Community broadcasters receive Walkley Grant for Innovation in Journalism

Community broadcasters William Martin, Jim Beatson and Susan Forde have been awarded a Walkley Journalism Innovation Grant for their citizen journalism project.

$15,000 will go towards the project, which is focused on reinvigorating local news and participatory democracy at a grassroots level by providing a model, tools, engagement and distribution for citizen journalism within the community broadcasting sector.

Taking what they’ve learned about producing quality, independent local news at Byron Bay’s 99.9 Bay FM, William Martin and team want to build a network of support and resources for community radio stations around Australia to develop their own citizen journalism newsrooms, and to engage with audiences.

The online portal will allow community newsrooms to upload and share their best stories and content for a global audience; individual newsrooms would also be able to create local news programs and curate portals dedicated to their own communities, with original local stories and national and international updates and features.

Special stories will also be crowd-sourced and crowd-funded. The team will also develop a citizen journalism podcast as a resource for community newsrooms to build the movement of citizen journalism and curate and share the best stories from around Australian community broadcasters.

The Walkley Journalism Innovation Grant program is a pool of seed funding, offered annually since 2013 for proposals for innovative projects in journalism, media and storytelling. Recipients receive support from program partners Google, iSentia and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

William Martin will present at a workshop at the upcoming CBAA Conference, where he'll discuss how citizen journalism fits in with community broadcasting. He'll be joined by Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, journalist and freelance author Margaret Simons.