CommonSpace will be back in the new year
WELL, that’s it from us for 2016, folks, and what a year it’s been.
The CommonSpace team is now off for the Christmas holidays and a very well-earned break. We’ll be back publishing as normal on 4 January.
I’d like to say a huge thank you to all of you for your incredible support this year. CommonSpace is now two years old and we are going from strength to strength.
It wasn’t our intention when we launched CommonSpace to have a training side, but we’ve built such a good reputation that we have a lot of demand from people.
In 2016, we continued our core news function, publishing several stories daily, and we developed other parts of CommonSpace.
We got our magazine section up and running, which has been a great way to branch out into a vast range of subjects that we struggled to cover in year one.
We also increased the training we’ve been providing to people interested in journalism. It wasn’t our intention when we launched CommonSpace to have a training side, but we’ve built such a good reputation that we have a lot of demand from people who want to train and work with us because they like our approach to reporting.
As a result, we had a number of students from the University of the West of Scotland come to CommonSpace earlier in the year to complete a work experience requirement in their journalism course, and we’ve had a number of secondary school students in for weeks here and there throughout the year.
We’ve also had some staffing changes at CommonSpace. Jen Stout left us at the beginning of the summer to pursue an academic qualification in journalism, and Michael Gray took a two-month break in the summer to do some travelling. We decided that it was a great opportunity to run a paid training course for a couple of months, and I’m delighted that two of the trainees we brought on board, Nathanael Williams and Maxine Blane, are still with the team today.
In August, we launched CommonSocial, a major new project for Common Weal and CommonSpace.
In August, we launched CommonSocial, a major new project for Common Weal and CommonSpace. In the last two years we’ve had our tech wizards building a social network, and in August it was finally ready to open up to the public.
If you haven’t used CommonSocial yet, all you have to do is register an account on CommonSpace to access it. You can get some more information about how it all works here.
In the news, 2016 has been an absolutely chaotic year. We had the Scottish election in May – it feels so long ago now, doesn’t it? – and then the EU referendum in June. Some major things this year – like the Chilcot Report and the Panama Papers revelations – now feel a little lost amid the noise of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.
Throughout it all, the CommonSpace team – and we’re a tiny team – have worked incredibly hard to bring the best coverage that we can, and I’m so proud of our reporters – Michael Gray, David Jamieson and Nathanael Williams – and everything they’ve achieved.
But all of this is only possible because of you. Our supporters have entrusted their cash to us because they want a new media, a better media, and I’m honoured to be in a position where I can help build it.
So a huge thank you to all of you who donate to Common Weal. You really are building a better Scotland, and we’re going to continue working as hard as ever.
So a huge thank you to all of you who donate to Common Weal. You really are building a better Scotland, and we’re going to continue working as hard as ever.
If you’re a CommonSpace reader but not yet a financial supporter, you can sign up to make a donation here, and we’d really appreciate the support.
2016 has made it clearer than ever that good journalism is absolutely essential, and it’s going to be even more so in the years ahead. CommonSpace has now built the foundations of a better media, and a better model for journalism. What we need to do now is grow further and reach more people, and that’s the target we’ll be taking into 2017.
We hope you have a great time with your loved ones over the holidays, and we’ll see you in January.
(Thank you to the brilliant Terry Anderson for the cartoon!)
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