Giving Big Smoke a hand

Here at Big Smoke Towers we’re into our sixth week. At the beginning of February, we’ll be having our official launch – there’ll be wine, Twiglets, Power Point, you know the sort of thing.

We’ve smoothed out most of the wrinkles and started to put out the quiet word already, but soon we’ll be stepping up the action. That means we’d like everything ship shape by the end of the month – all on a shoe string, as you’d expect.

We’ve had some lovely emails of support and guidence and we hope they will keep rolling in. If you’d like to help us make Big Smoke a useful resource for London we thought it might be handy if we put together a few suggestions on how you could help out.

• In the next few weeks: if you spot a mistake, a technical problem or a glitch please let us know! Where typos or ghosts in the machine  creep in it’s really important to us to correct them as soon as possible. If you spot something send us an email and tell us *exactly* what’s wrong.
• If you think there’s a site we should be linking to and are not – let us know.
• If you are part of an organisation add us to your press contacts and send us your press releases. If we know what you’re doing we may well report on it. We’re certainly more likely to do that than if we don’t know what you’re up to.
• If you see something online, or in the local paper, that you think we’d be interested in – let us know.
• If you see something in real life you think is interesting – send us a photo. It doesn’t have to be earth shattering. Those little snaps we’ve already received have been a real joy.
• Follow us on twitter. You might even like to retweet us occasionally, when you think we’re interesting.
• If you have advanced wordpress skills, we have a bug we can’t squash. It doesn’t effect the public facing part of the site but is an annoying under the hood problem – we want to ask you a question, you might be able to help.

More than this, if you’d like to get more involved and write for Big Smoke here’s a few suggestions on what you might like to write about;

• If you’re involved in a community group let us know about the things you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
• If you are campaigning on a particular issue – tell us about it.
• Do you have a specialist subject? There are a whole number of very important issues where those with specialist knowledge or campaigning experience have useful expertise that would be good to pass on. So pass it on already.
• Do you know someone that we should be interviewing? Perhaps you’d like to interview them yourself?
• If you think there is a topic that we are ignoring, tell us. We may agree and sort something out.

We’d love to hear from you as, ultimately, we’re hoping that Big Smoke will have a wide and varied group of regular writers providing readers with a number of flavours and perspectives. If you are thinking about submitting content to us please do read our submission guidelines first though. If you’re unsure please do drop us an email, we’ll be happy to advise on the best approach.

Write to Big Smoke by emailing us at editorial@bigsmoke.org.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.