Ordsall Community Café have now established a Community Reporters Club, in which local people can join.

We are currently attending training with the BBC with the producers of Look North West News; which is very exciting and informative.

One of the items from the training was found that there is a great need for a locally based news desk, which could be Blogg based.

It would be manned and based at Ordsall Community Café, allowing all local residents access to our computer suite and free training.

The news desk would take the form of local community events listing, feedback or comments on current issues such as regeneration, police and emergency services information and of course Private Sector companies giving their points.

It would involve the filming of people from time to time, so that local people see the person not just hear their name and maybe take more interest or get involved in more activities, events or say how they feel without the feeling of “nobody takes any notice” or “it’s already decided anyway”.

If you think this may be of some interest to you, your group or organisation, please contact me on Stacy_cafe@hotmail.co.uk or call me on 0161 872 6011.

I look forward to hearing from you soon

Stacy Cass
Ordsall Community Reporters

On Tuesdays from 11:00am to 3:00pm Ordsall Community Cafe are running a multimedia club in conjunction with the MCIN community reporters programme.

You can learn how to use a computer for the first time, or how to use programmes or media equipment.  You can learn how to turn you videos into CDs, make and edit a movie, and many other things.

Ordsall Community Cafe is 172 Tatton Street, Ordsall.  You can phone them on 0161 872 6011 or email them at ordsall.cafe@hotmail.co.uk

Or go to their website at www.occ.colsal.org.uk

The Club has created a new blog to be used to share the history of the Whitemoss Club for Young People, past and present. It aims to give the local people and people that attend the club the opportunity to share memories, video and pictures about the club and surrounding areas.

The blog can be found at http://whitemosshistory.blogspot.com/

Following on from our blogging workshop we have set up a media club at the Whitemoss Club for Young People.  People attending the media club can brush up on their IT skills and get help in using a number of software packages.  Most recently we have been giving people help in using Photoshop.

The media club takes place at 1:00pm - 3:00pm on Thursdays.

If you would like to come to the media club please contact Graeme Bates at MCIN on 0161 230 1430 or email him at info@mcin.net

We have held a number of workshops at Chatterbox (a community group in Blackley) and have set up a media club.  Some of the local residents are producing a book taken from their experiences with the cook and taste sessions being held at Chatterbox.

The media club at Chatterbox takes place at 10:00am - 12noon on Thursdays.

If you would like to come to the media club, or for more information please contact Graeme Bates on 0161 230 1430 or email him at info@mcin.net

As reported we held a workshop for a number of voluntary sector groups on 24 October.  In all 6 groups were represented.  The workshop was very productive and we hope to be able to bring you RSS feeds from their blogs once they have set them up.

We will be holding a workshop for voluntary and community groups next Tuesday (24 October).  The groups attending will be given an introduction to the project and we will get them started on setting up blogs for themselves and for their organisations.

Once the blogs have been set up we will take feeds from them and their information will be appearing on the front page of the myManchester website.

We have run a Community Reporters course for the Chinese Women’s Centre, Wai Yin, focusing on video production. This will enable them to edit the videos that they have taken of community events and to upload them to a blog that can be fed into their website and the ethnicity site. A group is planning to meet on a regular basis to plan video coverage of upcoming community events.

We were extremely busy through out May and the beginning of June signing people up as potential Community Reporters and delivering introduction sessions and workshop sessions.

The people we signed up at Cheetham Jobs Fair have completed their introductory sessions and are now ready to start creating their content. There will be links to their blogs on this site.

The meeting with the Monsall Women’s Group went very well and they are due to start their workshops this Thursday. We are also due to start working with a group from Cheetham Sure Start at the end of the month.

We have also been meeting with Chatterbox - a community outreach project in North Manchester. Of the initial 20 people who express an interest in becoming Community Reporters, 12 people have signed up for the workshops.

We’re off to ALL FM today to speak to Danielle about members of their 10-strong news team getting involved in M-CR.

ALL FM are the community radio station for Ardwick Longsight and Levenshulme, so seem like ideal partners to hook up with. Their volunteers already get support in radio production - they’ll be able to bring their existing skills and learn new web-based ones.

Check out ALL FM’s new website: www.allfm.org