Hackney Post: A Student Newsroom for All of Hackney
Hackney Post is a local news website covering the London Borough of Hackney, written and published by students on the MA Newspaper Journalism course at City, University of London. Its self-description could hardly be simpler: a local news website for all of Hackney, produced by the latest cohort of City's newspaper journalism postgraduates as they learn their trade on a real patch, in public.
Hackney gives them plenty to work with. The east London borough — Dalston, Stoke Newington, Clapton, Shoreditch, Homerton, De Beauvoir and Hackney Wick among its neighbourhoods — combines rapid gentrification and a famous arts and nightlife scene with deep-rooted communities, social housing estates and some of the most pressing housing and poverty questions in the capital. Hackney Post's archive, which stretches back well over a decade, records successive cohorts of young journalists discovering that borough, one production week at a time.
Overview
The site is organised in the sections of a conventional local newspaper: Home, News, Sport, Features, Lifestyle, Arts, Money and What's On, with a contact page and an active archive organised by tags for places and subjects across the borough. Stories are bylined and dated, and the site surfaces its most-read pieces — a snapshot of recent production weeks shows housing, renters' rights, community football and food projects leading its most-read list, a fair sample of the borough's own priorities.
Hackney Post is one of two hyperlocal titles produced by City journalism students, alongside Islington Now, which covers the neighbouring borough. Where Islington Now is run jointly by interactive and newspaper journalism students, Hackney Post's own account of itself names a single parent course: the MA Newspaper Journalism programme. Both titles share the same underlying model — intensive production periods in which students run a working newsroom for a real London borough.
History and Development
The Post was established as part of City University's postgraduate journalism training in the period when hyperlocal publishing became central to how the university taught digital-era reporting. By the early 2010s, the two borough sites were being written about as a pair: in 2011, media commentators were describing student journalists spending production weeks playing "actual journalist" at the two sites, with one participant explaining that the goal was to bring together all the skills learned over the previous six months and put them to work in a working newsroom. In February 2012, the university's interactive journalism cohort was likewise dividing its time between projects that included both Islington Now and Hackney Post, brought to life during three intensive production weeks in collaboration with the newspaper course.
The site's own archive testifies to continuity since that era. Comment threads and stories from the mid-2010s — moped muggings in Stoke Newington, hygiene data for the borough's food outlets, hospital strike coverage from Homerton — sit in the same archive as the current cohort's work, and older tag pages show the site publishing through successive academic years. Like all student titles, the Post renews itself annually; unlike many, it has a named borough, a stable format and an institutional home that keep it alive from cohort to cohort.
Ownership and Institutional Home
Hackney Post is produced within City, University of London, whose Department of Journalism is based at Northampton Square in Islington — a short distance from the southern edge of the borough the site covers. The department is one of the UK's leading providers of journalism education, and its MA Newspaper Journalism course supplies the Post's reporters, news editors and production teams.
The publication is educational rather than commercial. It has no cover price, paywall or dependence on display advertising, and its continuation depends on its curricular role rather than on revenue. In return, the university's students get something no classroom exercise can provide: a public platform, a recognisable title and an audience of real residents, while local readers get additional reporting on their borough.
How It Works: Production Weeks
The Post's publishing heartbeat is the intensive production period, in which a cohort takes over the site and produces it as a working newsroom. The model described by participants in the site's early years — three weeks of full-time production, in teams, applying six months of training — remains visible in the archive's rhythm: stories cluster tightly on particular days, especially in March, as a whole cohort files at once, and the most-read list turns over wholesale with each new production period.
That rhythm shapes the journalism. Reporters must find Hackney stories fast: they work the borough's institutions — Hackney Council, Homerton Hospital, its schools, markets, venues and sports clubs — cultivate community contacts, and turn around news, features and multimedia to deadline. The transferable discipline is the point of the exercise, but the output is genuine local journalism, read by the community it describes.
Coverage and Content
News coverage spans the borough's hard issues. The Post's recent most-read stories include an examination of Hackney Council leaving social housing residents in the lurch, a guide to new rules strengthening renters' rights, and a feature on a community food project under the headline "Cooking up change in Hackney". Housing — the defining Hackney question of the gentrification era — runs through the site's work like a spine, from homelessness and temporary accommodation reporting to renters' campaigns.
The archive shows the same range historically. Its pages carry crime reporting such as the Stoke Newington moped-mugging story; health coverage including warnings of further strikes at Homerton Hospital; data journalism, including an analysis finding that almost half of Hackney's food outlets had been hit with hygiene warnings; and an interactive map of arts venues in the borough, produced as part of the site's early experiments with data and interactive storytelling. Politics is woven through it: one enduring archive story reported Hackney's MP Diane Abbott's reaction to revelations about police spying — national-grade material, handled by student reporters on a borough patch.
Arts, lifestyle and sport give the site its colour. Theatre at Stoke Newington's Tower Theatre, grime nights in Dalston raising money for refugees, café-by-café food guides in Dalston and Clapton, a community football league putting community at the heart of the game, even a long-running readers' vote on Hackney's cutest dog in the site's earlier years — the Post's lighter coverage maps the borough's cultural life as attentively as its news pages map its politics.
Editorial Voice
The Post writes as a borough newspaper: reported, bylined and locally rooted, with features that allow its young journalists' personalities to show. Its best work combines the two registers — rigorous on housing and council accountability, warm and curious on food, music and community sport. The student identity is not hidden; it is the premise. Readers know they are reading the work of journalists in training, and the site's authority comes from the quality and specificity of its reporting rather than from institutional seniority.
Community connection is part of the voice. Stories are built around borough institutions and residents — family centres, food banks, parent networks, choirs, leagues and venues — and the comments and contributions of readers visible in the archive show the site in conversation with its patch over many years.
Digital Presence
Hackney Post is digital-only, published at hackneypost.co.uk in a newspaper-style WordPress format with section navigation, tag archives, most-read rankings and social follow links. Every page carries its statement of identity — a local news website for all of Hackney, written and published by City's MA Newspaper Journalism students — making the site's provenance transparent to any reader who lands on it.
The digital archive is an asset in itself: years of Hackney stories, searchable by street, venue and theme, form a longitudinal record of the borough's recent history as seen by successive groups of young reporters — from Dalston raves and chicken-shop geography in the early 2010s to renters' rights and community football in the 2020s.
Audience and Reach
The audience is Hackney itself: residents of the borough's neighbourhoods, its community groups and institutions, and the wider audience that London hyperlocal stories reach through search and social media. The site publishes no audited audience figures; its reach is best gauged by its longevity, its most-read dynamics during production weeks, and its place in media references to City journalism training, where it is routinely cited alongside Islington Now as the university's hyperlocal publishing model.
Like its sister title, the Post has a second audience of employers and educators. A byline on a real borough news site is portfolio evidence, and the Post's public archive lets anyone inspect the standard of work its cohorts produce.
Place in Hackney's Media Landscape
Hackney has a long local-press tradition of its own, and the Post operates alongside — not instead of — the borough's established commercial and independent media. Its contribution is additional reporting capacity and a training-ground perspective: stories such as the food-hygiene data analysis, the community-league football spotlight and the social housing investigation are the kind of labour-intensive local journalism that adds texture to a borough's media diet, whoever produces them.
The arrangement also suits Hackney. A borough that has changed as fast as any in London benefits from fresh eyes: each cohort of City students arrives asking the questions newcomers ask — about rents, displacement, nightlife, safety and belonging — and the Post's archive, read across the years, amounts to a rolling documentary of that change.
Recent Developments
The Post remains in active production. Its spring 2026 output — published in the tight March clusters characteristic of its production weeks — led its most-read rankings with the community food feature, the renters' rights explainer, the social housing story and the Goalposts League community football spotlight, all dated within two days of each other in March 2026. Arts coverage in the same period included a substantial review-feature on a production of Brian Friel's Translations at the Tower Theatre in Stoke Newington.
More than a decade after media writers first described City students learning hyperlocal lessons on the site, the formula is unchanged and still working: a new cohort, a real borough, three intense weeks, and a news website for all of Hackney at the end of it.
