Improving Local Democracy in Piątek Commune by Creating an Innovative News Product

Also, a local newsletter dedicated to community issues will be created. Thanks to the project, it will be possible to provide access to reliable, verified, and independent information for the inhabitants of the commune who are informationally excluded.   

This project is addressed to a small community of the commune of Piątek in Poland, with less than 10,000 inhabitants, located in the district of Łęczyca  in central Poland, about 30 km from Łódź. The community lives in a low-urban area that has become a news desert in the last 5 years.  The inhabitants of the Piątek commune are currently almost completely  deprived of valuable and independent local information. This applies to both information of a functional nature as well as information on important public matters, in particular those concerning local government and local authorities.

Our Project, which is an element of the company's broader strategy related to the liquidation of news deserts in our region, will be a response to  these challenges. We plan to build an innovative information platform for the inhabitants of Piątek, the pillars of which will be - a dedicated information news site containing qualitative and important information from the area of the Piątek commune, a local newsletter and a key module enabling communication between the editorial office and residents. 

These module will allow the previously excluded inhabitants of the news desert to report topics important to the community,
inform the editorial staff about local initiatives, and the need to undertake journalistic interventions. The module will also enable the community to vote on the selection of large cross-sectional topics related to the municipality of Piątek, which is to further increase the participation of Readers. This last point will be crucial for building the participation of residents and in the future for supporting the project by the Readers themselves in the membership model, which is the target model for financing local news from the Piątek commune.

Target group

The project is addressed to a small community of the commune of Piątek in Poland, with less than 10,000 inhabitants, located in the district of Łęczyca in central Poland, about 30 km from Łódź. The community lives in a low-urban area that has become a news desert in the last 5 years. As part of the proposed project, we should, in particular, reach the target group of professionally active people aged 25-55,

Goals of the project
The goals of our project should be considered in several areas. The first concerns the liquidation of the news desert in the commune of Piątek by building an innovative information platform for residents and improving local democracy. Our goal is to include residents in the process of creating local news, e.g. by reporting topics important to the community, participating in discussions with journalists in a closed group for readers, and last but not least by voting on topics to be covered by local journalists. This will allow us to build a strong community around the local product, and in the future, it will definitely facilitate the financing of local news in the Piątek commune in the membership model. Secondly, we want to create a sustainable model for the functioning of local media in small communities at risk of information exclusion, and we intend to continue it after the end of the project in the commune of Piątek, but also to expand it to other news deserts in our region. 

About the media outlet

TuŁódź Sp. z o.o. is an independent company from Poland focusing on important local digital news from Lodz and the surrounding area. From the beginning, we operate in a multi-channel manner: we distribute our content through the dedicated news site tulodz.pl, channel on YouTube and in other social media. Our mission is to reliably inform the local community about matters important to Łódź and the surrounding area.  We are everywhere where something important is happening.