{"id":2198,"date":"2018-12-31T10:37:46","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T10:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2198"},"modified":"2019-02-06T15:13:30","modified_gmt":"2019-02-06T15:13:30","slug":"2198","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2198","title":{"rendered":"Is it too late to save local news from the spike?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When did you last pick up a copy of your local paper? Not\nrecently? You\u2019re not the only one. Britain\u2019s local press looks to be on its\nlast legs. Since 2005, almost 200 local newspapers have closed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

News was once a hugely profitable business, largely thanks\nto advertising. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the technological advances of the 1980s and 1990s, the\nsector started to consolidate.  Newsrooms\nstarted to merge. When the likes of Craigslist started taking nibbles out of\nthe ad market, the enfeebled local press started to struggle. When Facebook and\nGoogle started to take bigger bites, it was there for the taking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now five publishers \u2013 Reach, Johnston Press, Newsquest,\nTindle and Archant \u2013 control more than three-quarters of the UK\u2019s local and\nregional press titles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their challenge is to keep making money from dwindling print\nrevenues \u2013 even though it\u2019s far from clear that this model is fit for the 21st\ncentury. Budgets have been squeezed and staffing cut to the bone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Investigative reporting is usually the first to go. Hannah Walker,\nthen editor of the South London Press, told\na London Assembly inquiry<\/a> in 2017: \n\u201cI cannot afford to lose a reporter for three days not being productive.\nI need some copy because we have deadlines and we need to get papers out.\u201d More\noften than not, that means being sat in a distant office scouring social media\nand pasting up press releases rather than the old craft of nurturing contacts\nand getting out in the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2014, Reach closed the Kensington & Chelsea\nChronicle, the area\u2019s only local paper, calling it \u201cunsustainable\u201d. When\nresidents of a tower block started a blog about serious safety concerns, its\nreplacement website, Guildford-based Get West London, was too distant to\nnotice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After 72 people died when fire destroyed Grenfell Tower,\nformer Kensington News reporter Grant\nFeller wrote:<\/a> \u201cI don’t know whether a vibrant local newspaper staffed by\nidealistic young journalists would have prevented the catastrophe all of London\nhas been indelibly scarred by. But it could have.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the local news scene as we knew it is dying, what will it\nbe replaced by?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The BBC\u2019s Local Democracy Reporter Service is funding 150\njournalists to report on UK councils. While critics say the scheme is\neffectively subsidising the major companies that have cut back on local\njournalism, the BBC is making content available to rival providers too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bureau Local, an initiative from The Bureau for\nInvestigative Journalism, links up journalists, technologists and others in\nstudying issues locally that can be scaled up to make national stories. This\nyear\u2019s revelations about county councils suffering financial problems came, in\npart, from Bureau Local members looking at their local councils\u2019 budgets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And a host of hyperlocal and community newspapers and\nwebsites have set out to fill the gap – many coalescing around the Independent\nCommunity News Network, set up at Cardiff University to champion small\nindependent news outfits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am part of that network as the editor of 853london.com,\nwhich follows civic issues in and around Greenwich, south-east London, and\ncharltonchampion.co.uk, a community site for the Charlton area. It started as\nsomething I did in my spare time, but as other news coverage of the area faded,\nI started to take it more seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve broken stories of council bullying and incompetence and\nsat through endless meetings. In August, I beat all of London\u2019s media to reveal\nplans to cut bus services that run to the centre of the capital \u2013 a story that\naffects many of the poorest and most vulnerable in my area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past year, 853 has been funded by readers\u2019\ndonations. I get an amazing amount compared with what other sites raise, but it\nstill only pays for me to run the site on a part-time basis. I struggle to find\nother journalistic work to pay the bills that are creeping up on me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sites such as mine suffer from the same problem as the media\ngiants\u2019 legacy titles. Too much advertising money is going to Facebook and\nGoogle, while too few people appear to want to pay to support local news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One independent south London community newspaper, The\nCroydon Citizen, has closed after just five years, with founder-editor\nJames Naylor lamenting<\/a>: \u201cAdvertising is no longer able to fund journalism;\nFacebook has won the battle for eyeballs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Local news is a market that needs a complete rethink,\nwhether that involves news outlets being able to gain charitable status; the\npromotion of co-operative models; allowing residents to declare local papers\nassets of community value to save them from closure; state grants for start-up\nnews outfits (as is being proposed in Wales); or the emergence of a charitable\nfoundation to support civic reporting (such as the Knight Foundation in the\nUS).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever happens, something needs to change. Or communities\nwill become even more disconnected from the decisions made in their name \u2013 with\nserious consequences for all of us.<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When did you last pick up a copy of your local paper? Not recently? You\u2019re not the only one. Britain\u2019s local press looks to be on its last legs. Since 2005, almost 200 local newspapers have closed. News was once a hugely profitable business, largely thanks to advertising. With the technological advances of the 1980s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":2199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1395,1408,1396],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1573],"class_list":["post-2198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-comment","category-media-and-culture","category-uk"],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Is-it-too-late-to-save-local-news-from-the-spike-mike-ackerman-313942-unsplash-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2198"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}