Dear readers — in a few weeks time The Dispatch will be three years old. The school uniform is in the post; the picture books have now got words in them. We’re making our first tentative attempts to conquer our ABCs. And now? Now it's time for a party. We’re thinking bouncy castles, face paints and — of course — a magician. We’re hoping he’s going to pull a few rabbits out of his hat.
That’s because The Dispatch is gearing up for perhaps the biggest thing we’ve ever done. In fact, if you were planning on getting us a present, make it this. At the start of November we’re going to launch our first major campaign, involving a list of pledges to the city of Birmingham. Today, we want you to choose what those pledges will be.
As die-hard Dispatch readers will know well, we do a lot of reporting on issues like misinformation and the divisions in our society, but now we’d like to go one further. If we can get to 3,000 members in the course of just over a month, we’re going to commit to take matters into our own hands.
That’s an ambitious target. After all, we’ve only just gone past 2,000 members. But we’re hoping that 1,000 or so more people will buy into our vision, and help to transform The Dispatch into not just a mightier force, but one whose appeal reaches much wider than just journalism.
On the long-list you’ll see things like giving workshops to children and young people about misinformation, or creating opportunities to break into journalism for people from backgrounds where those opportunities are few and far between. You might vote for one of those, you might vote for something entirely different. Either way, this will be a list shaped by you.
Our sister titles in Manchester and Sheffield have done this already. The Mill (in Manchester) ran a similar campaign at the end of last year, and committed to pledges such as going into schools to talk about fake news — and how to identify it. You can see some photos of the school talks below. Jack, who has been helping out on The Dispatch in recent months, went along for one of these talks and described the scenes that greeted him in one particular school as something akin to Beatlemania.
Our colleagues, The Manchester Mill staff speaking to school students.
Meanwhile The Tribune (in Sheffield) did a similar thing in spring this year, and they have since launched a Good News edition to celebrate all that is good about the city, as well as offering free subscriptions to first-time voters. And frankly, why should Manchester and Sheffield have all the fun?
So: if — and only if — we hit our target, we will fulfil five pledges to make Birmingham a better place. We’ve long-listed 25 options, and you can use this Google Form to look at them and rank the ones that you like the most. If you can think of a new one that we haven’t thought of, but that you think would be better, there’s space for extra suggestions too.
We’re doing this for a few reasons. One, of course, is that we want to grow. We recently passed 2,000 paying members, a huge milestone, but we’ve got no interest in sitting there feeling pleased with ourselves. Excessively competitive folk we might be, but our ambition has always been to build The Dispatch into the newspaper Birmingham has long needed, with greater capacity for work which both scrutinises and celebrates this city.
It’s fun being a small and plucky little outfit (in the earliest days literally a one-person affair) but it’s more fun being able to build something really meaningful for your city. This means hiring new journalists, paying freelancers better rates and taking on investigations of a greater scope, but it will now also hopefully mean these five pledges — committing to something that goes beyond the journalism and turns The Dispatch into more of a force for good in the region.
I want to give this a shot. It will introduce The Dispatch to thousands more people and generate a discussion about the role we can all play in piecing back together some of what seems to be broken right now in our society.
Please use the Google Form to tell us which of the pledges you most want to see — it’ll only take five minutes.
Then, in a few weeks, we’ll let you know the results of the survey, unveil the full pledge list and let the fun begin.
Take care,
Kate Knowles
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