Beans and chips: blogging at the heart of Colmore Row

URBAN Coffee Company, a smart, independent café sitting in the heart of Birmingham’s Colmore Business District does a brisk trade every lunchtime.

It’s a favourite haunt for a good few of the 24,000 office workers that populate the area during weekdays – probably because it does a particularly good cup of coffee. But UCC, as regulars like me have a habit of calling it, isn’t just a nice place for a latte. For the last few weeks it’s also been home to an experiment in local journalism.

With the help of the café’s co-owner, Simon Jenner, it has been hosting a local news website called Grounds . It took Birmingham City University lecturer Jon Hickman and I just a few minutes to set it up while we enjoyed an on-the-house brew sitting in Urban Coffee Company in January. We simply registered for an email address, a web address and the now obligatory Twitter account and went looking for leads.

In the space of just a few weeks we’ve been joined by a growing list of other contributors and are busy covering a host of stories for our tiny city-centre patch .
So far we’ve published the local news staples: crime, events, arts, human interest and even the odd investigation. We’re even trying to find out the true cost to Birmingham City Council of the free distribution of paper publications in the city – such as the Shortlist magazine – and map the empty shop units in the city centre.

But, because we’re in a business area, we really want to get a lot closer to the thousands of office workers who are just a few minutes from the café. Grounds’ intention is to provide this busy, city-centre location with its own local publication – and we know that means reflecting the many businesses who occupy the area. Because this is a forward-thinking sort of a place we’re doing it first on the internet and then, to reach out to more people, as a newsletter that we’ll print when we think we’ve got enough to say.

As you might have guessed, at the moment Grounds is just voluntary – and we’d love to hear from anyone who thinks they can lend a hand . But we’re not just here for the cappuccino. Both Jon and I are interested in seeing how a project like this can have a beneficial effect on businesses. We’re also keen to find out whether it can become sustainable – either by making money or by attracting other forms of support. For the time being, though, we’ll keep running solely on coffee.

You can visit Grounds at http://grounds.posterous.com to find out more about the project. To contact Grounds you can email groundsbirmingham@gmail.com, follow @groundsbham on Twitter or simply try popping into the café.

Andrew Brightwell is a journalist who has worked as a local reporter and, more recently, as chief sub editor for a magazine group in the Middle East. He’s currently studying an MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University.