front window of our tiny community newsroom in Glasgow’s Govanhill. “What’s yours?”
This invitation to the local community to collectively share in the story gathering process is at the heart of the mission of The Community Newsroom, a partnership between The Ferret investigative media coop and Greater Govanhill magazine.
The Community Newsroom opened its doors on a chilly December day back in 2022. But with its cheery bright yellow exterior, the aim was to bring warmth to our surroundings, along with an easier way of accessing both local and Scotland wide news.
Govanhill is the most diverse neighbourhood in Scotland and many of the communities here are marginalised by traditional, or legacy media. That marginalisation, and the feeling that news media isn’t relevant, means that many of the people that come to our events and workshops don’t read newspapers, even online, and don’t watch TV news.
That’s not just true here in Govanhill, but according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, four in ten people across the world say they sometimes or often avoid the news. And just over a third (36%) of people across the UK say they trust the media.
Our Open House editorial meetings were born a year later out of both The Ferret and Greater Govanhill’s desire to do our bit towards rebuilding that trust right here on our own doorstep.
Our two organisations are quite different. The Ferret is a Scotland-wide investigative media coop, reaching millions of readers through both our own website and co-publishing deals with everyone from Scottish titles including the Herald and the Daily Record to the BBC. Our journalists and members are our owners and can stand as either journalist or reader directors on our board. We’ve won multiple awards for big investigations into power and influence in Scotland today, including Scottish Press Awards team of the year for our Who Runs Scotland.
Greater Govanhill meanwhile, is a local solutions-based media project which aims to challenge stereotypes, break down cultural barriers, and amplify unrepresented voices. It’s also award-winning and produces a free solutions-focused print magazine, delivered from our community newsroom to homes and businesses in the area, and runs regular events, workshops and training programmes equipping people with writing, filmmaking, storytelling skills and more.
But we’ve been working together to bring the media back on our local high street, aiming to more accessible to all.
What is the Community Newsroom?
Our Community Newsroom is a place where people drop-by to tell us what they think, pick up a copy of the Govanhill Magazine, or book time to speak to one of our journalists about a story they think we should be working on. It’s a venue for our community training sessions, discussions and social events, a place to make real world connections not possible online. Our shop window features headlines from recent stories helping our journalism be visible in our community.
It also gives our teams of journalists a sustainable co-working environment, for freelancers as well as our journalists and local groups can hire out our meeting space or a pay-what-you-can basis too, creating a work environment that’s ripe for collaboration and for finding new ways of doing things.
Open editorial meetings
The idea for our Open House editorial meetings was to provide an opportunity for journalists from Greater Govanhill and The Ferret to collaborate with people with lived experience of different issues, as well as professionals and campaigners working on a range of topics. Everyone was invited into our public space on an equal footing to share their expertise.
As well as talking about the chosen topic, we also asked participants ‘what could the media cover better?’ and ‘what stories need to be heard?’.
People told us they wanted us to keep following stories, to talk about the reality that people live with, even when it’s not ‘sexy’ or new. Solidarity, they told us, is about sticking with it.
They agreed we should not shy away from telling things as they were. But they wanted us to cover the positives too, as well as investigate whether suggested solutions ever came to pass, reporting on them if they worked, but also when they didn’t.
And they wanted us to go deeper, side-step the stereotypes and help the public understand issues from a human perspective rather than serve up sharable sound bites.
Discussing the housing emergency
In December 2023, Glasgow City Council declared a housing emergency, becoming the third council in Scotland to do so. It seemed imperative that in an area of spiralling rents and with high rates of child poverty, we chose this as the first topic of our community newsroom.
It proved to be the right call. Our little 22-seater newsroom was so packed that people were perched on stools and crowded into our reception area. Those in the room included refugees and people with experience of homelessness, forced to wait for temporary accommodation in substandard hotels, young people made homeless on turning 18, campaigners of all sorts, housing association representatives and academics.
People shared their own experiences, and remarked on the similarity of challenges facing people in the room, despite their diverse backgrounds. They raised questions for our journalists to investigate and also asked us to look at what worked and could be replicated.
The idea of stopping evictions and preventing homelessness featured strongly. Yet we heard that was often far from the case, with some reporting stories of those facing evictions even from social housing. In that same meeting, we heard from one housing association representative about its attempt to take a different approach.
Instead of sending round the rent arrears officers, they instead employed community workers, who knew that dealing with the issues in people’s lives – from difficulties accessing benefits to dealing with grief, mental health and addiction problems – was the way to ensure people kept their homes. As Sanctuary Scotland’s community manager Anthony Morrow later told us: “It’s about recognising tenants that are struggling, helping them to be happy and healthy. Then the rent follows.”
The investigation that followed that meeting was two-fold. There was a hard hitting Scotland-wide news story exposing the level of eviction orders granted despite the supposed rent ban, an issue that had been raised at the meeting from a Glasgow perspective.
But we didn’t stop there. We also reported on the approach of Sanctuary Housing, both the potential of the solution and the limitations in a feature style long read, giving people evidence that something different might be possible. Both pieces featured on The Ferret and the Sunday National… and on our shop front window, of course.
Talking about food insecurity
We ended our housing meeting by asking people what we should focus on next, and food poverty and insecurity was a clear choice. Greater Govanhill had already worked alongside other members of the Scottish Beacon local news collaborative to report on the rising use of food banks across Scotland and based on what we heard from communities around the country, this felt like an urgent subject to discuss.
From community kitchens to food pantries, a Muslim food parcel charity to the Sikh langar that provides hot meals, there are a number of organisations in Govanhill with knowledge of this area.
We invited them in, asking them to think about the history of food banks – which started as an emergency measure, not a solution in themselves and asking if the Scottish Government’s plans for “a cash first” plan to address this were moving fast and far enough.
Conversations highlighted the broader issues of poverty, seen through Scotland's growing food insecurity, focusing on the limitations of food aid models and their impact on vulnerable communities, such as asylum seekers.
Discussions also centred on the challenges pantries face, such as funding and sourcing appropriate food. There was a call for a more dignified approach to food provision, with community meals proposed as a way to foster social inclusion and reduce stigma.
Public diners was one of the ideas that was raised in the discussion, both as a means of tackling social isolation and fostering community, as well as reducing stigma in accessing food support. Previously known as British Restaurants, these were publicly subsidised eating establishments that were common across the UK during the 1940s.
So when Greater Govanhill was putting together an issue of the print magazine focused on heritage themes, we commissioned an article on this topic. The article explores the history of these establishments, and the possibility of their return to Govanhill and Glasgow.
As Abigail McCall writes:
“British Restaurants were not perfect but they were public infrastructure. In theory, they extended people’s democratic control into their food environment. Public diners could do that again – and Govanhill would be the perfect place for them to start.”
Why this open approach matters to our journalism
We believe everyone has a story worth hearing and that when we know and understand each other better, we support each other better. As much as surveys and digital engagement provide an opportunity to canvas views, nothing beats bringing together people for an in-person conversation. It helps them find solidarity and see the shared structural issues shaping their experience as well as individual circumstances.
The Open House creates connections, and leads to stories for our organisations to follow up on and develop. But they also stand as an ‘act of journalism’ in themselves – a direct means of sharing information, knowledge and lived expertise.
But there are challenges too. This work needs resources, both in organising and keeping in touch with our participants but in following up story leads and making sure we do what we say. It’s by doing so that we hope we will help, in our small way, build the trust that journalism so badly needs to rebuild.
Karin Goodwin is an award-winning journalist who specialises in social affairs stories for online, audio, broadcast and print publications. She is the co-editor of The Ferret and co-founder of The Community Newsroom. Rhiannon J Davies is founder and editor of Greater Govanhill community magazine and The Scottish Beacon local news collaborative. She is interested in constructive, community-led journalism that creates positive social impact.
This article is part of People-Powered Storytelling, a new collaborative series showcasing the transformative impact of community-centred media initiatives in the UK. Read more about the series, and the other contributions that are part of it, here.