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FAQ

Most frequent questions and answers, including how you can participate, our complaints procedure, and plans for the growth of title online and in print

A new print and digital publication, celebrating the people and industry of Hackney Wick, Fish Island and the neighbourhoods in and around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The Wick is fully collaborative, offering a platform on which local residents, creatives and organisations alike can participate, by communicating their ideas and showcasing their work. Our mission is to earn trust, and grow to become a sustainable community resource for the area over many years to come.

The pilot print edition is out now, although current lockdown restrictions may mean you won’t be able to go out and pick up your free copy just yet. Don’t worry though, as soon as local businesses are able to reopen, we will restock, and the edition is due to be around until well into January.

The monthly print edition will ultimately be delivered free to thousands of local homes, shops, bars and public spaces using zero-emissions e-cargo bikes, and available at select locations further afield, too. If you’d like to stock copies, please get in touch info@thisisthewick.com. Online and across all the social channels, you’ll find us @thisisthewick, we’re also soon to be on the new SWEN platform here.

The Wick is joint venture between Creative Wick and TheLococo, with the pilot edition funded by the Foundation for FutureLondon. Creative Wick works to facilitate a permanent, sustainable, creative economy in Hackney Wick, Fish Island and the wider East London area. TheLococo supports neighbourhood economies and communities, working in partnership with existing stakeholders to establish innovative new media titles.

If you’d like to see us cover a particular person, business or topic in a future edition of The Wick, you can fill in details on this form and your pitch will go directly into out live editorial queue for consideration.
Community editorial meetings are held as part of the HWFI Cultural Interest Group (CIG), on the second Friday of every month at 9.30am, and you are welcome to sign up and attend the next one (CIG meetings are currently virtual events held via Google Meet due to Covid restrictions). 
If you’d like to contribute a feature yourself, either written work, images or using multi-media tools, we’d love to put your work in front of an audience. Let us know more via info@thisisthewick.com the next one

Yes! The aim of The Wick is to offer meaningful employment opportunities to as many locals as possible. If we commission you to write, photograph, record or illustrate a piece for us, we will agree a fair and reasonable fee from our edition editorial budget and will pay you upon publication. We actively source a variety of supplementary services from within the community too, from physical distribution to digital marketing, so keep an eye on our channels for occasional paid roles like those, too.

Our key editorial topics fall under one of five main strands: Arts & Culture, Enterprise & Innovation, Health & Wellbeing, Environment & Public Realm and Education & Training. Additionally, print editions or online seasons will focus on particular themes in more depth. We invite regular guest editors to bring a range of alternative local views and perspectives to our output. Our content will always celebrate this neighbourhood’s diverse creativity and industry, honour its unique history, and imagine a future with improved outcomes for all. We’re not a traditional ‘local paper’, full of gripes and moans, but rather a positive, innovative way of uniting everyone through engaging local storytelling.

Yes, we’d love to help. Our audience couldn’t be better targeted for businesses of any size who want to communicate with people who live, work and play in the four boroughs around the Olympic Park. We offer a full range of promotional services, from simple print/digital display advertising to native content pieces and larger branded partnerships. Our sponsors are ultimately how we can pay our team and build The Wick into a valuable, sustainable community asset for all, so we’re always on the lookout for people to work with. As a community title, we will ensure our values and ethics are not compromised by any commercial activity we undertake.

It’s an era of rapid change in this part of London, leading to inevitable tensions – and that was before the Covid crisis made life that much tougher. The Wick presents an opportunity to bring locals of all ages, social groups and backgrounds together. It is a democratic hub for communicating ideas and discussions, and an ideal platform to stimulate recovery of the creative economy, too. Now is the time to focus on all things local, and make sure they truly work for everyone. This is what we aim to help achieve, and we look forward to you playing a part in it.

We can look into complaints about items we have published which are in our control.  We adhere to the Standards Code adopted by IMPRESS and can only deal with complaints which relate to an alleged breach of the standards set out in this Code.

 We can only deal with your complaint if you are:

  • Personally and directly affected by an alleged breach of the Code
  • A representative group affected by an alleged breach of the Code, where there is public interest in your complaint
  • A third party seeking to ensure accuracy of published information


We are also regulated by IMPRESS, but initial complaints must be made to us in writing at the following address: 

Email: complaints@theloco.co       
Address: The Local Content Company Ltd, LABS Atrium, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8AH

We will acknowledge your complaint by e-mail or in writing within 7 calendar days and will normally respond to your compliant with a final decision letter within 21 calendar days. If we uphold your complaint, we will tell you the remedial actions we have taken.

If you are not satisfied with the final response to your complaint, or if you do not hear from us within 21 calendar days of submitting your complaint, then you can refer your complaint to our Independent regulator IMPRESS at the following address:

Email: complaints@impressreg.ork.uk
Address: IMPRESS, 16-18 New Bridge Street, London, EC4V 6AG