The day after the 2008 local elections and London elections many of us must have felt deflated and nervous about Labour's future electability, I know I did. The corporate media, mostly fair weather friends at best, had spent months highlighting Labour's weaknesses and ignoring our successes. All the talk was of an inevitable change of government whenever Gordon Brown decided to go to the country.

In London the media was even more hostile. The Evening Standard had actively campaigned against Ken Livingstone and had been victorious. It might not be true that it was "The Sun wot won it" but The Standard almost certainly lost it for Labour in London.

Of course we know all this, many of us have complained about media bias for years. The question is what can we do about it? That is what I asked myself anyway!

We are the newsmakers
Like an increasing number of people, the Internet is my first choice for information. I no longer buy a newspaper, instead I have all the newspaper's RSS feeds deliver news directly to me each morning. If I want to read what's happening on the Council I served on for eight years I search the Web too.

And then it struck me: Labour is full of newsmakers who publish press releases in the hope that an unsympathetic media would deign to include some of it in an article. But Councillors are often thwarted by a local media disinterested in politics outside of an election; MEPs find it hard to be relevant to the many local papers their constituencies cover; and MPs often find their press releases ignored by the national media altogether.

If not printed, all that good news is lost forever.

Bypass the corporate media
What Labour needed was a publishing tool to save all this positive publicity and make it available to anybody who was interested in, say, Labour action in their local area or the views on a hot topic by their MP. It needed to avoid adding to workloads of already busy people too.

So I got to work and created Labour Matters. A week later I started writing test articles to see whether people really were using the Internet to find out about both local and national issues, and they are! Even though Labour Matters isn't yet published in Google News and the like, even the most mundane of local issue was being searched for and read.

Ready for your news
Today, 8 July 2008, Labour Matters passed a milestone by moving into beta stage. What that means is that we are now able to accept press releases from elected Labour representatives. After registering with labour Matters, Councillors, MPs, MEPs, etc., can simply email their press releases, just as they might email the newsdesks.

The difference is that Labour Matters will publish them in full without adding any journalistic spin or editing. That's it: just register once and add news@labourmatters.com to your normal press release email list!

We're not publicising this very widely until the Autumn because we still have some improvements and further testing to do, but if you are or know somebody Labour who issues press releases, let them know about this new service. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain!