This week, to mark Indie News Week 2025, S&C Editor Dr Sarah Cheverton is drawing from her recent PhD research on the local news crisis to talk about the dramatic changes to local news over recent decades, the rise of small independent local news publishers like Star & Crescent, and why we desperately need funding and government support. Today, Sarah looks at how the current crisis facing local news – particularly the public interest news that makes the most difference to local people – came about.
It may surprise some of you to know that local journalism has never paid for itself. But it’s important to start with that fact because arguably, it’s at the root of what has come to be known as the Local News Crisis.
Historically, the main funder of local news was advertising and for a long time the local advertising business was booming. With advertising not just paying a newsroom’s bills, but generating great profits for business owners, the reporters, photographers and editors who filled local newspaper pages just got on with their jobs – bringing the stories that mattered the most to local people to their door. There were some subsidies, like public notices (which binds local government to place most of their print advertising in local print newspapers) or VAT relief, but advertising was not only paying most of the bills, it was also generating great profits for the news business.
Over time, things changed. Specifically, four things changed that have transformed local newspapers and – for many local communities and readers – arguably, not for the better.
Ownership
While advertising was still booming, local ownership of newspapers almost completely died out as bigger and bigger businesses bought them up and merged them together, consolidating the ownership of hundreds of individual papers into the hands of just a few large businesses, while closing or merging newsrooms across the country to maximise efficiency and of course, profit. Today, 71% of all local newspapers (including print and online-only titles) are owned by just nine companies, and since 2007, there are over 6,000 fewer journalists employed by the 3 biggest local news publishing companies (Reach, Newsquest and National World – the latter of which owns The News, Portsmouth) to report in and about local communities (Media Reform Coalition, 2025, p.17) Today, most of the titles owned by these companies feature large amounts of content that do not relate to the local areas they serve at all.
Production
At the same time, digital technology revolutionised the way that information reaches the masses, knocking print newspapers out of the way. This has been a mixed blessing – on one hand, allowing small teams of volunteers like S&C’s to start their own titles, but on the other, allowing the largest local news publishers to simply duplicate their content across all their titles. The impact of this has been to dilute the local relevance of the news, and to drown the little public interest news that still exists with articles that are often sensationalised, nothing to do with the local area, or just plain clickbait.
Advertising
The rise of digital technology revolutionised advertising, including being able to target audiences far more closely (micro-targeting) and follow them across the internet. The price we’ve paid for this (apart from our data, privacy, and trust in anything we see online, of course) is the concentration of advertising in the hands of just two companies. In 2019, 80% of the UK’s digital advertising spend went to Facebook and Google (Competition and Markets Authority, 2020, p9), leaving local news publishers with a collapsing income stream, along with angry shareholders.
Readership
The combination of all these factors has cost newspapers their readers and their sales, with local papers trying to generate support through paywalls or subscriptions. At the same time, the way people access news has changed dramatically, including more people getting their news via social media or online video, which has also led to a rise in dis- or mis-information online. That said, it’s important to remember that even before digital, readers were already abandoning their local papers, and part of the reason why might be found in the declining quality of reporting caused by endless cuts to local newsrooms, and its decreasing relevance to the communities the papers claimed to serve.
Bought as booming advertising businesses, the survival of local journalism – both as a profession and as a public good – has not been prioritised by corporate owners, as they closed down or merged together local newsroom after newsroom to protect their profits. The closure of local papers has even graver implications for the communities left with no newspaper at all, or left without coverage that safeguards the interests of local people, by providing the news that matters most – public interest news reporting and investigations that holds power to account and acts as a watchdog on behalf of communities.
In response to this crisis, small independent local news publishers like Star & Crescent have sprung up all over the country, but they are not on an even playing field with their mainstream siblings. Subsidies like public notices – funded by local councils – still go mostly to the largest newspaper providers in the country. Schemes like the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme, which uses millions of pounds of the BBC’s license fee to directly pay for local journalists to report in the public interest, are also dominated by the largest newspaper providers and, more concerningly, have faced accusations of misuse of funding by the National Union of Journalists.
Government ministers of different parties have acknowledged the problem, with help from fantastic organisations like the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF), and our independent press regulator, Impress. These organisations have brought local indie publishers, including S&C, into meetings with MPs, government ministers and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to help us make the case for the hundreds of small indie news publishers who are trying to address the news crisis across the UK. But so far, despite several reviews and commissions making recommendations to remedy the local news crisis, nothing changes. To put it simply, maybe our policymakers just think the corporately-owned newspapers have become – like so many failing public services delivered by private businesses – too big to fail.
That’s why we’re asking for your help, as part of PINF’s Indie News Week campaign, showcasing the importance of funding independent, community-based journalism across the UK.
So what can you do?
- Share our articles and social media posts about the local news crisis on Facebook and X (the platform formerly known as Twitter)
- Sign and share PINF’s petition calling on the UK government to support local news providers to regenerate local news
- Donate to us and help us to bring more news to you every week
- Come along (virtually) to our online Zoom event on Monday and let us know what YOU think about the state of local news!
This week – 9th-16th June – is Indie News Week, showcasing the importance of funding community-based journalism across the UK.
Big Tech greed and corporate takeovers are strangling local news, and independent community news providers that bring you the news you need are struggling to keep the lights on.
Star & Crescent is run by the community, for the community, and we need your help.
Choose local news. Don’t lose local news.
