S&C Editor Dr Sarah Cheverton shares insights from her PhD research on the local news crisis in her second article for Indie News Week (9th-16th June 2025). Building on her first article about the local news crisis, Sarah explains why the crisis matters and what can be done about it.
The ‘local news crisis’ is usually defined by two factors – sometimes one or the other, and sometimes both at the same time:
- A crisis of money – as I wrote about in my last article, local news publishers no longer make the same amount of money from advertising, and partly because of this, the biggest publishers have been cutting their newsrooms for decades, reducing the number of local reporters, and of local papers themselves;
- A crisis of journalism – the outcome of all those cuts has led to a shift towards ‘creating content’ that generates clicks and therefore money for the publishers. As a consequence, public interest local reporting has dramatically declined over the recent decades, both in quantity and quality.
Public interest journalism is a very broad term, but for local news it includes:
- Holding local politicians and public bodies to account for their actions and spending;
- Investigating stories that matter to local communities;
- Campaigning for issues that can change local people’s lives;
- Telling stories that you might not find in the mainstream news, e.g. stories of marginalised people and groups or accounts of events and experiences reported on directly by local residents;
- Court reporting, including coroner’s courts;
- In depth election reporting;
- Reporting on local community events and activities;
- Representing a diversity of local history, culture and identity;
- Crime reporting that goes beyond sensationalism and looks for solutions.
So what does it matter if this kind of reporting declines?
Well, it matters a lot. For example, research studies in the United States have shown that quality, regular reporting in the public interest – for example on local elections and candidates – can influence turnout at local elections, and conversely, that when local reporting declines, fewer people vote.
But public interest reporting doesn’t just affect voters, it affects everyone.
Public interest reporting can change what happens behind closed doors in local institutions, like Councils, NHS trusts, and the offices of our Police and Crime Commissioners, for example, simply because our public servants know that someone is watching. And when they think no one is watching, it can have a negative impact.
While there is disagreement among experts on the levels of corruption across UK local government, research from Transparency International (a global movement working in over 100 countries to end corruption), “the conditions are present in which corruption is likely to thrive –
- low levels of transparency,
- poor external scrutiny,
- networks of cronyism,
- reluctance or lack of resource to investigate,
- outsourcing of public services,
- significant sums of money at play,
- and perhaps a denial that corruption is an issue at all.”
At the same time, the research notes that “checks and balances that previously existed to limit corruption ha[ve] been eroded or deliberately removed”, including “the reduced capacity of the local press”.
This isn’t just theoretical either. Research conducted by a team led by Dr Dave Harte from the University of Birmingham studied the impact on local communities of the closure of the Port Talbot Guardian in south Wales.
Dave and his team charted the decline of local reporting in the public interest that led up to the paper’s closure, including fewer local sources used in reporting, an increasing reliance on press releases (e.g. written by the Council’s media team), and the loss of access for communities to engage with local reporters. Their research highlights concerns that the decline in local council reporting meant decisions “were being made behind closed doors by officers rather than in public forums”.
As a result, the research also found that local people were confused about, or completely unaware of significant local developments and issues, and that local people felt increasingly hopeless about their ability to change or shape the issues that mattered to them the most, particularly young people, who began to talk about taking direct, violent action as a result.
Welsh actor, Michael Sheen, whose hometown is Port Talbot, has shared his concerns and frustrations about the decline of local newspapers in the town and across the country more generally. He told the Press Gazette in 2020:
“In Port Talbot we have no local reporting, so if knowledge is power we’re incredibly powerless here and you can see the ripple effect of that in all kinds of ways. If you’re not getting accurate information from some trusted source then you’re going to get information from all over the place.”
So what can be done about it?
Well, you might be pleased to discover we don’t have to reinvent the wheel…but we do have some work to do.
As I wrote about in my first article, local news publishers already access subsidies, such as the national system of public notices (which binds local government to place most of their print advertising for things like planning in local print newspapers, estimated at around £50 million per year spending) and VAT relief. Moreover, 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, was created in 2017 and pays for 165 local reporters across the country to report specifically on local democracy in the public interest.
At the same time – perhaps because of the blame placed upon them for dominating advertising spending in a digital age – Google and Facebook have also deployed large amounts of funding to local news, arguably putting themselves into the centre of discussions on the future of local journalism. The Guardian estimated in 2019 that both companies spend approximately £80 million a year on journalism projects, mostly in the form of funding grants – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Both companies also run their own licensing projects such as Google News Showcase and Facebook News, which make individual funding deals with publishers behind closed doors (so the exact amounts of these deals are not made public).
The problem is that all of these subsidies, schemes and direct funding go disproportionately to the biggest newspaper publishers.
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).
The Government’s Cairncross Review in 2019 looked into the sustainability of journalism and concluded that the reporting most in need of protection and support was public interest news and that this was most at threat on a local level. It also concluded that this crisis poses a threat to the “long-term sustainability of democracy”.
In its recommendations, the Cairncross Review recommended that the Government create a new arms-length body targeting its support to local news publishers seeking to prioritise public interest reporting. Philanthropists, funding bodies, and big tech companies like Facebook and Google could divert the unknown millions they’re currently giving to the biggest local news publishers to such an arms-length body.
Like the Arts Council, such a body could distribute funding according to strict criteria that would ensure it went straight to public interest news. That funding could be carefully targeted and co-ordinated to help local news publishers make it sustainable – instead of the current arrangement where a handful of stakeholders are propping up a small number of huge companies by doling out piecemeal interventions that aren’t solving the problem (but do keep their shareholders happy).
But, needless to say, the previous Conservative Government that commissioned the Review took no action on its recommendations. So far, the new Labour Government has shown little interest in saving local public interest news either, no matter how important a role it plays in sustaining and supporting democracy.
This is why the Public Interest News Foundation has partnered up with independent news publishers – many of them local – across the country for Indie News Week, to raise awareness of the local news crisis, how it’s affecting your community and what you can do about it. We are very proud to be part of this campaign.
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.
