GET YOUR MESSAGE OUT

Grassroots:  Sudbury’s Media Collective helps grassroots groups be heard

SUDBURY, ONTARIO, February 12, 2013 –  Grassroots:  Sudbury’s Media Collective wants local, grassroots groups to be heard in the community.  There are many community groups in Greater Sudbury but citizens don’t always hear their messages or know about their work, events, or calls to action.  Connecting citizens to these grassroots efforts helps to build a vibrant and healthy community.

To help local groups get their message out, Grassroots:  Sudbury’s Media Collective has prepared a current contact list for local media (attached).  Maintaining a current and complete media contact list is a challenge for many small groups.

If your group is looking for further information on getting your message out effectively, remember that Grassroots:  Sudbury’s Media Collective is also offering a mini-workshop during a group’s regular meeting.  This will provide useful pointers on writing better media releases, working with mainstream media, and other techniques for being heard.  A written resource will also be provided.  For more information on this workshop, as well as a longer Writing Workshop, see:  http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/grassrootssudburymedia/15719

A great way to get your information out is to post content on Grassroots:  Sudbury’s Media Collective  (http://www.mediacoop.ca/group/sudbury.)

Our alternative media site is a place where you can post your content, whether that is a media release, an event notice, photos of an event, an interview, a video, a discussion of local issues of importance to your group, blogs, a call to action, or other relevant local content.

There are lots of advantages to posting your content to the site:

• You have control over your content.  For example, you know that your whole media release will be published, rather than the bits and pieces the mainstream media may choose to use.
• There are lots of options. You can use a variety of mediums from videos, photo essays, posters, etc to catch people’s attention and get your message across.
• You can easily link to your content on Facebook, other social media, on-line newsletters, and so on, to connect your members and network to more in-depth content.

There are two ways to post your content:  send it to us, or do it yourself.  Content can be sent to grassrootssudburymedia@gmail.com.  To post independently, sign up for your own Media Co-op account. Sign in to the Sudbury Working Group page and select the type of post you’d like to make. Under the “Groups” section of the posting form, be sure to select “Sudbury” in order for your post to appear on the Sudbury page. Your post will also automatically be posted on the 'feed' of the main Media Co-op page.

Grassroots: Sudbury's Media Collective is creating independent media in the North, to speak to our issues and outlooks on our communities as well as the world around us. Independent media provides an avenue for people who are wishing to gain critical perspectives on the issues that matter most to us, and to give a voice to those people and stories that you won't find in the mainstream media. We are a working group of the national Media Co-op network.

You can contact us at grassrootssudburymedia@gmail.com