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Digital Sentinel funded by Carnegie UK Trust ‘Neighbourhood News’

Great to see that the work funded through the AHRC Connected Communities project Community Hacking has attracted more funding to develop the third phase – community journalism. This press release was written by Whale Arts:

“An emerging community news agency in Wester Hailes is to receive £10k of funding after winning a competition to help local news projects organised by the Carnegie UK Trust. The Digital Sentinel online news site will be run by the community as ‘citizen journalists’ and provide a go-to hub for hyper-local news for people in the area to find out more about stories and information directly relevant to the area.

The funding comes as the Carnegie UK Trust revealed the five winning projects of its £50,000 ‘Neighbourhood News’ initiative which was set up to help develop innovative ways of producing local news. http://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/changing-lives/neighbourhood-news

WHALE Arts represented a collaboration of organisations in Wester Hailes including Prospect Community Housing and Wester Hailes Health Agency for their bid. Together they have been working collaboratively with academic research partners on providing access to online social history archives using QR codes, blogs and Facebook sites. It is one of a suite of projects under the banner “Our Place in Time” using digital media to provide access to archives and to tell the stories of Wester Hailes today.

Visit www.digitalsentinel.net regularly from June onwards to see the emerging site develop and become populated with content. If you are a local resident or worker who would like to get involved, email digitalsentinel@whalearts.co.uk ”

The Digital Sentinel hopes to recover many of the positive aspects of a community running it’s own newspaper. See blog posts from the HailesMatters blog:

“Every-community-needs-its-own-sentinel/”