I’ve heard three pieces of news this month which will be of interest if you think you may like to make a local website like AbergelePost.com

1. Starting in April 2014, Cardiff University is offering a free five-week Community Journalism online course. It’s called a MOOC, which stands for massive open online course. Cardiff University’s is the first ever community journalism MOOC. It’s led by Richard Sambrook who was editor of BBC News Online at the time when I worked as a content producer with BBC Cymru Wales Online. You can sign up for this course via the provider Future Learn, which is the Open University’s MOOC brand. I first heard of MOOCs though my interest in digital storytelling. The #ds106 course was a pioneer in this field. I’ve signed up for a computational linguistics MOOC by the University of Lancaster which begins next week.

2. Existing to help local organisations with communications, the Local360Network offers training and support to get local news sites and other local websites to get publishing regularly. I heard of this from Andy Smith, a former BBC colleague who trained me to use BBC News’s content management system many moons ago. He’d like to see more local journalism being published around the UK, and says:

“Local360 Network (is) a UK-wide community of citizen journalists, community reporters and local storytellers, providing the tools, skills and connections to get more from local news.”

Andy wants to “expand the existing network and to try and find local groups that may benefit from the opportunity of joining the Local360 Network.  I was wondering if you had any local groups or organisations you were in contact with that may benefit from getting involved.”

Feel free to contact the Local360Network directly if you’d like to find out more.

3. #DoSomethingBrilliant is a project I’m going to be learning more about soon following an invitation from a third former BBC colleague and experienced radio broadcaster Steve Lloyd. It’s a collaboration between the Media Trust and Community Channel, funded by Big Lottery Fund.

You can find out more about these three exciting projects by following the links above.

And remember, we always welcome contributions to AbergelePost.com; do get in touch if you’ve got a story to share.