25. Pits n Pots 23 February We broke the story of the Polish spitfire on 23 February. Almost every national newspaper took our story and published it. No credits No bylines No Pay
Pits n Pots was started on Blogger in September 2008 by Tony Walley, who famously said, All you need is a bottle of red wine and some time... That will teach his wife to go out and leave him home alone. The local paper had a policy of censorship over moderation Tony started off by C&P content from the paper and allowing people to discuss in a more open environment He then started writing comment articles based on the discussions
We moved to self hosted WP install quite quickly to allow for greater functionality. BNP membership lists being published on the site were the catalyst for this.
We started building a drupal install in June 09 and launched the new site 1 year after the original self hosted PnP site went live.. Drupal gives us far more options and features. I don’t see that we would need to move from this platform
There is a huge interest in local politics. 12 years ago 60 Labour councillors, then the chamber got very fragmented and far right councillors started to get elected. We have been attacked by pretty much all the local media in Stoke-on-Trent in one way or another. We must be doing something right :)
I say the local media are not interested. This is the Sentinel coverage of Tristram Hunts maiden speech in the house. 10 lines
We on the other hand, provided the full text of the speech. Not much work but people are interested in this stuff.
Some of the stuff we are proud of.
Staffordshire Police are getting more trusting of us, we were allowed to go out on a drugs raid with them recently.
We make a lot of use of audio recordings for our interviews. Rather than using the recordings as an Aide-mémoire we took the decision to publish them in an audio player on the site. This gives us a more credible voice as our visitors are hearing what the interviewee wants them to hear, rather than a sanitised and spun version. The feed back we get from our visitors is that they like the audio recordings.
![Mike Rawlins ,[object Object]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/pnppresentation11062010-100610152442-phpapp01/85/PnP-presentation-11062010-1-320.jpg)
