BAY FM’S Creating a Community Newsroom team headed by William Martin featured as winners in the Walkley Grants for Innovation in Journalism.
Creating a Community Newsroom for the 21st Century.
This project is focused on reinvigorating local news and participatory democracy at a grassroots level by providing a model, tools, engagement and distribution for citizen journalism within the community broadcasting sector.
Taking what they’ve learned about producing quality, independent local news at Byron Bay’s BayFM, William Martin and team want to build a network of support and resources for community radio stations around Australia to develop their own citizen journalism newsrooms, and to engage with audiences.
The online portal will allow community newsrooms to upload and share their best stories and content for a global audience; individual newsrooms would also be able to create local news programs and curate portals dedicated to their own communities, with original local stories and national and international updates and features.
Special stories will also be crowd-sourced and crowd-funded.
The team will also develop a citizen journalism podcast as a resource for community newsrooms to build the movement of citizen journalism and curate and share the best stories from around Australian community broadcasters.
Projects focused on podcasting, community radio, secure communications and automated data journalism will be supported by the Walkleys’ inaugural innovation partner Google Australia.
The Walkley Foundation aims to celebrate and encourage great Australian journalism, telling the stories of our nation and strengthening our democracy. Now in their third year, the grants program is central to the Walkleys’ mission to encourage and support innovation in the Australian media.