School students to contribute to Teesside hyperlocal websites

Stockton school students will contribute to the Teesside Evening Gazette's hyperlocal sites as part of a new Media&Creative Diploma for the region.

A new partnership between Trinity Mirror and the Stockton Schools consortia will ask 70 students to produce material for the sites, a release from the publisher said. They will also be encouraged to publish material directly to the sites and use the social network facilities.

The diploma, a new vocational qualification, which can be studied at several different levels and as an alternative or addition to GCSEs and A-Levels, and will be introduced in September 2009.

"We've been very keen to target younger age groups and get them involved and interacting on our websites. We've already recruited a number of youth bloggers and this builds on that success," Lindsay Bruce, senior desk editor at the Gazette, who will lead the project for the sites, said in the release.

"Partnering with the Gazette means our students can learn real business sector skills, but what is brilliant for us is that the programme is ongoing so will help them develop personal learning skills," added Laura Langridge,  the Creative&Media Diploma leader for Stockton.

The Gazette first rolled out its postcode-based community websites as 'cousins' to the paper's Gazette Live website in January 2007 and feature content written and posted directly by a combination of non-journalists and the Gazette's editorial team.

In September 2008 the paper launched a mission to recruit 1,000 citizen contributors for the sites.

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