THE Camden New Journal is launching a new online channel today (Monday), as we expand the cam­paigning, independent journalism we have become known for to a broader audience.

Borrowing the name of our long-running politics column, Peeps Online will be available on our new platform on YouTube and include films and interviews aimed at going behind the headlines and hearing from people you don’t always see on the national news.

While the UK’s media has contracted, often pumping out the same stories and messages regardless of which channel you choose, we will not sit waiting for briefings from spin doctors and special advisers ­– which are then branded as scoops.

We are a country which rightly now celebrates and promotes diversity, but not in diversity of thought. The CNJ has always believed that the media only survives and thrives with pluralism, and cannot be the fiefdom of the rich.

We have no shareholders or faraway owner to appease. There are no excessive pay packets ­­­­­– the money that comes in is spent to simply cover the cost of good journalism.

In the first uploads on the Peeps Online channel, reporters will take you behind the scenes of some of the discussions at the recent political conferences, debate the effectiveness of protest and take a rare look inside an international arms fair which happens in our city every two years without most Londoners even knowing.

Our films will be rooted in more than 40 years of award-winning journalism and the political drama which always somehow seems to have a route back to north London.

You only have to glance at the current and previous leaders of the Labour Party to tell you that.

But this channel will also give us the freedom to go beyond borough boundaries and reach a wider audience. We often hear how people in other areas wish they still had a strong, campaigning local newspaper.

We will feature well-known faces, but also those with burning ideas that don’t always fit into the circular daily news diet with which we have all become painfully familiar.

There will be a chance to help us sustain what we do with donations, but there will also be material which will be open and available to all.

One of the lasting principles of the New Journal has been that everybody should have access to news, information and debate, regardless of the ability to pay.

Our so-called “free sheet” later became the model for many others.

So join us now by subscribing to our YouTube channel ­­– www.youtube.com/@peepsonline ­­­­– and comment on our work. Everybody who does so will be helping independent, campaigning journalism.

We hope it will open up our reporting to more readers looking for something new and alternative.