Citizen Extra is the latest incarnation of the popular and much-missed Whitley Bay and Geordie Citizen websites - we're back and even better than before! 

The Citizen phenomenon began in the spring of 2000 when a certain Whitley Bay resident called Geoff was reading his local newspaper. After reading endless stories about wheelie bins, dog mess and Council inefficiency, he came to the conclusion that none of it was really very important. So why did this newspaper, which shall remain nameless, take it all so seriously?

So it was that he set about designing his own local newspaper - only this newspaper was to spoof the issues the real local newspaper took so seriously. Unimportant issues would be reported on to ridiculous extremes and tabloid-type sensationalist stories would become commonplace in a place where nothing really interesting ever happened. He printed a few copies of this spoof newspaper, the Whitley Bay Citizen, and handed them out to his friends - uploaded images of the newspaper's pages onto an obscure site on the internet and then forgot all about it...

At around the same time, a certain other Whitley Bay resident who had only recently decided to be called Geoff, was taking his first steps into the world of web publishing. He set up a web site, the now dormant Comedy Alternative UK, in which he wrote humorous bits and pieces about his world. Foremost among these bits and pieces was his diary - a daily delve into the life of a Whitley Bay resident to whom nothing interesting ever happened. Up to a thousand words of nothing were produced every day - the whole point being that humour was derived from the completely mundane things...This was a blog long before blogs had even been invented.

In February 2001, whilst searching on the internet for sites about Whitley Bay, this Geoff happened to stumble across the pages of one spoof local newspaper, the Whitley Bay Citizen. Dazzled by its brilliance, he set about trying to find the person that had created it. There were no contact details on the page - only a guestbook with one entry in, an entry obviously written by the author. As his only means of contacting the creator of this masterpiece, Geoff (II) spent 2 hours writing a message pleading and begging with this person to let him use the Whitley Bay Citizen on Comedy Alternative UK. He even suggested that they made it into a proper online newspaper, and, rather cheekily, that he would like to write stories for it. Then, he waited for a reply.

And he waited. And waited.

A couple of weeks later Geoff (I) happened to check the guestbook on the Whitley Bay Citizen. Yep, there was the message he'd written all those months ago under a false name - but what was this? A new message...

In the bouncing of e-mails that followed, numerous ideas from the sublime to the ridiculous were discussed before eventually getting round to setting up the original idea - a proper online spoof local newspaper. On the 1^st of March 2001, the Whitley Bay Citizen web site was launched. The reporting of wheelie bins, dog mess and Council inefficiency would never be the same again...

After a few months of consolidation and the addition of new interactive features, the site started to become quite popular. The first sign of what was to come came in June when, while flicking through an issue of Private Eye magazine, Geoff (II) happened to notice the words 'Whitley Bay Citizen'. But this was not just a comment about the web site - it was a paragraph of one of the stories in the Whitley Bay Citizen, published in Private Eye as a humorous clipping from a real local newspaper. Whitley Bay Citizen had truly arrived - it had achieved its objective. It was so real in style that even Private Eye was fooled into believing that it was real. Geoff (ii), amused by the irony of it all, contacted Private Eye's editor, Ian Hislop. The reply he received was suitably satisfying: "Oops - a cock up and failure to spot satire by so-called satirists. Apologies."

Now linked on Private Eye's web site, the hits kept on coming. Soon Whitley Bay Citizen was being featured on popular North East web sites, local radio and even a regional newspaper saw the funny side and gave it a terrific review.

If it had truly arrived when it was featured in Private Eye, perhaps even more satisfying was the first post on the forum of the web site of the local newspaper which had provided the inspiration for Whitley Bay Citizen - a message saying how funny Whitley Bay Citizen was.

By this point Whitley Bay Citizen was having new stories and features added almost daily - with up to 50% of content being provided by outside contributors (all of whom, of course, had to live in Whitley Bay...or small villages on the outskirts of Whitley Bay, like Sunderland). The Letters to the Editor page proved how people had really grasped the concept of Whitley Bay Citizen and taken it to their hearts. The ingenuity and intelligence of the humour of the letters sent in by ordinary readers was and still is quite amazing.

So it had to happen eventually. Expanding the premise. In September 2001, the Geordie Citizen was launched. Lessons from Whitley Bay Citizen were learned - making updating the web site far easier - but the design and style remained essentially the same, just for a bigger population. The expansion into Geordie land gave us a chance to get away from Council bashing and move on to new themes - mostly Mackem-bashing. Consequently, the rivalry between Newcastle and Sunderland meant that this theme became very popular and Geordie Citizen began to have twice as many hits as Whitley Bay Citizen.

Whitley Bay Citizen was always intended to be the original and best - the two Geoffs' fondness for their hometown (despite its many faults) making it more special than any other Citizen could ever be. Yet one of the aims of Whitley Bay Citizen had always been to make Whitley Bay famous across the country, and as a stand alone web site this was going to be difficult to achieve. To spread the glorious name of Whitley Bay was going to mean abandoning one of the central premises of Whitley Bay Citizen - keeping it local. The Citizen name had to go country-wide.

Whitley Bay Citizen had always been local news for local people, so expanding the premise to make it into a national newspaper was, in some ways, sacreligious. However, in order to overcome the problem, Citizen News UK was to keep to the same style as Whitley Bay Citizen, in that it wouldn't report anything that was remotely newsworthy. How people distinguish it from the real tabloids no one knows!

But that wasn't the end of the story. On the same day as the launch of Citizen News UK, University Citizen also came into existence. Geoff (ii) had recently started university, but the initial inspiration to create a University Citizen was to come from one of his fellow students, whose ingenious (and, unbelievably, truthful) excuse for not being at a lecture one day was that her kitchen roof fell in, seemed ripe to be made into a student news story. It all fell into place - how similar the university campus was to Whitley Bay. Things not working. Inefficient bureaucracy. Every thing he saw that day translated into a story for the new web site - from a photo-me booth with no queue to solar panels that didn't work. Luckily, his trusty MiniDV video camera was, as always, ready for action so that photographic records could be taken - lest he forgot (back in those days digital stills camera were in their infancy). Just a few days after on Saturday, 13^th October 2001, University Citizen was launched. In an effort to maintain the 'local' theme of Whitley Bay Citizen, University Citizen has pages for each UK university where students can write stories about their own campus.

This brings the Citizen story up to mid October 2001, after which they continued for a couple of years and then, for various reasons, faded into obscurity.

An attempted relaunch in 2005 never really took off.

But now we're back, providing an archive of content from the early noughties along with brand new material.