Kate Griffin freelance journalism and editing

“I liked The Stig. He came round my house, he had drinks... and all the time he was writing a book.” For the first time since “Stig-Gate” unfolded, Jeremy Clarkson publicly shared his feelings of betrayal. But the interview wasn’t with a national paper or broadcaster. He was talking to Witney TV, an online news station that didn’t exist six months ago.

We want to consume content without paying for it. So why do we still equate professionalism with getting paid?

A friend just sent me a link to this Tom Tomorrow cartoon about the death of reporting. You see, we're not really living in the Information Age at all. We're in the Opinion Age, building wobbly castles on a shaky base of not-quite-fact. (That's partly why it's also known as the Age of Stupid, but more on that later.)

Community journalism is a relatively new and rapidly changing area, so I don't feel confident in coming up with a catch-all definition of what makes a community newspaper. On the other hand, I do want readers of this blog to know what I'm talking about, so it might be helpful if I list some of the characteristics that most community newspapers have in common.

A community newspaper...?

In my last blog post, I wrote about how many regional papers are calling themselves community newspapers despite being nothing of the sort.

I want to reclaim the term "community newspaper".  A real community newspaper is created by the community with the fundamental aim of enriching the community it serves. This enrichment may take many forms, including but not limited to:

At the time of writing, Google is returning 1,160,000 results for the search term “community newspaper”, as opposed to 192,000 for “regional newspaper”.  On that basis, you could be forgiven for thinking that community journalism has become the most prevalent form of print media in the world today.

At the end of next week, I’ll be leaving Leys News, the community newspaper I’ve been editing for the past two years. I’ve learnt a lot in that time, but the biggest epiphany was this: community journalism is a sector in its own right.