PINF Provides Two Grants To Boost News Coverage in Newry
Local journalism in Newry has just received a major boost through the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF) which has provided two grants for innovative media projects.
The PINF is a UK-wide organisation which “aims to support ethical and impartial journalism that informs and empowers the public about the things that matter to all of us.”
The PINF is keen to help support indie media outlets to grow the public information news base in different areas throughout the UK and has selected Newry as its first project in Northern Ireland.
The funding initiative has been co-designed over a period of months with local businesses, organisation, and members of the local media all contributing.
The initiative supported through the Paul Hamelyn Foundation in its mission to create socially just societies will support aspiring journalists and existing media in both digital and in print.
Over the UK there are many print titles, dailies and weeklies, struggling due to loss of advertising revenue and a drop in counter sales. This undermines the fabric of local democracy and it impacts on the whole of our society.
And this development presents a very difficult scenario for the media. As the Fourth Estate, a special responsibility for presenting the news without any subjective political or sectoral slant on issues lies with the media which should be a protector of the key pillars of our society.
And digital media too has had its problems with not securing its fair slice of business advertising revenue through questionable procurement processes thus impacting also on sustainability.
The Newry PINF initiative was launched in May 2024 and has caught the imagination of many in Newry by producing a Newry News Plan.
Back in 2023, a number of meetings were held in Ballybot House and consulting widely across the Newry community and it transpired that a need to engage younger people was top of the list along for a need for more effective investigative journalism.
Columba O’Hare of Newry.ie said: “In recent years the local Newry media has generally suffered from the capacity to generate sufficient in-depth news items and this initiative is designed to address this need.
“Therefore, the Newry media outlets will be driving forward with a news platform supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is currently in progress.
“This platform will help improve the speed and depth of gathering information from complex sources and it will help analysis of local government matters ultimately providing an improved quality of in-depth journalism.”
Kayleigh Curtis has been appointed as the Youth Journalism manager, and in tandem with Columba O’Hare, they will be trying to increase the capacity of quality news for the Newry area.
The youth project will allow younger community members to cut their teeth on journalism skills and gain valuable work experience possibly providing a basis for future careers in journalism and other professional areas such as PR.
It is expected that the ‘cub reporters’ will cover some of the more mundane tasks initially developing key journalistic skills while the more experienced media outlets concentrate on more investigative and analytical articles.
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