The Anchor presents: the Your Local News series

Hello Anchor readers:

Over the past few months, both in the community and in-person, I’ve had a lot of incredible discussions with folks who are passionate about local on-the-ground news coverage.

The news industry is going through a challenging time right now, and based on feedback, we’ve heard a couple of things from our readers, and from people who consume news in general:

• “News has always been free. Why is that changing now?” While news has been appeared free through the act of picking up newspapers, watching a 6pm broadcast through cable TV, or even by way of digital snippets via social media, it’s not free to produce. In the case of a newsletter, there are costs associated with the work that goes out a couple of times each week, whether that’s the cost of someone researching and writing stories, or paying a skilled professional to run the website, to social media graphic design.

• Why an e-newsletter? Can’t you print these? As much as we’d love to print off these newsletters, we’re trying to keep costs low so that we can continue to serve our community, especially with more than 5,600 people subscribed to The Anchor.

• I care about local news. How can I help ensure it doesn’t disappear into the ether? Aside from the obvious—subscribing to the Insider tier of our newsletter—there are other ways to do so. We’ll be going over that in these workshops.

With some of those examples, I’m elated to launch an online dialogue series called Your Local News. Each of these will be hosted by yours truly, and have been put together by me through the feedback I’ve received from the community. I’m definitely open to taking more topics to cover in the future: this is our newsletter for our community.

The goal of the series is to demystify the world of local news, and understand the journalism landscape within the context of hyper-local news.

We’ll be rotating the times for each one, so if you miss one, hopefully you can catch another. Each session will go for a half an hour: 15 minutes for a bit of a discussion, and 15 minutes for a chat/question and answer/comment session.

We will have a ‘vlog’ summary of each edition’s chat, that you can watch on the go over YouTube. And yes, that means we’ve got a YouTube channel now, which we hope you’ll follow for more New West content.

Here are the dates for the first four sessions. These are each limited to 20 people; first come, first served.

• Friday, Oct. 6: 12 to 12:30pm. Topic: a crash course on newsletters.

• Thursday, Oct. 26: 12 to 12:30pm. Topic: using newsletters to live your best local life.

• Sunday, Nov. 5: 1 to 1:30pm. Topic: the informed community.

• Sunday, Nov. 26: 1 to 1:30pm. Topic: news and social media.

We hope to expand these to in-person events in 2024, if interest is high.

To remain in the know, be sure to subscribe to our twice-weekly newsletter for all the latest in New Westminster. And as always, thank you for your support.

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