When communities are informed & connected good things happen
Greater Community Media supports people to build more community-centred media.
Imagine if every community has a platform that listens to them, amplifies their voices, provides them with relevant, actionable information, makes them feel proud of where they live, and enables them to tackle challenges collaboratively.
Greater Community Media exists to make that a reality.
Through training, workshops, consultancy, and coaching, we help individuals and communities build community-centred media organisations, and ultimately, develop healthier information ecosystems rooted in care, listening, and meeting community needs.
We work with
📌 Communities – Launching and sustaining media projects or organisations for your community.
📌 Media organisations – Helping you develop your audience into a community, and implementing community-centred approaches.
📌 Non-media organisations – Training your community to be reporters for your own publication.
📌 Journalists – Helping you understand how to listen - and respond - to your community, and launch your own project.
How we can help
Consultancy: dedicated advice and hands-on support for anything you want help with in building and sustaining a community-centred media project.
Coaching: 1-1 sessions to provide you with advice and coaching to support you to develop your project.
Training & workshops: bespoke facilitated sessions for you and your wider team, delivered online or in-person.
Who we are
We have both led award-winning community-centred media organisations, and believe deeply in the need and opportunity for more media projects which reinvent how to meet people’s needs for information, connection and agency.
We are regularly asked for advice and assistance by others wanting to develop similar projects, and we also saw that the case for civic and community-centred media needed to be better made in the UK. So we teamed up and launched Greater Community Media to support its development.
Lucas Batt
co-founder
Lucas is an independent media consultant with nine years’ experience developing and supporting trailblazing independent media projects.
A founding member of the paid staff team of The Bristol Cable, a community-owned investigative newspaper, over seven years he played a key role in its growth, leading efforts in organisational development, revenue generation, membership, and community engagement.
He has since worked with dozens of independent publishers across Europe as a facilitator, organiser and consultant. He is also a Director of grassroots community project the Stokes Croft Land Trust.
Rhiannon Davies
co-founder
Rhiannon is the founder of the multi-award winning Greater Govanhill community magazine, The Community Newsroom local media hub in Glasgow and The Scottish Beacon local news collaborative that brings together 25 publications across Scotland.
She has a BA(Hons) in Humanities, an MSc in Journalism, Media and Communications as well as a PG Diploma in Journalism Innovation and Leadership. She also taught entrepreneurial journalism at the University of Strathclyde.
She was a member of the Scottish Government public interest journalism working group and the Women in Journalism Scotland committee.
A manifesto
In late 2023 Rhiannon spent six weeks travelling across North America, visiting innovative local media projects who were re-inventing what journalism could be – from the ground up.
She spent time with the pioneers of the civic media movement including Resolve Philly, City Bureau in Chicago, Documented in NYC, the Center for Cooperative Media in New Jersey, the Colorado Media Project, Documenters, Rebuild Local News, and dozens more.
This Manifesto records how it’s being done, and what we need to do to make it happen more here.
