THERE has been much talk in the media this year of the arrival of the 'Citizen Journalist'.

The new breed really came into its own with the London bombings and helped in giving the Asian tsunami an instant global impact.

You can now film events with your mobile phone and with the internet download those images to millions of viewers in minutes.

There has never been a more exciting time to be a journalist with the potential of this new technology to put us even closer to the communities we serve.

Today we are launching a new online news forum, which can be found at http://forums.thisismalvern.co.uk.

We hope readers will use it not just to comment on what they read in the newspaper, but also to submit their own stories, reviews, whatever takes your fancy.

Today, for example, we suggest that anyone planning a firework display might be a good neighbour by posting the time and date on our new site - after all it's not always practical to put a note through the door every home in the area - the possibilities are endless, so get blogging!

Even in the brave new world of the citizen journalist, there will still be a role for trained journalists, in fact even more so, in helping to make sense of the huge amount of information which is available to people these days.

But journalists are not omniscient, we can only write about what people tell us or we have the wit to ask about.

We hope the new forum will be one more way of helping readers make sure that we too stay in touch with the news.