After the show yesterday I had a meeting with a couple of young lads from a very promising alternative media initiative. The Bristol Cable bills itself as a citizen media co-op. That is, it will be local news, by local people, for local people. That is as opposed to local-ish news largely content-farmed by a national organization that owns many “local” newspapers and is itself part-owned by the Daily Mail, which is what we (and many other British cities) currently have. Alon and Adam turned out to be very personable and full of big ideas. You’ll get to hear more from them on April 23rd when I have them on the radio show, and there’s an in-depth article about them today on journalism.co.uk, but I wanted to write about them now because they have a crowdfunding initiative going that had a deadline at the end of next week. The money is being used in part to fund a series of free workshops for local people that will help teach them journalism skills. It all sounds very promising.

One of the things I like about the Bristol Cable team is that they are not all white. Around 94% of UK journalists are white and, as Christina Zaba said on the radio show last week, the increasing cost of education is making that situation worse rather than better. Media Diversified, the organization behind the excellent Writers of Colour Twitter feed, is also running a crowdfunding campaign, in this case to help create a directory of minority ethnic experts who can be made available to the media. If you don’t feel that supporting a Bristol initiative is appropriate for you, maybe that one will appeal.