Hastings’ young people and marginalised communities need your support with the Youth Multimedia Storytelling Programme Crowdfunder. We need to encourage more diverse and representative voices into the media – to tell their stories and share their perspectives of the world, and to get more equal access to employment. Hastings, along with many towns along the coast, has a specific and pressing need for help with employment – the media is just one part of that effort, but an important part.

Widening Access

As in many professions, the journalistic elite perpetuates itself. Wealthy families can afford a year or two of supporting their young person going through the maze of internships and networks and badly paid posts as they get their first foot in the media. That’s too big a bar for most families in the UK. Many in positions of privilege want their own children to get those opportunities, and ‘putting a quiet word in’ with contacts is also a crucial part of exclusion for others. Only 20% of journalists identify as being from a working-class background. In addition, 245 local newspapers closed in the UK in during the past 20 years, previously a route into national journalism. 

Photos from Young Syrian photographer Nour Alezou’s exhibition at The Nest during Refugee Week
CREDIT: Nour Alezou

The project would give younger people and those from marginalised communities in Hastings the chance to develop digital journalism skills – writing, researching, photography, video, interviewing, maintaining social media – crucial for anybody trying to get into the media at any level. Very few can now be a ‘print’ journalist only – they also need to be able to record and edit audio and video and ‘re-purpose’ their material for a range of outlets. Experience is crucial and building a track record of published pieces is essential for anyone attempting to start a career in a highly competitive (and shrinking) field. These skills and experiences are also transferable to other career paths such as the creative industry. 

Broadening Political Debate

Exclusion and a lack of diversity also help maintain a narrow political and cultural Overton window (the range of ‘acceptable’ opinion). The edges of that window are policed forcibly, and mainstream journalists can relax within the middle of it and pat themselves on the back for their ‘not this or that’ party approach – what Noam Chomsky called ‘a herd of independent minds’. The problem with that is that the ‘centre’ has shifted very far to the right in the last decade or two with the rise of right-wing populism and the conversion of formerly ‘left’ parties into neoliberal centre-right ‘alternatives’ (looking at Blair and Starmer). The fence that many journalists are pleased to be sitting on is, in fact, far to the political
right, and far removed from the experience of the majority.

CREDIT: Nour Alezou

We also need to up-skill a wider group of people as the ‘legacy media’, as they are sometimes called, are increasingly failing. Sales of newspapers are shrinking year on year – but remain influential – and the use of ‘fake news’ by newspapers has always been a huge issue for our democracy and the way the population is informed. The golden dawn promise of social media is well and truly over – algorithms are set to promote the extreme, to create division and encourage people to stick within their own silos. We need a new generation of budding journalists prepared to ‘speak truth to power’ and to develop new ways of working – in what we currently call social media and media, but which will undoubtedly become one seamless entity.

Creativity Works

We are really pleased to partner up with The Magnum Photos Foundation for this project. Ask a photographer and they will tell you that Magnum is a stellar name in photography, and Magnum has already piloted a project similar to this in London and Shannon Ghannam, Global Education Director, recently worked with the Refugee Buddy Project to mentor ​young Syrian photographer Nour Alezou whose exhibition was hosted at The Nest during Refugee Week celebrations. We will also have support from Fujifilm UK and The Newspaper Club, East Sussex Career Hub, Eggtooth Hastings, Hastings Contemporary, Xtrax Young People’s Centre and Hastings Radio. 

Shannon explains: “This project was inspired by a programme that Magnum has been part of for a number of years in London called ‘Creativity Works’ in partnership with Create Jobs – A New Direction. They are a youth employment agency that has a specific remit of increasing diversity, equity and inclusion within the creative industries. It is one of the most powerful professional relationships I have had because I learnt so much about the various barriers young people might experience when trying to access certain opportunities and how to support them to overcome these. Another powerful outcome was the networks the young people created with each other and professionals they met on the programme that continue to this day.”

How the project works

The young people on the project will create a special edition of HIP, about their lives in Hastings and issues important to them, through multimedia journalism co-created with the wider community. We hope to engage people from working class backgrounds, people from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds; people with experience of exclusion; incarceration; looked-after children; young parents or
carers; differently-abled people; people from the GRT and LGBT communities.

The programme will seek to build vocational skills as well as support creativity, confidence and well-being through the creation of a supportive peer and professional network. It is hoped that this project will offer additional funding, new talent, a wider professional network and new audiences for HIP.

Shannon adds: “We will design a programme specifically with these young people in mind and support them to build the skills and confidence to create multimedia stories about their lives and their town. We will then print a special edition of the newspaper and find various ways to showcase this work in the town and online.”

CREDIT: Nour Alezou

As a relative newcomer to St Leonards, Shannon has become aware of the energy and talent in this town: “Having lived in St Leonards for two years I know how so many individuals and organisations will pull together around this initiative and these young people and support them into whatever comes next for them, further education, internships, employment etc, and I hope that this cohort will in turn support the next as tutors and mentors as we have seen happen in the programme in London.”

Support the Crowdfunder

If the Crowdfunder is successful, we have been promised matched-funding as one of five projects to receive £5,000 in this way from the East Sussex County Council’s Community Wellbeing Fund. But ONLY if the Crowdfunder is successful, and the deadline is December 23rd! We hope that everyone who cares about the future of local journalism and increased representation will help us.

• We will also have support from Fujifilm UK and The Newspaper Club, East Sussex Career Hub, Eggtooth Hastings, Hastings Contemporary, Xtrax Young People’s Centre, Refugee Buddy Project and Hastings Radio.

• Please, support the future of local journalism and the future of young people in the town! The address is www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/hasting-independent-press-youth-training-project

Hastings’ beach-launched fishing fleet is arguably the heart and soul of this seaside town and the lifeblood of the community. Its thousand-year-old heritage has drawn journalists, artists and photographers from far and wide hoping to capture some of its history, romance and often brutish way of life in print, paint or words.  But none will have been able to capture what photojournalist John Cole has achieved in his body of work ‘Fishing for Generations.’ 

Mark and Richard Ball, brothers, pushing boat out to sea, 1991
PICTURE: John Cole

His exhibition at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, which opens Saturday 15th June, is more than a photographic exhibition.

It is a unique record captured by working with Hastings fishing families for over twenty years. It is an insight into an industry that is proportionally the UK’s second most dangerous profession and, as he points out, it is an important record of the changing political and economic circumstances that have led a once thriving industry possibly to the edge of extinction.

When Cole first visited Hastings from London in 1991 there were over 40 boats on The Stade. Today there are just 25. He recalls from that first visit that while he was initially able to photograph some fishermen “attempts at further conversation were generally futile. But I persisted, and over the next two years I was able to win the trust of the fishing community.”

Robert and Shane Ball, father and son, out at sea, 2017
PICTURE: John Cole

On moving here from London in 2000, he was able to pick up where he had left off in 1991-2, in large part thanks to the encouragement and support of the Hastings Fishermen’s Protection Society.

“For many fishing families, there is hope that with continuing legislation in favour of the Hastings under-ten metre fishing fleet, more young men and women will be able to make a living from the sea, thereby supporting local communities and supplying the freshest and most sustainably caught fish possible,” he says. “But many older fishermen now say that if economic and political circumstances do not change very soon, Hastings’ fishing fleet may become just another tourists’ attraction, rather than the vibrant fishing port it has been for almost a thousand years.”

Dean Brooker out at sea, 1991
PICTURE: John Cole

• Fishing for Generations by John Cole runs from Saturday 15th June until Sunday 27th October at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, John’s Place, Bohemia Road, Hastings.

• For more information about John Cole visit http://johncole.co.uk/generations-hastings-fishing-families-gallery