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Happy birthday to us: Five years of Blog Preston

Posted on - 11th January, 2014 - 8:30am | Author - | Posted in - Preston News
Our Blog Preston birthday cake, made by the wonderful Sarah Cook

Our Blog Preston birthday cake, made by the wonderful Sarah Cook

We had a little get together for Blog Preston contributors and people we’ve worked with over our five years on Thursday evening.

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Here’s an extract from the speech I gave, but with a bit more fleshing up:

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Thanks everyone for taking the time to be here. On behalf of all the team at Blog Preston I’d like to thank you for your support and making time to raise a glass with us.

This feels a long way from five years ago when the site was born, on a cold Sunday in January when a New Year’s resolution became something which I didn’t realise would stick around for this long.

Blog Preston is here to be a centre point for community and news in the city. This is what it set out to be what it remains.

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Speech at the birthday party at the Continental

Speech at the birthday party at the Continental

We are a news website, but we are news in a different way to perhaps what people would class traditionally. We cover what people talk about, laugh about and share about their city.

In the five years the site has been running, we have had the pleasure of covering this city, its people and its issues – oh, and a fair bit about a certain building which shall remain nameless.

We’ve now notched up nearly 3,000 posts on the site, and the breadth of what we’ve covered about Preston often staggers me.

In the last six months the site has gone through a transformation, we are lucky to have such a committed team of volunteers who want to make sure the city of Preston has an alternative community news source.

So much so, the readership of Blog Preston has leapt from averaging up to 15,000 readers per month to now pushing 40-50,000.

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To this end, we’ve taken the step of looking for a sustainable future for the site – and this is what we’d like to announce tonight.

Blog Preston has officially become a community interest company. A what? Well, it’s not a charity and it’s not a company with shareholders etc. This is a new type of company and fits the ethos of Blog Preston perfectly.

It allows us to do what we do best, create content for the city of Preston – whatever that might be.

Our official aims as an organisation will be:

o    To report and create online content about the city of Preston to be published via www.blogpreston.co.uk and its associated social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and any others which it chooses to use)

o    To involve community contributors across the city to produce content about their local area which may be of interest to their community or the wider community of the city of Preston

o    To work with other community organisations, for example a community radio station or the local university, to report on community events and news

o    To establish a Blog Preston community fund which can help fund community events or projects across the city, such as the sponsoring of a new exhibition about Preston’s history, a community fun day or any other number of worthwhile community initiatives

So this is an open invitation, if you feel you can work with us to achieve our aims. We’re all ears.

Ed Walker, founder and editor 

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