Introducing Our New Campaign Coordinator

Hello! My name is Rowan Gavin, and I am the new Campaign Coordinator here at Better Media. This post is both an introduction to me, and an overview of what you can expect from Better Media in the coming months. Let’s get into it!

As Campaign Coordinator, I am the first member of paid staff here at Better Media. The funding for the role comes from union donors including Unite and the NUJ, as well as the members of the Better Media movement. All the details of the organisation’s finances are available to be viewed transparently on our Open Collective page.

For the past six years I have been an editor with The Norwich Radical, an online, independent and proudly left-wing politics and arts publication. Through that role I have developed a keen interest in media reform and in the UK’s independent media, as well as in co-operative models of media production (the Radical is also a worker’s co-op). I am looking forward to bringing that experience to this role with Better Media, and to learning more from fellow campaigners, writers, editors, readers and comrades across the media reform space.

My priorities for my first few weeks of work with Better Media are:

• Introducing myself to the membership, building familiarity with existing infrastructure, and building working relationships with members and coordinators.
• Developing a strategy for re-engaging the membership through the Better Media forum and Loomio, with a view to facilitating productive ongoing discussion and democratic decision making in those spaces.
• Creating ‘Be The Media’, ‘Know The Media’ and ‘Change The Media’ pages on the Better Media website, along with corresponding twitter lists, as resources for anyone interested in media reform.
• Opening dialogue with the Bureau Local, Stop Funding Hate, Hacked Off, Media Reform Coalition and other media reform organisations, inviting them to join in discussions on our forum, and exploring collaborating in other ways.
• Initiating a project to create a guide to starting a local media co-operative, in collaboration with a wide range of UK media co-ops.

In the longer term, some other objectives I have are:

• Developing a clear vision of Better Media’s role within the media reform and independent media sectors, to ensure we amplify rather than overlap with the work of other groups.
• Exploring options for registering Better Media as a legal entity.
• Investigating the possible benefits of becoming an Independent Media Association partner.
• Collaborating in the running/promotion of the Media Democracy Festival, and exploring opportunities for running other online events ourselves.
• Developing a concrete strategy for growing the membership, and identifying reasonable targets for growth/retention.
• Finding ways to make productive use of our large following on Meetup.

These ideas are not set in stone, however. I am looking for feedback from Better Media members and others with interest in media reform on what our priorities should be. If you’re reading this on our website, head to our forum to get involved in the discussion.

Together, we can enable a more progressive, imaginative and diverse range of people to be, know and change the media.