Craig Wilson is a talented local photographer with an extraordinary ability to capture images of Pevensey Bay, the hidden jewel in the crown of Sussex.

His understanding of portraiture and the particularity of the place means that his work is almost certainly worthy of an award of some description. Amongst his work are images taken of the sun rising over the Bay, stunning in their compositional qualities.

Bay Life will be featuring his work over the coming year, in a gallery dedicated to his emerging portfolio.

Craig is the first of our ‘in-house citizen journalists’, who are joining the publication to report on local issues, events and news stories in the spirit of Life Magazine and Pathé News in the fifties.

We hope to be able to ‘break’ a local budding journalist or photo journalist, by giving them a platform that will promote their work to a wider audience.

Regular readers will know that Bay Life is the only publication online in East Sussex to work on the basis of a Guardian ‘Open Platform licence’. This gives us entitlement to publish from 1.4 million articles in the Guardian news vault on any given day.

Working with the licence enables us to draw into the readership of the Bay Life people who would not otherwise bookmark and browse a local community based publication.

In Wales, where a sister publication, based in Narberth, Pembrokeshire is now a well established part of the community, enjoying 500 page views daily, two ‘citizen journalists’ have begun to report the local news with commentaries, stories and moving image newsreel style reportage on their cell phones.

The viewing figures have shown that there is a real appetite for news and pictures generated locally. In the New Age of Austerity, all kinds of local initiatives are beginning to spring up in business and community networks. The online world is beginning to reflect some of these initiatives. Pevensey Bay Life is part of this growing movement.

We welcome Craig and his work to the pages of Bay Life.

The Citizen Journalism section of Bay Life begins in earnest in September 2011. We are interested in hearing from people of any age, budding journalists and image makers, both still and moving, who would like to see their work credited and put before a growing audience.

You can contact Bay Life for further information about our ‘Citizen Journalism’ project.