What can you do to challenge the news?
If you have your own story to tell you don't need to rely on newspapers, TV, radio, or official websites any more, you can publish it yourself. As long as you have access to the internet you can write a blog, record a vlog (video), record a podcast (audio), or publish your photographs.
Start your own blog: there are many blogging sites available, alot of them free. Some of the most popular are blogger, squarespace, typepad, blog, livejournal, or wordpress. For examples of popular news blogs see our news blogs links on the News about News page.
Record your own news video: you can record a one off video and publish it anywhere from youtube to yahoo or, if you want to vlog more regularly you can add video to your blog (not all of them support video). This way you have more control of how it looks and the context. There is a useful vlogging tutorial on freevlog.
Start podcasting: if you just want audio, you can record interviews, reports etc. onto a downloadable podcast. There is a good how to guide for aspiring journalists on journalism.co.uk. You can record interviews directly onto your computer using Skype, then edit them with free downloadable software and publish them on your blog. If you want a wider circulation you can make it available on itunes
Publish your news photographs: if you have your own photographs there are many places you can now publish them. The easiest starting point are photo sharing sites like flickr, but if you think your photos are newsworthy you can send them to any of the main news organisations directly, or take them to agencies like Scoopt, which specialise in selling photographs from the public to newspapers and television