Social Streets Fellowship

The Social Streets Fellowship supports early-career journalists who can demonstrate a commitment and interest in using constructive journalism for the benefit of the local community.

The Fellowship offers training and mentoring in constructive community journalism, a form of local journalism that transfers power from media companies to the grassroots and is committed to being a trusted, long-term guardian of the community.

Start date: 12 March 2024

Your tutor and mentor

All course participants are trained and mentored by Tabitha Stapely, who has 30 years of experience in the media industry.

Following her degree in English Literature and Language at Leeds University, Stapely trained as a journalist in 1995 at the London College of Printing. Her first work experience placement was at the Independent and she then interned at GQ at Condé Nast for one year. 

Her first job was Editorial Assistant at Cosmopolitan’s Zest magazine and she then went on to be the Style Editor for the Saturday Telegraph Magazine. In 2010 she joined Hachette Filipacchi shortly before it was bought by Hearst and here she helped develop the digital strategy for Red, Elle, Handbag and Harpers magazines. She was Digital Director at Elle and Deputy Editor of Redonline.com when she left to follow her interest in local journalism.

In 2016, Stapely was accepted at Cambridge Social Ventures, a social enterprise incubator at Cambridge Judge Business School. Here she formulated her idea for community-centred local journalism that strengthens the local community, working to unite not divide.

As well as being an alumna of Cambridge Social Ventures, Stapely is an RSA Fellow (see her published work here). In 2019 she was listed as one of the top 50 East London Innovators and in 2020 was recognised as a Natwest WISE100 Women of Inspiration in 2020 for her work in social enterprise.

Having previously worked in China as a teacher and manager, I wanted to switch career into journalism. I applied to the Fellowship to gain a wide variety of experience in journalism in a short period as a way to explore who and what I wanted to be as a journalist.  I wanted to build up a larger portfolio of work and receive one-to-one mentorship to develop my confidence as an early career journalist. 

Above all else, what I valued most from the Fellowship was the knowledge and expertise that Tabitha brought to the program. She is an exceptionally talented journalist and now transfers those skills excellently as a teacher.  In addition, the group sessions allowed constructive and cooperative work, letting us develop ideas as a team and share insights. And I valued the freedom of the fellowship. We were treated as equal members of the newsroom who could develop and pitch our own story ideas. 

The Fellowship has developed my journalism skills to the point I am confident to apply for jobs and pitch articles. In 10 years time, looking back on my career, I am confident I will be able to say my first big step into journalism was Social Streets.  

I’d recommend this to anyone who is confident journalism is for them and has made their first tentative steps in that direction be it through a student paper or freelancing, and is now looking for the big push they need to start their career. 

After graduating from University of Bristol, I worked as a copywriter and did an NCTJ at News Associates. I was looking for the next step in my journey to becoming a reporter when I found the Social Streets Fellowship. I wanted to deepen my news writing ability and learn how to find more nuance when developing stories. I also hoped to meet like-minded people and find my feet in a freelance career. 

Having completed the Fellowship, I feel I am a much more confident interviewer.  I know when to push and when to not, how to be observant and notice small things that others might miss, how to push conversations deeper and understand what makes people tick.The Fellowship also taught me that it is people who drive stories and engage with a reader, and this should always be prioritised no matter the genre. It was great to learn the process of building relationships with people in the interest of future stories too.

I would recommend this course for anyone who has an understanding of journalism but has specific areas in which they would like to flex their journalistic muscles to find out where they would ultimately like to end up within the industry.

Before I started the Social Streets Community Journalism Fellowship, I had very little experience in journalism, but I knew it was something I wanted to do. I lacked the knowledge and experience to get the first step on the ladder in journalism. I hoped the programme would provide me with training in foundational journalism skills and allow me to build an interesting body of work. I also was excited to work in such a hyper-local setting and wanted to get involved in and cover a diverse community.

The Fellowship throws you in at the deep end. This is something I greatly appreciated as it pushed me to quickly become a better journalist. For instance,  after a couple of weeks, I was no longer afraid to pick up the phone as the first port of call to contact someone. I was also able to build a portfolio of skills that you might not get trained in in other journalism courses, such as how to use social media and SEO. And I valued the opportunity the fellowship gave me to meet and interview fascinating people in my patch, whom I would never have had the chance to meet otherwise. 

Having completed the Fellowship, I feel ready to take the next step in my career. It has given me the sandbox I needed to test different ideas, approaches and skills. 

The Fellowship is perfect for someone with limited journalism experience who loves to meet people and has a great deal of empathy. 

I came to journalism later in my career and the traineeship has given me the skills, experience and portfolio to develop my practice without an NCTJ qualification. It has been a unique opportunity to meaningfully and practically apply what we learn week-by-week in our respective publications. Tabitha is a brilliant and thorough teacher with a lot of experience in digital media. But she also affords the students the space and responsibility to grow the magazine in the ways that we want. She is also a generous editor and gives a lot of time and valuable feedback on our pitching and writing. By the end of the course, I was securing freelance commissions – one with a national newspaper – which the traineeship gave me the confidence and portfolio to do. I feel immensely lucky to have been on this course and would unreservedly recommend it to anyone. 

I wanted to write features that capture a person’s spirit, and this scheme helped me develop interview techniques to get people talking about their home and identity which I will take with me for the rest of my career. After finishing my NCTJ I still had big gaps in my knowledge when it came to SEO, content strategy and social media, aspects of journalism, which are often requirements for jobs; this scheme gave me a much more in-depth understanding of online journalism. Doing on-the-ground reporting from my patch was really helpful in learning how to interview and photograph people in person. I also loved meeting other community-minded journalists who live in my area through the alumni group and getting to ask Tabitha for advice about all aspects of the industry. I wish I had known about this scheme before as it would have been perfect to do alongside my NCTJ!

Completing the digital editor course after my NCTJ training was the best decision I made as a budding journalist. While I learned about the essential modules as part of my NCTJ course, I still had gaps in my knowledge about how to run a website through WordPress, optimise stories with SEO, and create a content strategy for a publication. I loved writing for Whitechapel LDN because it allowed me to get on the ground and meet the people who made the area special. Beyond the group sessions, I really valued the individual meetings we had with Tabitha as this gave me a chance to receive comprehensive feedback on my writing. Having had little experience with long-form features, I learned about how to write a strong and engaging article. This course was pivotal in strengthening my confidence as a journalist, and I thoroughly recommend it to every early-stage journalist.

This scheme really helped me build my experience and skill within feature writing. I have learnt more about interviewing, particularly how to structure an interview to get out of it what you want, as well as long-form writing. My features usually don’t have a structure until I’ve finished and edited it multiple times. This scheme gave me more know-how about how to write the feature so I can stick to my word count. I loved building relationships with the people in Poplar – that’s the difference between local and community journalism, being able to work on the ground to amplify the voice of those who aren’t normally represented in media. I also loved working alongside the two other editors, it was fun to be a part of a bigger team. – Ruby Flanagan is now a reporter at The Express.

I love meeting people from all walks of life and as a journalist I am passionate about the opportunity to tell their stories. I hoped the scheme would help me with this, both in learning how to build up relationships with sources and how to interview and write their stories. One of the most important things I hadn’t really considered before was the importance of SEO. As a journalist, you want your work to be in front of as wide an audience as possible, and SEO is a key tool to do this. Journalism is increasingly digital and the importance of SEO is going to be something every journalist recognises. I learnt all sorts of SEO tips and tricks from the scheme. It was also a real privilege to be accepted and embedded in the Bethnal Green community thanks to the reputation of Social Streets in the area. – Niamh Carroll is now a reporter at Marketing Week.

I am passionate about journalism that makes a difference and Tabitha encourages people to follow their interests so I was able to focus on uncovering the radical past and present in Whitechapel. One of the most useful skills I’ve learned on the scheme is finding stories. It’s taught me how best to make useful contacts that will lead to stories, how to find stories out-and-about on the patch, and how to use social media as a source. My favourite aspect of the scheme was being in charge of an entire publication. It was very fun to act as an editor, working on social media and considering what to write based on factors like our content verticals and SEO, to try and boost our audience as much as possible. – Albert Toth is now Audience Manager at The Independent.