London Free Press

In my last column, I mentioned a new feature at lfpress.com called Check Us Out!, where you can get better acquainted with the Free Press newsroom staff - us telling you a little more about ourselves.

I hope you did check us out or will soon.

Now we'd like you to tell us a little more about you.

You know lots of things that are happening in the city that we don't and we know you have lots of ideas we haven't thought of and we would like to get more of both into The Free Press and onto lfpress.com.

It's time for you to share. How? You can start by posting material for us at lfpress.com on a tool there called Your Scoop.

C'mon, admit it, it has crossed your mind while mulling the paper over your morning coffee: Reporter . . . that would be a cool job.

Or maybe photographer or videographer (but not copy editor - where's the glamour in that, right? - even though you're pretty sure you know your grammar better than us).

Nothing to it, right? You're pretty tapped in, you get around, you chat up the neighbours, you know what fixes this city needs. All you have to do is write what you know. Right? Probably do a better job than those amateurs down on York St., too, you're thinking.

Whoa. First, it's not really as easy as you think. And we're not lowering the standards of the material we print and post just so you can get your name in lights.

But we do want to publish your work and journalist Kelly Pedro is taking on the job of working with you to help get the best of your stuff into the paper and on the website.

We also plan to hold a round or two of free afternoon seminars in journalism basics - a primer, really - that you'll be able to sign up for or watch afterward online. Dates, times, and curriculum TBA.

But let's not wait until class is dismissed. If you have a story you've written or a photo or a video or MP3 audio you think needs to be shared with London's biggest daily audience via London's biggest newsgathering operation, get in touch with Pedro (kelly.pedro@sunmedia.ca or 519-667-5507). If you have an idea you think could be got up to snuff with a little help, get in touch with her.

Or just take your chances: E-mail yourscoop@lfpress.com or go to lfpress.com, find the Your Scoop button near the top of the homepage, and post away.

Reader-generated material and material generated by a reader working with Pedro will be identified with a Your Scoop logo in print and online so it's easily recognizable.

It starts as soon as you're ready and it succeeds or fails on you. Don't be shy.

Let me also briefly mention two other plans we have to let you have a say in what we publish.

Early next month, we'll begin a multi-platform, months-long series trying to pin down London's identity and what we all think might be the city's way forward.

We'll need your help. To get it, we're developing a microsite on lfpress.com where Londoners will be able to come to share ideas, discuss them and - here's the key - rate the ideas of others up and down on a sliding scale. Our job? The newsroom will explore in depth those ideas that you vote should rise to the top.

It's not so different, really, from the idea that underpins Your Scoop - you tell us which of your collective ideas are most worthy, we help you get them out there in print and online for the city to kick around and maybe come to a consensus about.

We hope by year's end to have a kind of living body of work that the city's politicians and business, non-profit and emerging leaders can turn to as the collective will and hopes of the people - you and I.

Lastly, we're also mulling a return of The Free Press editorial board in an updated version for 2011.

It has been some years since The Free Press has struck such a board with any regularity, but every newspaper should have such a place where a citizen or a small group of them can help us talk about, then write about, where we all stand on the local issues of the day.

Back then, we left the writing to Free Press professionals - hardly a model that's fit to survive in the age of social media.

So even if we don't have this entirely worked out just yet, we do already know one thing about it for sure: This time, you'll have a hand in the writing.

E-mail joe.ruscitti@sunmedia.ca, or follow joeratlfpress on Twitter.