A successful first week – help us make week two even better
Editorial by Jim Jepps
The North London Star has been online for exactly one week today. Two weeks ago today we held our first ever meeting of the collective that came together to make the site a reality. It’s not going too badly.
Our strike coverage (photos and reports on the day, promoting what you could do to support the strikes and our video interview with George Binette of Camden Unison) was much better than it had any right to be for a newly launched publication, but we’re no less pleased about it for all that.
You may have noticed that we’re interested in housing – whether that’s mapping the inequality, reporting on discussions and activities, or debating whether hipsters are the root of all our ills, it’s a set of issues that are not going to go away, so we’re going to keep trying to tease out the issues in, we hope, a variety of fresh and interesting ways.
These aren’t the only political issues we’re interested in though. Kathy Martin’s piece on whether Labour’s proposals on violence against women were more PR than substance and Charlie Smoke’s new project on mental health in the gay community were both particularly good.
It won’t be all dry political biscuits though. We hope that our first, lovely theatre review from Hope Liebersohn (Wonderland, at the Hampstead theatre) will be the first of many articles covering cultural events, the music scene and the like across North London.
But that’s up to you.
The North London Star is an open project designed to support the campaigning left. So whether you have an event you’d like us to publicise, an issue you want to get off your chest or just a picture of your street in all its glory get in touch. You can email us at office@northlondonstar.org.uk or use our submission form to send us your thoughts direct. In the long run we’ll only be as good as you help us to be, and it’s your opportunity to promote those positive initiatives that you think are too often ignored.
Of course, because we’re only one week old (or two weeks if you include our rigorous planning stage), we’re still very much a work in progress. We’ve not yet written a comments moderation policy, we’ve not really settled on a nice logo design, we haven’t even started planning our first public event let alone reached even a quarter of the campaigning groups and activists in North London that we want to help achieve their aims. We’ll see where the following months take us.
Ongoing controversies like “where is North London?”, what our sub-header should be and whether we’re doing too much or too little will probably never be properly resolved, but as the site takes shape we hope you’ll come with us on the journey, not just as passengers but as one of many drivers.
Join the discussion