As part of our recent Futureproofing local news podcast series, supported by the Google News Initiative, we asked a number of experts what they thought good local news should, or could look like. Here, three leading local news practitioners give their view.
A part of something bigger
The Public Interest News Foundation was formed in 2019 with the aim of helping independent news providers and improving public understanding of their work. Executive Director Jonathan Heawood spoke to us as part of the futureproofing local news series to give insight into some of the work they’re doing to support the industry.
As part of their recent work, the team at the Public Interest News Foundation went into six different communities and asked people about their memories of local news, what they thought about it at present, and what it should be like in the future. “If you’re of a certain age, and you grew up when there was this vibrant local newspaper, you probably at some point saw yourself in the paper,” Heawood noted. “And that was quite a big moment.”
He described his own print paper moment when his primary school won a road safety competition and a photographer came from the Yorkshire Evening Post for them. “There we are out in the playground holding up this trophy looking like idiots… It was a really special moment because there we are in this school playground, and then suddenly there I am on the page of this newspaper along with other stories about the York City football team, and the council, and the Minister. So I see that I’m part of something bigger than just this little playground.”
Heawood believes this is where generational divides come into play. “There’s a generation of 40 or above that have those memories,” he explains. “The generation below that doesn’t really have any particular sense of local news at present. What people really, really yearn for is a sense of ‘boots on the ground’, that reporters are actually there.”
This is a long-term strategy for local news publications. “It’s about relationships. We want people that we know and trust,” he emphasised.
Connecting the community
UK-based community interest company Social Spider publishes five community newspapers in London. They have three strands which they believe makes ‘good’ local news, which they have built into their operating practices.
The first is the one which gets a great deal of recognition and discussion: holding authority to account at a local level. Managing Director David Floyd told us that this includes scrutinising the activities of local councils, public sector agencies and big businesses at a local level. “These are things that are going on which are important to the public and important to society, but aren’t necessarily going to generate millions of clicks beyond that local area,” he explained.
The second strand builds on what Heawood said above: developing a deep understanding of the community, and giving people the opportunity to know what’s going on in their local area in a broader sense.
“We’re not so much now in the situation of, can your local newspaper tell you if there’s been a fire down the road. The local Facebook group can take that on,” Floyd said. “But knowing what’s going on in the sense of understanding who lives in the community, what other community organisations and activities are going on, what are the local campaigns, what is the experience of living in your local area like… that element of understanding and generating that sense of belonging is massively important.”
The third part Social Spider aims to build good local news on is amplifying voices in local communities that otherwise get ignored. That can involve practical issues, and bringing in the views of local people. “But also in terms of the opinions of different groups within society on less life threatening issues; on everything from what local people think about regeneration of the area, quality of health services, or the situation of the roads,” Floyd said.
“Our role as the link from people being in [a situation] to wider recognition and wider knowledge of it, and then that being picked up by national outlets, which then prompts a response beyond local government, to national government…is vitally important. If you don’t have local journalists on the ground, you don’t have that link in the chain of knowledge of the situation.”
Bringing a broader context
As part of the series, we asked Prof. Dr. Wiebke Möhring, Professor of Journalism at TU Dortmund Institute how she thought local news needed to adapt to be fit for purpose in the future. She noted that much of the criteria for good local journalism in the future would be the same as the last few decades.
“It has to be done in a professional way. It has to go deeper; it has to put some effort in getting the research done. And it has to fit the needs of the users,” she emphasised.
But some things will need to change for publishers to survive. “[Local news publishers] additionally have to find a way of getting to the users,” Möhring said. “In the last years or decades, they could trust that users would come to them. And now they have to find ways of going to the users.”
Möhring also thinks the journalism itself will need to evolve its purpose. “[Publishers] need to put more effort in getting people informed in a way that they are not frustrated by all the bad things going on in the world,” she said. “Show solutions, show the context of things, and not concentrate on only one topic. Put the recent news in a broader context so that people can be not only informed, but also understand what is going on.”
Jonathan Heawood, David Floyd and Prof. Dr. Wiebke Möhring all gave these interviews as part of our Futureproofing Local News series, supported by the Google News Initiative. You can listen to part one on the state of the market below, or search ‘Media Voices’ wherever you find podcasts to listen to the four-part series.
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