FROM FACEBOOK PAGE TO NEWSPAPER - THE CITY TALKING

Hebe Media are delighted to announce the first issue of The City Talking, a brand new newspaper for Leeds. The paper marks the latest step in a three year journey that has seen the project, which started out as a Facebook page for friends to talk about Leeds, become a multi-media network reaching more than 60,000 young people online, on mobile and now in print.

The first issue of The City Talking is a twenty page, full colour tabloid sized newspaper. 10,000 copies will be distributed free to the public, primarily in Leeds city centre. The paper focusses on life and style, and the first issue includes interviews with fashion designer Henry Holland, publisher James Brown and Leeds band The Pigeon Detectives. Other pages include features on the history of Burtons, Leeds Digital Fashion Week and Kirkgate Market, as well as travel advice from published author Shang-Ting Peng. The newspaper is edited by Daniel Chapman and Stacey Hicken, with art direction by Leeds design studio Rabbit Hole.

The City Talking was started three years ago, on Facebook, by a small group of friends seeking an antidote to what they felt was a weakness in the local media offer: it wasn’t speaking to a young audience. The page very quickly attracted thousands of members.

"We wanted to chat about things that the local media, speaking frankly, were not talking about,” says Lee Hicken of Hebe Media. "As the number of people liking the page grew into the thousands we knew we were on to something.” 

After three years of organic growth it now reaches more than 60,000 people via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a dedicated website that launched in May 2012. "We want The City Talking to be a truly multi-platform experience, and mobile and print were always on our agenda", explains Lee. "The timing seemed right and working with some amazing partners and storytellers sped up our decision to move to the next level.” 

In 2012 the project received investment from the UK innovation agency, Nesta, to develop a mobile news service for Leeds. The outcome, a mobile app named Solomon, will launch in May 2013 and will provide people across the city with a way to create, discover and share stories about life in Leeds, wherever they are.

"Our new website, which launches today, provides an improved mobile experience but with Solomon we wanted to design something totally different, built from the ground up, and designed for mobile," says Simon Zimmerman, who leads on the digital component of The City Talking's offer. "We're really excited about launching the service, and we think it's going to redefine how news and views about life in Leeds are shared and consumed."

"With the launch of our paper we've taken the first big step in our plan to make The City Talking the media space for young people in Leeds. Mobile comes next and then we have our sights set firmly on video," concludes Lee.

Leeds Digital Fashion Week Vol. 2

We are delighted to announce that the second Leeds Digital Fashion Week will take place March 18th - 24th 2013. 

Following on from our debut last October, #LDFW Vol. 2 will continue to tell the story of Leeds fashion scene past, present and future. We will be adding 'off-line' events to the mix this time around, including showcases, industry panel discussions and in-store events. 

The Leeds Digital Fashion Week project started in reaction to a workshop we ran in June 2012 called Made in Leeds. The idea of the Made in Leeds is to showcase Leeds design and manufacture at the centre of our city's narrative, and try to shine a light on the brilliant things people are doing here in fashion, music, art and other creative industries. 

More then 80 industry professionals attended the workshop including designers, makers, high street retailers, people in education and the fashion media. One of the main themes to emerge was the need to "tell our story better" and market what we are doing much more effectively  We thought the perfect way to start was to talk about our heritage, current scene and future superstars using the power of film, photo-shoots, podcasts and other digital media... and Leeds Digital Fashion Week was born.

The first #LDFW was a great success. We orchestrated a 'takeover' of thecitytalking.com, a website where 1,000s of young people in the city were already plugged in. We produced more then 60 separate stories using film, photo-shoots, podcasts, interviews and features. We had tens of thousands of visitors to the site and showcased the Leeds scene to audiences all over the world.

This, however, was just the beginning; just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we want to achieve. In #LDFW Vol. 2 we will be introducing more new brands, designers and projects that are waiting to be discovered here in Leeds (and the region). Once again, we will be looking at careers in the city's fashion industry, for both young people and established professionals; and, we will be inviting some very special guests to come and get involved in the project and introducing some exciting collaborations between brands.

In the next few weeks we will be making some big announcements about #LDFW Vol.2  and some of the partnerships and features we have secured. In the meantime you can sign-up to the mailing list for updates, or contact us if you are a brand who wants to be involved.

Leeds brands and designers will again take centre-stage at #LDFW.

Leeds Digital Fashion Week Approaches

We are now only two weeks away from the first ever Leeds Digital Fashion Week produced by Hebe. The project will present a week long programme of digital content, showcasing the best of the region's fashion scene, both past and present.

We have been blown away with the reaction to the project, with designers, makers, story-tellers and some of the most exciting fashion brands in the world getting involved. 

The week will feature a wide variety of content. Videos, photo-shoots, podcasts, blog posts, interviews and much more will fill our LOL! Leeds Online platform and showcase the industry here to the world.

As well as looking at what is going on in Leeds at the moment, we will look back to the region's illustrious fashion history, to a time when the city was one of the most important in the world for design and manufacturing. We will look at some of the brands with a massive Leeds history and influence, such as Marks and Spencers, Arcadia, Aqua, Nicholas Deakins and many more. We will speak with some of the people who lived and breathed the industry here from the 1950s to the 1980s, and get their take on what was going on at the time and the changes that have taken place since.

We will look to the future for the region and identify some of the designers, brands and individuals who will take Leeds City Region forward into a new era, and discover how they plan to do it.

For people looking to break into the fashion industry, we will focus on careers and education. We will speak to people from the region who have gone on to become global players and talk about the paths they took to get there. We will also look at some of the opportunities for young people to break into the industry with a focus on education, training and job opportunities currently available in the region.

We will announce the next stages of exciting new projects, such as Independent Leeds and 'Made in Leeds', which we have been working on in recent months.

Three years ago we sat down in the Hebe office and said we wanted to create the industry we want to work in, here in Leeds, and this is the first step towards achieving that dream. We have researched, debated, produced 'test' projects and created a strategy that we feel will re-establish Leeds as a major player in the fashion industry. This will not be a solo thing, we need everyone to come on the journey and play their part. We also need to facilitate and engineer serendipity between the fashion scene and other brilliant creative scenes we have in the city, such as the music and digital industries, to create the cross-discipline stuff that we find most fascinating.

We hope you will join us and get involved in Leeds Digital Fashion Week, and hopefully we can all look back on this moment in a few years and talk of massive things growing from small stylish acorns.

UK Observing Diary Teaser

Wow! The UK Observing Diary book launch tour was insane! We spent a month out in the Far East promoting the new book which focuses on life & style in London & Leeds. Hebe's Head of Fashion Shang-Ting Peng and partner in crime Chia-wen Liu are now best selling authors and we had a blast working with brands like Vogue, Brand, Marie Claire, EETV and loads more.

We are currently putting together a longer film with all the TV appearances  and magazine spreads but in the meantime we thought we would share this 30 second teaser with everyone. 

DO or DIY

The second part of information as material's exhibition Do or DIY opens at Shandy Hall in North Yorkshire today, following a month long display at one of London's most prestigious art galleries, the Whitechapel, earlier this year.

information as material, whose editorial board includes our very own Simon Zimmerman, has an international reputation for publishing books, posters, pamphlets, films and even mobile apps by key contemporary artists including Pavel Büchler, Caroline Bergvall and Kenneth Goldsmith. We are really proud the continue working with these guys, helping to produce their insane projects.

Their latest exhibition looks at the long tradition of DIY publishing, of which they are a part, starting the story with 18th Century writer Laurence Sterne who self-published his most famous work, The Life and Time of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen, from his home at Shandy Hall, now a museum dedicated to his legacy, as well as a gallery showcasing work by contemporary artists and writers. The exhibition is part of the Art in Yorkshire, Goes Modern programme.

Unlike the Whitechapel exhibition, which was displayed across two indoor galleries, the Shandy Hall showing is described as an intervention throughout the gardens of Shandy Hall. If you are up near Thirsk in North Yorkshire, it's well worth a detour to check this place, and the exhibition, out.

There is a free publication, including an anecdotal history of DIY publishing along with a call-to-action for others to get involved. Be sure to pick up a copy or drop us an email and we'll fire one out in the post.

Positive Chord Changes For Impressionable Young White Girls

As some of you will have already read, we manage a band along with one of our partners in crime and legendary BacktoBasics founder Dave Beer. The band are I C S (I Call Shotgun) and this is their new video for the track Positive Chord Changes For Impressionable Young White Girls.

The boys (Joe, Graham, Iain & Josh) have a really cool vibe about them and more importantly a sound that makes us want to party! We first clamped eyes and ears on I C S at a Harvey Nichols event a few years ago and knew immediately that when the time was right Hebe and I C S would work together on something. That right time was when we went out to Barcelona for the first ever Creative Encounter. As well as having I C S play at the event, our after-party was DJ-d by BacktoBasics and the stars had aligned... Hebe x I C S x Basics.

We have loads of cool stuff lined up in the coming months for I C S and this video is just the start of what will be lots of fun to come!

UK Observing Diary Book Launch

On Thursday Hebe's Head of Fashion Shang-Ting Peng will head out to Taiwan to begin the promotional tour for the first UK Observing Diary book. The book is the latest stage of a project that started out as a diary for friends and has turned into an international sensation.

The UK Observing Diary book is a kind-of 'extension' of the Facebook page on which it is based. The book provides a new look at life and style in Leeds and London, for an audience in the Far East. As well as having very practical information for tourists and new students coming to the UK, the book also features some of the most interesting people from the two cities and gives a different take on the 'traditional tourist book'.

The book has already gone down a storm in the Far East; last week it went on pre-order and within hours went to No.3 in the charts of a Taiwanese website equivalent to amazon.com. An event to promote the book had space for 150 fans... it has sold out. On top of all this, one of our favourite brands, Cath Kidston, has come on board as a partner on the book launch and will be giving away a special free gift with every copy.

The book entered the top 3 bestsellers list within hours of going on pre-order

On Monday we held a little 'send-off' for ShangTing at the legendary Mojo Bar in Leeds. The guys at Mojo created a special cocktail in honour of the launch called, "ShangTing's Ginger Fizz" and it certainly went down well with the people we invited to the event.

We presented a sneaky peak at some of the pages from the book including those featuring Leeds couture designer James Steward and places like Kirkgate Market and Leeds City Museum. It was great to see how people in Leeds reacted to seeing the city showcased in a totally new way. We have held conversations with many people in the past about how the city does not sell itself very well internationally and focuses on the wrong things when telling the 'Leeds story' to the world. The UK Observing Diary book represents many of the faces and places that are best about this city, in our opinion. It is going to be really interesting to see some of our theories about the marketing of the city put to the test when the book officially launches next week.

Over the next few weeks we will be posting regular updates on the book tour including reports from events with the British Council and the numerous book signing events that are planned. At the event last night Shang-Ting spoke about how she wanted to showcase Leeds to the rest of the world and this book will certainly help with that mission. 

An afternoon with James Steward