A year to the day after launching his own local news site for Preston, Ed Walker started work on a new community site and a new job as online communities editor for Media Wales.

Just weeks into his new role the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) graduate has helped launch yourCardiff, a new local news website for Cardiff released in beta yesterday.

The site will pick up on unusual and Cardiff-specific stories that might only make a NIB [news in brief] in the printed paper, says Walker, who launched Blog Preston, as it is now known, after completing a journalism undergraduate at UCLAN.

Walker has no doubt that his work on Blog Preston, combined with his third year specialism in online journalism at UCLAN and on various work placements, helped him secure the Media Wales position. But his digital skills didn't initially work in his or his fellow graduates favour when they left UCLAN in 2007.

"We all graduated and no one [local news organisations] wanted us, because no one had done their digital strategies in 2007. They still wanted 100-words-a-minute shorthand. It made us start to think that no one was going to want those skills in the future and how they could be applied to other areas apart from journalism," he says.

"It's now taken me until 2009 to get the journalism job I'd wanted. Perhaps you almost have to do journalism as a hobby first. If you make something happen, someone, somewhere will notice and you will get something out of it. For journalism students it means you can go to an interview and show that your are producing something off your own back."

yourCardiff isn't the only hyperlocal kid on the block: last week the Guardian appointed its beatblogger for Cardiff; while Northcliffe's Local People websites piloted in the Bristol area.

But having run his own local news website, Walker is bringing the independent-thinking of a hyperlocal blogger to a project for an established regional news organisation. He doesn't want to use a generic newspaper website template for the yourCardiff site and he has a keen understanding of what motivates the bloggers and individuals who will contribute.

"People will do it for the love of it and people offering an alternative view point is valuable. You can do this on this level because you don't need a certain level of advertising to support it," says Walker, who wants to use yourCardiff as "a platform for all those different voices in the community".

"We'll be using social media to help build our community, but it's also about getting out of the office, out of the media hub and sticking our camera, or pen and paper, into different places to find out what's going on," writes Walker in a blog post about the site.

As such the site will pull in RSS feeds from other local sites and blogs and Walker has done his homework on the social media scene in Cardiff: there are two hyperlocal sites already which the site will link to and blogger meet-ups are planned in a bid to make yourCardiff an online and offline meeting place.

So far he's recruited bloggers on music, politics and food, and says the site should cover communities in Cardiff by geography and by interest. There will also be a community events calendar and the team behind the site is creating useful databases for readers, such as a spreadsheet of every school in Cardiff and its postcode, as part of its datastore.

The site will also be used to give more detail and background on big news stories for Cardiff covered in Media Wales' print editions. Walker wants to see a closer connection between print and online and is planning to create in-depth sections on big issue stories, featuring timelines of archived content and maps of stories, which the paper can point readers towards.

Working with the print edition will be important - its reputation, audience and local knowledge will be crucial in getting the local community to buy into the idea of a local site for Cardiff, says Walker.

For the contributing bloggers, association with a newspaper group gives them a new audience: "Old media is still the biggest driver of traffic."

As for Blog Preston, Walker isn't abandoning his old community: the site has been taken over by Lisa McManus. The site has taken on a completely different editorial style with her at the reins, says Walker, who clearly still feels a strong connection with his post-graduation project and will be travelling back to Preston once a month to teach the new Preston blogger a new online skill.