Making money out of community journalism

James K Walker shares his experience of life at the frontline of community journalism, and how to make it pay.

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WIC 2010 Podcast – Community Journalism

Publishers of newspapers and other print media have been the gatekeepers of what we read for centuries. But in less than a decade the internet, has thrown the gates open to everyone. Millions of blog posts are published every day to niche readerships seeking specific coverage of anything from local politics to geek culture. How are writers using these opportunities to find new readerships, and affect change of all kinds?

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Al Needham is one of the UK’s foremost male sex writers, having written about sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, Scarlet and Marie Claire. Al is also a founder member of todgertalk. com. He is an editor of LeftLion, Nottingham’s award-winning free alternative magazine.

James Walker is an award- winning writer who has written for a wide variety of publications. He has just finished his debut novel ‘This Is All I Know’, the story of a father who teaches himself origami to get closer to his son. He is the Literature Editor at LeftLion magazine and a member of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.

John Coster is the editor of the Citizen’s Eye Community News Agency, which leads the Community Media Hub covering a wide range of subjects and run entirely by volunteers including John. Through You Tube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter they engage a wide audience. He edits the Soar Community magazine and is lead project worker on the Leicester Wave young people’s newspaper.

Susi O’Neill is a digital strategy consultant within the music and media industries. Her consultancy, Digital Consultant, delivers training, research and consultancy for online business and e-marketing. She is the founder of CreativeNottingham.com

James Urquhart joins Arts Council England

James Urquhart joins Arts Council England, East Midlands as Relationship Manager, Literature. The new role is a result of national restructuring across Arts Council England, and replaces the former Literature Officer, Jacek Laskowski.

James Urquhart
Relationship Manager, Literature
james.urquhart@artscouncil.org.uk

A full staff list for Arts Council England, East Midlands can be found here.

ALT. FICTION BURSARIES FOR NORTHANTS RESIDENTS

Literature Northants is pleased to be able to offer three bursaries for the Alt.Fiction festival of alternative fiction in Derby on Saturday 12th June.

ABOUT THE BURSARIES
Literature Northants will offer bursaries to three successful applicants to cover the price of their ticket (worth £25) plus travel expenses up to the value of £50. See below for details of how to apply.

ABOUT ALT. FICTION
Alt.Fiction, Derby’s international festival for alternative fiction, has been running successfully since 2006 as a one-day event focusing on the genres of science-fiction, fantasy and horror and featuring some of the top authors in the field such as Ramsey Campbell, Iain M Banks, Mike Carey and Harry Harrison. The fourth Alt.Fiction will take place in QUAD; Derby’s state-of-the-art multi-media venue.

The day is made up of a number of different types of sessions, each of which offers something different to the next. These include:

• Readings from authors
• Q&A sessions in which there will be the opportunity to pose questions to panels of authors and publishers. There will also be discussion panels in which a panel debate a particular topic such as ‘What is Alt.Fiction?’
• Workshop sessions. Workshops present the opportunity to get new ideas for writing, or advice about writing and publishing, from established figures in the field.

This year BBC books – publishers of tie-in-novels from the ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Torchwood’ and ‘Being Human’ series – have already confirmed their attendance at Alt. Fiction 2010 along with Rob Shearman, Justin Richards, Mark Morris, Sarah Pinborough, Guy Adams to name but a few.

For full details see http://altfiction.co.uk/.

HOW TO APPLY
To apply, send your CV, three short examples of your work (links to online work preferable) and a covering letter explaining why you should be awarded the bursary to Kate Wilkinson, Literature Development Officer: kwilkinson@northamptonshire.gov.uk.

*** PLEASE NOTE: only applications made by email will be accepted. Applications not containing the required information outlined above will be disregarded. ***

DEADLINE
Your application should be emailed to kwilkinson@northamptonshire.gov.uk by 12 noon on Monday 3rd May 2010. Successful applicants will be notified by the end of the day on Monday 11th May. Unfortunately, we will not be able to notify unsuccessful applicants.

WIC 2010 Podcast – Writing in the Digital Era

New technologies are changing how stories are told and how we encounter them. The internet and computers provide ways to make interactive and immersive stories that are still being explored. Video games are experimenting with ever more sophisticated narratives and are now bigger business than Hollywood. Writing for interactive media is a growing field for writers, who are finding new ways to tell compelling stories that fight back!

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Graham Joyce is the author of seventeen novels, which have won five British Fantasy Awards, the World Fantasy Award and the prestigious O Henry prize. He has also diversified into new media with the announcement last year that he will be writing for Doom 4.

Richard Birkin likes to make things. In the daytime he makes things for Mudlark and Pixel-Lab, and in the evenings he makes things for his imprint Time Travel Opps. He’s been exploring online publishing for this entire century, and would like it if England were more like Iceland.

Steve Ince is an award- nominated Writer-Designer with 17 years of game development experience. He has played an important part in the success of a number of critically acclaimed games, including Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword and In Cold Blood. He was nominated for Excellence in Writing at the Game Developers Choice Awards 2004, following on from three BAFTA nominations for Broken Sword.

Alex Pryce is Director of PoetCasting, the UK’s foremost poetry podcasting enterprise. Her poetry has been published in various magazines and websites, including Mslexia, Staple and Snakeskin. Alex is also a full time postgraduate student in modern and contemporary literature at the University of Leicester.

Books & Things – April 2010

Books & Things
April 2010

http://literaturenetwork.org

Hello!

April has arrived, and with the sunshine comes an array of literary activity. With the excitement of the excellent Writing Industries Conference now behind us, we have put together a round-up of responses to the day and a selection of photos. Plans are currently being made for Writing Industries lectures, workshops and debates in the year to come, so if there are any topics you would like to see covered please let us know.

NEWS
Nottingham based Five Leaves press welcome experienced publisher Richard Hollis, who will be editing a new imprint including a memoir of Ted Hughes. Independent comics publisher Factor Fiction are going digital in 2010, and will be making their titles The Girly Comic and Violent! freely available online. In other comics news, Nottingham cartoonist Brick (alter ego of John Stuart Clarke) will publish his first graphic novel through Knockabout comics, who also publish Alan Moore among others.

EVENTS
Leicester continues as the hub of the East Midlands live literature scene with both WORD and Short Fuse bringing great writers of different kinds to audiences in the region. In May WORD presents poet Marvin Cheeseman as well as a host of local talent through its open mic. Short Fuse takes on the themes of Metropolis (April) and On the Road (May), showcasing great short fiction in both months. Spoken word also returns to Northampton with the return of Ripping Pages. And comics writers appear in force with Mike Carey and Bryan Talbot both featuring at events in Leicester, and a major academic conference into the work of Alan Moore: Magus at the University of Northampton in late May.

OPPORTUNITIES
Want to get writing? Classes and workshops too slow paced for you? Then you need the Kick School of Creative Writing! Write, drink tea, write, more tea, more writing. Repeat. If journalism is your thing, then the BBC are hosting summer placements for new reporters as part of the Blast reporter scheme. Proposals are being invited by the National Association for Writers in Education’s national conference, a good chance to make your opinion heard. And the NCLA Student Writing Competition invites foreign students at UK universities to write about their experiences.

BLOGGERS and PODCASTS
The first two of twelve podcasts from the Writing Industries Conference are now available, so if you were not able to get a ticket for the day you can now hear all about how to sell your script and see it produced and find out if there really are 1000 working poets in the UK. Helen Jaeger interviews Jan Snow, a happy librarian who talks about the changing role of libraries. And Ross Bradshaw has set himself the challenge of living for a whole year only on the product of independent publishers, but can a man live on indie press alone?

Until next month, have fun and if you see me at an event please come and say hello!

Damien Walter
Literature Network Coordinator

http://literaturenetwork.org

(To unsubscribe from this newsletter please email ‘unsubscribe’ to editor@literaturenetwork.org)

WIC 2010 Podcast – 1000 Working Poets?

Henry David Thoreau said that the poet ‘must sustain his body by his poetry’, but how many poets today can claim that achievement? With the growth of performance poetry and spoken word in the last decade the answer may be more than you think, with as many as 1000 working poets* making their primary living from performance. What is spoken word, how has it transformed the fortunes of working poets and how do new writers get noticed on the performance circuit?

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Lydia Towsey is a poet and performer. She has performed with John Hegley, Jean Binta Breeze and Keorapetse Kgositsile, the South African Poet Laureate. She comperes and coordinates, WORD! the longest running poetry night in the East Midlands and in 2009 was the Artistic Director of ‘The Lyric Lounge’

Mark Gwynne Jones is well known for mind altering poetry with a music-hall edge. He has performed alongside The Levellers, Alan Bates, Mark Radcliffe and John Peel favourites Half Man Half Biscuit. He has sold poetry to the CIA and written poetry with disenfranchised kids in some of the most deprived areas of Britain.

Sarah Ellis is the programme manager for Apples & Snakes. She is currently exploring new and pioneering ways of touring work through live and online experiences and is executive producer for the national online critical framework, My Place Or Yours. She produced Apples & Snakes’ national tour, Exposed in 2006.

NCLA Student Writing Competition

Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts is pleased to announce the inaugural International Student Writing Competition. The first of its kind to be sponsored by NCLA, the competition aims to attract outstanding work that captures the day-to-day lives of international students living and studying in the UK.

Deadline:
21 Jun 2010
International student short story competition

1st Prize: £1000
2nd Prize: £500
3rd prize: £200
Winners to be selected by award-winning writer, Jackie Kay

NCLA is pleased to announce the inaugural International Student Writing Competition. The first of its kind to be sponsored by NCLA, the competition aims to attract outstanding work that captures the day-to-day lives of international students living and studying in the UK.

Students from anywhere in the world can enter, providing they are studying at a UK university or have graduated within the past two years. Entrants can write about any aspect of their experience of studying abroad, such as the challenges of adapting to life in a different climate and culture, the ups and downs of ‘international living’, culture clashes, coping with food / cuisine in a new country, homesickness, love (or the lack of it), social lives, job hunts and struggles to make ends meet.

The winning story and a shortlisted selection will be published in a collection exploring international students’ experience of studying in the UK in 2010.

Deadline for submissions is 21st June 2010

For competition rules and further information about making a submission, please visit the website.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ncla/projects/competitions/isssc/

NAWE Conference Submissions

Proposals are invited for this essential UK event for writers working in all educational and community contexts.

You set the agenda

The NAWE Conference enables writers to share their various approaches to teaching writing at all levels and to address current issues. We are open to any suggestions in terms of presentation format but we are likely to give preference to workshop sessions or discussions where delegates can be most actively involved.

The Conference will run from Friday lunchtime through to Sunday midday. There will be special events on both evenings.

Proposals should consist of a brief (100 word) outline, exactly as you would wish the session to be described in the conference programme, together with any further detail (250 words max) and biographical information on all presenters (50 words each). The suggested length of a session is 75-90 minutes (though sessions may be shared). Please also specify exactly what technical equipment you require. All presenters need to register as delegates but will have a proportion (20%) of the conference fee waived.

Deadline for proposals: 31 May
Decisions on proposals: 30 June
Programme published: 31 July
Booking & payment deadline: 15 October

Please email proposals to: conference@nawe.co.uk

St Georges Day Festival

April 24, 2010

**** St. George’s Day Festival 24th April****
As part of the St. George’s Day festival at Orton Square on April 24th there will be a celebration of local literature. A mini expo of Literature organisations from the city will be sharing their expertise and information and putting on a series of short readings. There’ll be a workshop on improving your performance skills & on the main stage the world premiere of 4 new spoken word commissions. So come along from 1pm if you’d like to find out about creative writing in the city.

For younger readers the Bookbus will be in attendance with storytelling & crafts and there will be lots of other eyecatching entertainments at Orton Square so don’t miss it!

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