When we first started publishing the G41 Newspaper, our website was pretty dull. It basically gave people our contact details and showed them a few of the stories that had been published in that month's paper. But g41.org.uk is a bit different - anyone can use it to make the news.

Over the last year, I've been getting more and more interested in what's been called Citizen Journalism. It's about giving people tools to tell stories about their community. For me, that's a first step along the road to finding how people think their communities could be made better places to live and then working together to put those changes in place. It's a practical example of the kind of ideas that were talked about in the recent Glasgow 2020 report.
For a long time, journalism has been about journalists deciding what's important enough to get published. That's not anything sinister, it's just that there's only so much space in a newspaper or news programme and not everything can get in.
But on the internet, there isn't the same kind of space pressure. It's also much easier for people to submit their own content. It's something that's really beginning to take off in the United States. The site at Bluffton Today is a good example, but there are others. Just like g41.org.uk, Bluffton Today is built on Drupal.
I'd like g41.org.uk to become a place that thousands of local people use every day to find out what's happening locally and to tell their own stories about life in the area; a place to share opinions and information.
To help you, we've created a short tutorial on how you can create Stories, Events, Blog Entries and Tags for the site.
I hope you read through it, see how easy it is and get contributing!