What is this site for?
The site is written by and for people who live and work in Kings Cross, London’s most fascinating neighbourhood. It is about efforts by the local community to keep the streets of Kings Cross in London clean and liveable. We act as a community bulletin board and an online news and campaigning service for people who are interested in their neighbourhood. This site only shows the tip of the iceberg of a huge range of activism and volunteering in Kings Cross.
Who writes it?
There is a small team of volunteers who write, drawing on about a dozen people who feed us with information from local campaigns and happening. We go on holiday, have lives and stuff so it isn’t a 365×24 process.
Where does your material come from?
Most of the articles we write are suggested by neighbours who use the site as a community bulletin board. We mainly write original material sourced from the streets. But will on the odd occasion recycle relevant stuff from the news that people may have missed.
What area do you cover?
Kings Cross is at the junction of two boroughs – Camden and Islington. The railway stations are in Camden but most of the people who identify as Kings Cross live in Islington. Experience suggests that most of the issues we cover are in either Caledonian Ward, Barnsbury Ward (both Islington) and Somers Town (in Camden).
What are your politics?
This site is not affiliated to any political group – we are interested in making the area a better place, not the Politics. We work with whoever is committed to helping us. All three main parties have acknowledged the work of the community around this site. We don’t allow comments on party politics and our readers tell us they like it that way.
There is an active tussle between the Liberal Democrats and Labour in the area. The Islington South MP Emily Thornberry is Labour. The Holborn and St Pancras MP Frank Dobson is Labour.
How many people read the stuff on this site?
Between 300 and 500 people read content from this site every day there is a post – readership is split between unique visitors and email subscribers through the excellent Feedburner service. Quite a few people now read our stuff on Facebook. The site’s community videos on YouTube have had over 8,000 views. There are over 1,200 articles on the site and about the same amount of comments.
The general comparison we make is with community newsletters shoved under doors – a website like this is far cheaper (indeed nearly free) and much quicker. There is no way we could reach this many people with a newsletter. Community email lists are very popular but don’t act as a public knowledge store as this site does.
How do you handle comments?
We are always delighted when people comment on the issues we raise. We are realistic about the fact that many open comment sites are, bluntly ruined by crazy people. This site was never intended to be a ‘blog’ as such, it just uses blogging software. So comments are moderated before approval. Well over 95 per cent of comments are approved. We approve comments that disagree with the overall tone of the site, but not ranters or flamers etc.
How do I set up a site like this?
The site uses the wordpress.com blogging service at a cost of about £100 a year (the cost of a few evenings out drinking or a few football tickets). If you can use, say Yahoo or Google webmail, you can set up and run a site like this. The technology is the easy bit – the content is much more important. Focus on that first and add techno bells and whistles later.
Where do the videos come from?
We make our own using a mobile phone or cheap camcorder and edit them on a laptop. The video is embedded into the site from YouTube. We also embed other videos that we find on YouTube about Kings Cross. There’s also a prototype online video channel about Kings Cross that we occasionally update.
What else is there on the web about Kings Cross?
This site is related to the Kings Cross Facebook page and KingsCrossTV
