Community media thrives in Manchester

JAMES Thornett’s blog Straight to the Point is well worth a look as he reports from a conferencein Salford into the future of local media.

He covers a number of interesting points about the rise of community media – and the point about there being there 69 media websites covering the Salford and Greater Manchester area was particularly worthy of raising an eyebrow or two as that’s a helluva number, even for someone as sold on the community media sector as I am.

It’s also interesting that that area is served by the MEN – a company which has made a number of cutbacks and has centralised left, right and centre. Certainly the MEN itself doesn’t take an interest in community content – and its associated weeklies are in the process of having their reporters centralised.

An example of news sources reinventing themselves  once mainstream media departs?