Announcements

[nevali]

Welcome to the Local News forum!

This is a specialist area of the forum designed for the publishing of press releases and similar announcements from official bodies, such as local councils, NHS trusts, education authorities, and so on. Essentially, the things that are relevant to your local area, but unless you regularly visit your council's or hospital's website you won't see.

What it's not designed for is general news stories—the sort you see on Sky or BBC news, or even your local newspaper—which are fairly widely reported and if you're interested in sparking a discussion about them the General Chat and Debate & Politics forums are fairly ideal for those threads; there's no real need to overlap with them in that respect.

To keep things consistent and readable, every article in this forum has a very specific format: the title is prefixed with the source of the release (the council, hospital trust, and so forth), and the article body begins with the date the information was released (this is because there's a very good chance that articles won't be published on here the same day that it was originally), followed by the full text of the release, and finally a link to the original source, and finally links to any relevant news stories relating to it.

To submit an article, simply P.M. me (nevali) a link to the original news release (along with any relevant links to stories in the press about it), and I'll put the article together and credit it with your user-name. Please try to keep such links limited to local-area news, though: major shifts in government policy are going to be reported everywhere anyway, and if there isn't a thread in General Chat or Debate & Politics already, your best bet is to create one.

Note that what is ‘local’ is entirely down to where you are. If you live in Cornwall, feel free to submit links to releases from North Cornwall District Council's site. So long as it fits the bill for inclusion in general, it'll be posted so that other users in Cornwall will find it useful.

You can also submit editorials on local topics, provided they're well-researched and well-written, and don't fit into the article categories provided by the rest of the site. Things like motorway extensions, closing of schools and hospitals, or the planned development of new supermarkets are all good themes for local editorials. If you're interested in doing something like this, drop me a P.M. and we can discuss it.

If you have any questions (or corrections), feel free to give me a shout!