As I mentioned in my previous post, The Guardian's cuts coverage aims to be both innovative and collaborative. It's in this spririt that we've launched Leeds cutswatch, a kind of micro-storytelling exercise that maps and builds up a picture of the spending cuts as they affect the west Yorkshire city and its residents.
What's novel is that it promises to report the story, using digital technology, in a way that gives the people of Leeds a voice and opportunity to report the cuts and their consequences as it affects them. As my colleagues explain:
"We believe this to be the first attempt by a news organisation to adapt the technology to crowdsource the impact of government spending at street level."
Why Leeds? We wanted a place that was big and diverse enough to tell the cuts story in all its richness. But it also had to have a strong civic identity. We wanted somewhere far from Westminster, and somewhere with interesting local electoral politics. Leeds fitted the bill perfectly.
We also have strong journalistic links to the city, through our (Leeds-born) northern editor Martin Wainwright, and our Guardian Leeds blogger John Baron.
You can get more details of how the project works, and how you can get involved here.
If you live in Leeds, or work there, we'd love you to be a part of it. It's going to be an interesting experiment.
