Michael Hill, Trinity's head of multimedia, announced that five micro-sites had been launched on the Teesside Gazette at the beginning of the year.

"The idea is that it will be totally run by local people and it will just be overseen by the content team,” said Hill.

News for the people, by the people.

"We're also hosting lots of local content that there was not room for in the print edition, everything you can imagine that is going on in that local area; meetings, news, anything and everything.”

The group has been sending leaflets to all local communities within or around Teesside (libraries, community centers, neighborhood watch and more) to ask for their participation in the local news.

"This is something that could play quite well in lots of other communities. I think this is the sort of idea that we can take anywhere."

Day-by-day, more evidence and cases come up indicating the movement of newspapers towards local and community journalism. Could this be a new trend for an industry in search for its fleeing readers?

18 more micro-sites will be launched by July, and if the idea continues to pick up, it could be extended to all of the Trinity’s newspapers.

If the idea turned out to be extremely successful, maybe it could even lead the way to a viable model of locally self-produced and self-referential news, which would almost be independent from the newspaper group’s management and editorial choices.

Source: journalism.co.uk