Start Spreading the News; the story so far
From launching a new newspaper, to developing our model and establishing a membership scheme, 2018 has been a big year for Social Spider CIC!
If you haven’t heard of us already, we’re a small social enterprise based in north east London. With limited resources and a small team we (somehow) manage to print three community newspapers each month, using a social enterprise model which combines professional journalism with community involvement to create meaningful news written by and for local people.
We believe that the decline of traditional local news outlets has had a significant effect on local democracy and civic pride. Our model utilises the skills, knowledge and passions of our communities to create papers which are reflective of and responsive to the people they serve. Our news reporting helps hold power to account by scrutinising local decision makers and keeping up to date with local developments. Our features, opinion, arts, culture and sports content reflects the lives and interests of the communities we work with — all of whom have an endless supply of exciting projects, important campaigns and creative pursuits to write about. We offer local people a chance to be heard when mainstream news outlets and traditional local newspapers are nowhere to be seen. We provide them with the guidelines and support to write their own stories.
These are challenging times for local news, with many newspapers closing and advertising revenue in decline. However we are proud to publish three newspapers, Waltham Forest Echo (est 2014), Tottenham Community Press (est 2016) and Enfield Dispatch (2018).
For the past few years we’ve had our heads down, getting to work on the logistics of producing quality local news. Now, we’ve finally decided it’s time to start talking about what we do — to promote our work, share our learnings and to contribute to the growing conversation about how we can ensure that communities in the UK still have access to news about their areas.
The following blog posts come from our staff team as they reflect on some of the key developments which took place in 2018.
With best wishes for the year ahead,
Anna, David and the Social Spider team!
