Eliminating News Desert in Płock County by Creating an Innovative Local News

The project also involves building a participation platform for informationally excluded residents, which will enable the local community to be activated by creating a zone for citizen authors (Community Leaders Zone).

As part of the project, we want to challenge problems and eliminate the information desert in a community inhabited by 90,000 people. We will build a media platform with information important for the local community, which will be based on 2 main foundations. The first is an information sub-portal dedicated to the community containing quality local information prepared by a professional journalistic team. The platform will discuss important social topics, including: related to the issue of refugees, ecology, as well as attitudes of tolerance and social understanding. We will also promote pro-democratic and pro-participatory attitudes here. The second is a citizen journalist/influencer zone (Community Leaders Zone). Special zone will be created within the information sub-portal, where information and articles prepared by citizen journalists, local leaders and influencers from the information desert area will be posted. The zone will be animated by a dedicated Community Manager. An additional element will be a closed Facebook group available only to citizen authors.

Before launching sub-portal and (Community Leades Zone) a series of detailed focus studies will be carried out in the area of the news desert, which will allow for the collection of data on the needs of the local community and will allow for the effective development of an information strategy. The strategy itself will include, among others: editorial plan, plan for building a community around the information product, rules for obtaining and publishing content from citizen journalists, as well as topics related to the promotion of the project, technical issues, last but not least, sustainable development of the product after the completion of the project.

We are convinced that the implementation of the project in the płock district will bring huge benefits to the local community and will enable the construction of a sustainable model of local news in this type of areas.

Target group

The beneficiary of our project will be local community located in the lowurbanized area of the information desert of northern Masovia ("płock county), near the city of Płock. The community lives in one district and its number is approximately 90,000 people. This is a huge group of people who were deprived of access to reliable and independent local information a few years ago, and a classic news desert was created in the above-mentioned area. This results not only in information exclusion, but also in the lack of proper control over local authorities.

Currently, there are no independent local media operating in this area, and the residents themselves are condemned to propagaganda messages from the local authorities and the i.pl portal, built by the government owned company and dependent on the government.

The matter is further aggravated by the considerable distance from the regional centers in Warsaw and Płock, which means that regional journalists practically do not appear in the area.

Goals of the project

The inhabitants of low-urbanized rural areas in the Płock district are practically completely deprived of access to reliable and qualitative local information. This causes very serious problems in the control of local authorities in this area, resulting in a decline in the quality of local democracy and social participation and information exclusion of the inhabitants of these areas. We hope that our project will not only reduce information exclusion and eliminate news deserts, but will also lead to the possibility of controlling the democratic process by the inhabitants of the desert and increase social participation, which is the essence of local democracy. Our goal is to stimulate the local community to take action and build a permanent group of citizen journalists/influencers/community leaders who will publish original content on our pages. The two pillars mentioned above - quality local journalism served by professional journalists and content prepared by residents, in our opinion, will create an extremely interesting mix that will enable strong involvement of the local community, will give the opportunity to present voices that have not been presented or heard before, and will ensure that Readers will be willing to finance the project in the future. This will allow the creation of a model that can be expanded to other information deserts in Poland and Europe.