Could you create a newspaper in a day? The TDC Examiner will be a newspaper created and produced by TDC delegates in just 24 hours at the conference.

Led by local journalists who specialise in "pop-up" newspapers and magazines, delegates will get their chance to conduct behind-the-scenes interviews with speakers and contribute news, features, illustrations and opinion pieces.

In the last three posts, I've described our journey with JesmondLocal so far. What’s next? During this “semester of learning”, we’ve decided we’re going to make a documentary. Inspired (and concerned) by the government’s plans for local TV, we’re asking ourselves: what would a really good local, social, community/crowd-sourced documentary look like? We have a good idea what bad local TV will look like. But could it be something better?

Aside from some funding from Newcastle University for our pop-up magazine and bootcamps, we have yet to invest time seeking longer-term financing. Our short term goal is to secure funding so that each year we could promote one of our student volunteers to a one-year, full-time contract as editor of the JesmondLocal news website.

Two years on from launching JesmondLocal (see previous post for background), here’s what we’ve learned so far:

Student journalists need real world, grassroots work experience. For obvious reasons, opportunities for gaining experience in established news organisations are increasingly scarce. There is no shortage of classroom-based teaching, but would-be journalists, professional or otherwise, need first-hand, on-the-ground experience so they can learn the basics of newsgathering and reporting. We give each student a patch (crime, sport, health, environment etc) just as any local newspaper would do and show them how to build up their contacts book, work up story ideas, pitch them to a news desk etc. Hyperlocal/local journalism may not offer the sexy, celeb-filled material many of our students prefer to read, but we impress upon them that Jesmond, like any community, can be a microcosm of the wider world. When you learn the basics of covering a local politics story in Jesmond, you’re learning the basics of covering a political story at Westminster.

News organisations want to recruit talent with this real world, grassroots news experience. Our students often tell us that when invited to interview with the BBC, Sky and other news organisations, the JesmondLocal experience on their CVs is what often gets discussed the most.

What student journalists need to learn is changing all the time. The best university journalism courses are refreshed maybe once each academic year, if you’re lucky. But the tools, techniques and skills journalists need in 2012 are being refreshed almost daily. We offer our students three “semesters of learning” where, at our weekly team meetings, we run through a constantly changing curriculum of the latest multimedia tools, techniques and skills – Skyping experts from around the world to bring our volunteers the freshest insights.

Print is not dead. Convincing an advertiser to spend even £5 on a local online ad is almost impossible. But as soon as you mention the word “magazine”, local advertisers begin to take notice, writing cheques for up to £600 per page. Before Christmas, we created a magazine around the Turner Prize in just 48 hours at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. In the previous two years we’d barely sold enough online advertising to cover our domain fees. Yet in just a week, we sold enough print advertising not just to cover the costs of the magazine, but turn us a £1,000 profit (which we then foolishly donated to charity).

Projects accelerate learning and build community. The online news website remains the hub for what JesmondLocal does. But one-off projects, such as community radio shows and short films fast forward progress. For the same magazine project, we pulled in favours from a variety of creative professionals: illustrators, writers, photographers and film-makers. The chance to work alongside each other, including our students, gave everyone involved – professionals and volunteers - an opportunity to learn and explore new working partnerships.

Sometimes it feels like the journalism equivalent of the Hadron Collider – throwing a bunch of ideas, people, and projects together to see what sticks and what breaks.

We can’t yet claim to have discovered some elusive God particle. But on a good day, it can feel that we are inching our way towards discovering how, at least in our locality, we can create a model for journalism that is sustainable, independent and community-led.

JesmondLocal is a loose collective of professional journalists, educators and creatives, students and community volunteers… and anyone else we can pull in for specific projects.

But we do have a mission statement: to help people and organisations tell their own stories, in order to build cohesive communities around locations and shared interests.

And our vision of how we’ll do this is by cascading the skills of storytelling – journalism – from professionals to students to communities.

In a nutshell, we recruit a dozen to 15 student journalists each year, show and help them practise the skills, techniques, tools and values of independent, trustworthy, multimedia, grassroots journalism – then equip those students to pass on these newly-acquired skills, techniques, tools and values to would-be “citizen journalists” in the community.

To date we’ve struck successful partnerships with Newcastle University, the BBC, Waitrose and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. We’ve won some funding for community journalism bootcamps. We’ve even bagged some advertising. But most of the time, JesmondLocal runs on good will, a wing and a prayer.

I was a staff writer and section editor at The Guardian for 16 years, until I took voluntary redundancy in 2009. I freelance for newspapers (Financial Times, Guardian) and magazines (Management Today, Monocle – more details at http://ianwylie.co.uk). But a nagging itch that I ought to be better connected to where I live (Newcastle upon Tyne) brought me into contact with David Baines, a Newcastle University lecturer with a research interest in hyperlocal journalism. David encouraged me to take some of his students as volunteers and set up a news site for Jesmond, a suburb close to Newcastle upon Tyne city centre.

Local Christians to take 50 international students to the Lake District next weekend, reports Maria Loupa

Photograph: Globe Cafe

A local church is offering to take 50 international students on a weekend trip to the Lake District.

On 16th December, the Global Café, which is hosted by Jesmond Parish Church, will take the 50 students to the Bassenfell Manor in the Lake District, famous for its lakes, mountains and attractive market towns to celebrate an early Christmas (with traditional Christmas dinner).

The organisers say it will be a time full of fun and rest, activity and conversation – a chance to escape from the city.  The cost is £70 per person and includes all food, accommodation and transport. The final date for bookings is this Monday, 12th December.

Globe Café is an international students' meeting point that takes place in Jesmond Parish Church hall. Every Monday night from 7.30 to 10.00pm free coffee is served, and an additional meal provided  for £2. A variety of activities are also organised, from “desserts from around the world” to line dancing.  The café's organisers say they understand how arriving in a foreign country can be very challenging for many students - the difference in customs and in culture can be radical so their purpose is to help make this transition a little less painful.

They also organise day trips and weekends away, like a recent visit to Hadrian’s Wall. The café, which has been running for more than 14 years, aims to offer a welcoming and safe meeting place for international students studying in Newcastle. Students get the opportunity to meet British people, to learn about their culture and practise their English. Organised by Christians who live locally, the café aims to help international students feel more at home in Newcastle during their time here and around 120 international students visit the café every Monday night.

For more information on the trip and the café's activities, visit Globe Cafe's website at www.the-globe.org

*As published in http://jesmondlocal.com/2011/12/celebrate-christmas-early-globe-caf/

A night of film noir, musical theatre and impromptu sketches based on the audience’s suggestions with The Suggestibles, report Maria Loupa and Nelly Stavropoulou

The Suggestibles - Bev Fox, Gary Kitching, Ian McLaughlin, Carl Kennedy and Rob Atkinson - will be returning to Jesmond for their first ever New Year’s Eve performance at The Mixer.

event will begin at 9pm The and last until 2am, and includes a 2 hour improv show with interval snacks and drinks to "fuel" the audience’s suggestions. Everyone will be offered a complimentary glass of bubbly and the stage will transform into a dance floor until 2am.

The improv comedy group  joined forces with Steve Steen -  a regular guest with the Comedy Store Players at the Comedy Store in London - for a live show at The Mixer last month. Bev Fox and Gary Kitching from The Suggestibles talked to Jesmondlocal about their future plans, their relationship with the audience and gave their own point of view on the art of laughter.

You can watch their interview here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ixgzci050sM

http://www.thesuggestibles.co.uk/gig-diary

*As published in http://jesmondlocal.com/2011/12/year-suggestibles/