Community media organisation West Leeds Dispatch has been awarded almost £149,000 by the National Lottery Community Fund to keep producing its online and print edition for the next three years.
This builds on the previous three-year award which funded the editor, supported community reporter training and produced a regular print edition.
WLD Chair Anne Akers said the award recognised the importance of community-focused news and the value of working with local people to empower them to write stories about what interests them.
“Local newspapers used to be the go-to source of information for everyone wanting to know what was going on in their communities. Now there fewer publications across the UK, so people struggle to find the news that interests them,” she said.
“For the past nine years we have provided local news to the people of West Leeds. First this was done entirely by volunteers, but more recently, thanks to the Community Fund we’ve had a part-time paid editor who has produced the online and print editions as well as training more than 80 volunteer community reporters.”
This latest award funds an extra day a week for the editor and a new freelance role supporting WLD‘s community reporters to help them develop their skills.
All the reporters have completed an six-week course run by Editor John Baron. The course helps them understand what makes a news story and gives them the basics of writing articles. Up until now, there hasn’t been the capacity to do much further work to help develop them once they have trained.
Anne added: “John, our editor, has worked very hard to make the West Leeds Dispatch the number one source of local news for people in the area, putting in many hours as a volunteer until we secured funding to pay him.
“It’s thanks to John’s hard work and commitment that so many people have trained as community reporters and that so many others have given us their support. It’s also thanks to him that the Community Fund has recognised the value of quality local journalism to our communities.
“So we would like to thank the Community Fund and the Lottery players. With this funding we can continue and expand on the work of the WLD.”
- WLD is now seeking expressions of interest in the freelance community reporter development and support worker role. If you might be interested in the role, a full description of the role and person specification is available here. Closing date is Monday, 18 November 2024. Interviews will be held Friday, 29 November 2024.
The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its strategy, ‘It starts with community’, which will underpin its efforts to distribute at least £4 billion of National Lottery funding by 2030.
As part of this, the funder has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives.
National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year (2023/24) The National Lottery Community Fund awarded over half a billion pounds (£686.3 million) of life-changing funding to communities across the UK, supporting over 13,700 projects to turn their great ideas into reality.
Well done to all involved!