News Dash in the West Midlands

Something I’ll be keeping an eye on over the next few weeks is News Dash, a Say Hello project produced by Meshed Media.

News Dash is partnering up four community groups with journalists and social media experts to help them tell their stories.

The teams will have two weeks to complete the challenge with a simple brief: find the best stories and present them in the most effective way.

The teams might use blogs, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube, or more traditional methods to present the stories. What they use is up to them, but the aim remains the same, to get the stories out there.

The three community groups recruited so far are all very different, which should make for a good variety of content:

Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery – ‘arose from a deep genuine community interest in maintaining this historic landscaped Victorian Cemetery, which is also a valued green open space within an urban setting.’  This group bought to mind the Friends of Redcar Cemetary, who developed their community website project through talk about local and created the awesome Digital Cemetary, where readers can virtually visit graves.

iCycle – ‘More than a cycle shop’, iCycle is part of Queen Alexandra College for people with visual impairment and other disabilities.  The college trains mature students to become cycle repair and maintenance mechanics, who gain work experience working in the iCycle shop.

Blaze FM – a community radio station for Birmingham, Solihull and the West Midlands that helps promote local community groups.

It will be really interesting to see the different stories that emerge from these groups, and how they are chosen to be presented.

If you would like to get involved in News Dash, either by putting your organisation forward to be used in the project or by simply telling them your story, visit their Get Involved page.