On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices, we hear from Rhiannon J Davies, Founder and Editor at Greater Govanhill, a community magazine and media project.
Launched in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, it now has a website, radio show, award-winning podcast and community newsroom space, as well as doing events, training, workshops and outreach with marginalised communities. Rhiannon also established the Scottish Beacon, which is a collaborative of independent, community-based publications all around Scotland.
Rhiannon goes behind the scenes on the logistics of producing a free bimonthly magazine, from local ad and membership revenue to grants for projects, as well as her dedication to maintaining quality, and the importance of offering a platform for voices not usually heard in the media. She also explains her ambition to support other local publications through collaboration and amplify stories which come out of local communities.
Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
Launching a community magazine
I launched it after having moved here to Govanhill in 2018, and I was struck by the way that Govanhill was often described in the media and on social media versus the reality of living here. It was often described in quite negative terms, but what I found was a really warm, vibrant community with loads of people, and projects, and activism, and people making stuff happen. There wasn’t enough focus on that.
I’ve got a background in journalism and magazines with a particular interest in solutions journalism and constructive journalism. The idea for the magazine was trying to shift the narrative around Govanhill, but not ignore the problems that exist – do it from a solutions-focused way, so we could actually think about what could be done about some of those issues, and providing a platform for voices you don’t typically hear in the media.
Too often, Govanhill had its story told about it by others, as opposed to letting people tell their own story and telling the stories that matter to them.
What makes Greater Govanhill’s work stand out
We’re not afraid to do things that journalists don’t always do, recognising that the journalist isn’t the person with all the answers. I’ve come from a background of doing community development as well as doing journalism, communications, magazines, training, events, and everything else, so I think that has very much influenced the work that we do.
Rather than having this objectivity myth of the journalist sitting outside the stories and sitting outside the project and the publication, we really wanted to recognise that more voices and more diversity need to be in the media to bring them in.
The other thing is just really focusing on quality. I could have produced a magazine or a newsletter that was flung together and printed on some A4, and was passed out, some people might have read it and it might have been okay. But I wanted to create something that was beautiful, that made people feel proud when they saw it, that made people feel like they deserve to have something of this quality.
People tell me that they keep the magazine, all the issues, and they have it on their coffee tables or on their bookshelves, they show their visitors, or they send it to family back home in a different country, or they send it to people that used to live here and have moved out of the area.
I think creating something of quality and maintaining high standards made it stand apart from other similar sized publications.
Funding the magazine
[Being free] was really important to us, because there’s a high level of economic deprivation in Govanhill, so we never wanted [the magazine] to be out of the reach or out of the hands of people who might most benefit from their stories that were within it. So being free, having no paywall on the website is really important to us.
It’s funded through a mix of things. We have local advertising, mostly from local independent businesses, or charities, or social enterprises that see the value in it and want to support it as well. We have members who might pay £3 or £5 or £10 a month. They get the magazine sent to them if they want, they get invited along to our editorial meetings, they might get some merch or other perks as well. But really, they’re people that we say, ‘If you can afford it, if you like the magazine and you can afford to pay a few quid each month, then that helps to keep it free for everyone else.’ So that’s the selling point of our membership.
We’re set up as a social enterprise, so we also get some grants. We’ve had funding to do particular projects, that might be working with a group of young people who have been through the asylum process to create a radio show, or maybe it’s working with young people who find themselves under-represented in the media to learn some new skills.
Increasingly, we’re also doing bits of consultancy to support other communities to launch their own media projects, or supporting other organisations to be more community-focused in the work that they do.
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