Broadly speaking local and national newspapers both share similar modes of revenue gathering, styles of reporting and ethical codes, but there are also important differences. Local news, which is often made up of as many “good news” stories as negative ones, can reinforce pride in a local area and a sense of community that is largely absent from national news reporting, and it also has a firm focus on campaigns and scrutiny, enabling local people to take action: “local news has a more immediate impact on people’s lives than national news” (Fenton et al., 2010, p. 22).
Nielsen organises many of the strands that have emerged from the study of local journalism into three areas. These are: “accountability and information”, which include roles such as informing and educating citizens, scrutiny, coverage of public affairs and investigative reporting; “civic and political engagement”, including the role of local newspapers in influencing and fostering political and civic knowledge; and “community integration”, including the way local news defines and enables communities (Nielsen, 2015, pp. 13-17). These areas overlap with many of the normative principles of good journalism discussed above, and they are as true
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at the local level as they are at the national level – that newspapers should educate, inform, enlighten, scrutinise local public affairs and offer an influential voice on behalf of local citizens, as Fenton et al note:
Reporting the local news means telling citizens a little of what they know and a lot of what they would not otherwise know about an area that they know very well.
Independent reporting should reveal not only what local government and private interests are doing but also the motivation behind their actions. It should dig deeper and provide people with insight that takes time and resources to reach. (2010, p. 25)
For the local press the institutions under their microscope are inevitably local and relevant to the newspaper’s audience, including local councils, police forces, health boards, schools and commercial interests. Local newspapers traditionally report on council meetings, budgets, planning issues, businesses, crime and other issues which affect communities at a local level, and local citizens require the same quality of information, education, debate, balance, scrutiny and checking that we would expect from the national press at the national level. For McChesney and Nichols, a free press “must cover effectively” particular institutions in order for democracy to function, and lists among these, “legislative committees, courts, agencies, school boards, local commissions” (2010, p. X). For Fenton et al, it means:
…having a local presence, being seen to ferret out information, dig behind it, and make sense of it. [Readers] want analytic depth and scepticism regarding those in power, context and debate. They want stories that are compelling because they are relevant to them and they want to be part of the conversation (Fenton et al., 2010, p. 22).
In the 1980s and early 1990s, studies into local newspapers largely found they were fulfilling this role. Firstly, the influence of the local press was noted by Franklin and Murphy, who cited the large advertising revenues and circulations that gave financial muscle and influence to the sector (important if a citizenry is to impact on those in power), but importantly they also noted
61 its penetration into households (up to 80 per cent in some cases – with an inference that a large majority of people were getting hold of information to help them form opinions and make decisions), and a diversity and plurality of opinion and debate which showed local journalism to be more balanced than national journalism where newspapers’ political affiliations could bias reporting (Franklin & Murphy, 1991). These aspects – financial stability, penetration and balance – are important in maintaining a healthy public sphere which is well served by consistent, good-quality information and reporting from plural sources (underwritten by the support and resources of the institution), on behalf of a large number of well-informed citizens who are able to hold rational, well-informed debate. However, as Franklin’s more recent work suggests, much has changed in the industry since 1991, with documented declines nationally and locally in circulations and penetrations, changes in reading habits, a withdrawal of financial resources as a result of falling profits, and a consequent drop in the quality of the reporting at all levels of the industry: in short, as I discussed above, the local press has not been spared from the general decline in newspapers.
While its effectiveness may have declined, the importance of the local press to communities has not diminished. A more recent study by the Media Trust found “an explicit relationship between local and community news, local democracy, community cohesion and civic engagement” (Fenton et al., 2010, p. 7), and noted that local communities “want, and need, trained, conscientious, impartial journalists asking difficult questions, explaining and
scrutinising those in authority”(Fenton et al., 2010, p. 3). But the localness of this local news is key. The study found that since the 1990s, mergers and takeovers have seen economies of scale for newspaper owners, but a reduction in the localness and relevance of their products, leaving instead a “remote localism that has its sights set on the bottom line rather than the news service people want” (Fenton et al., 2010, p. 16). This makes local news less relevant to readers, and according to some observers, has contributed to the decline in circulations (Engel, 2009).
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Local ownership, or owners who prioritise and invest in localness, have been better able to withstand the declines in advertising and circulation. Fenton et al make this argument in their Media Trust report: “If local news is not local, it’s not news” (Fenton et al., 2010, p. 27) and their findings show that people miss the localness of news when it is withdrawn as a result of cuts or newspaper closures. For example, Cole and Harcup point to the relative success of the Tindle Group in the local newspaper sector, which owns just 27 local weekly newspapers but is tenth in on the Newspaper Society’s list of the UK’s biggest regional newspaper publishers. The group’s success, they say, is down to the simple formula: “keep it local, and then more local.
[Tindle] caters for the traditional editorial imperatives: people like to see their name in the paper so fill it with local names from sport and a variety of local activities” (Cole & Harcup, 2010, p. 56). Similarly, the success of local newspapers in Norway, where circulations have increased in defiance of national trends towards decline, is attributed in one study to the localness of the journalism and of the journalists. Participants testified in interviews with the researchers that “we write with our hearts” – meaning they are invested in the communities in which they live, and of which they are members, as the authors noted: “the news values of local Norwegian journalists are constructed on a foundation of community membership that informs all aspects of their news routines” (Hatcher & Haavik, 2014, p. 160).
Equally, where UK newspapers have kept their editorial focus, and even their ownership, local and continued to invest in their product they have often bucked the wider trend of decline in the industry, and shown themselves to be more tolerant of lower profit margins and more resilient to market dips. The Camden New Journal is one: bought by workers in a 1980s buyout deal, the paper has established a strong presence in Camden, acknowledging:
“today, we are managing, but it is because we can survive on a small net profit. A big company would not tolerate our performance” (Fenton et al., 2010, p. 28).
However, studies carried out by Franklin and many others have shown a trend towards a dilution of the localness of local news. Franklin et al looked in depth at the reporting of the
63 general election by the local press, finding an increase in stories with a national focus, a
decrease in locally-focussed stories, and a tendency towards trivialisation and celebrity, which the journalists interviewed put down to a lack of reader interest, anxieties about losing
circulation, and the absence of experienced political journalists in the newsroom (2006).
Harrison described the rising power of public relations within local government – finding a growing army of civil servants providing a comprehensive and sophisticated flow of information to newspaper journalists to help fill their pages, a so-called “information subsidy” (Gandy, 1982, p. 74) paid for by local councils to advance their own agenda (Harrison, 2006). Coupled with the findings of a third study by O’Neill and O’Connor, which examined the use (and number) of sources in news articles in local newspapers in the north of England and found a large
percentage of news stories came from a single source (76 per cent) – the concern is that there is a growing over-reliance in the local press on a narrow range of sources for stories, with an absence of “the sifting of conflicting information or contextualising that assists readers’
understanding and makes for good journalism” (O'Neill & O’Connor, 2008, p. 493), and this finding has also been supported in several other studies (Franklin, 2011; J. Thomas & Williams, 2008; A. Williams & Franklin, 2007). There is additional concern that fewer sources means the multiplicity of voices that is traditionally seen as a prerequisite of a healthy public sphere is compromised. Voakes et al found a prevalence of low-sourced stories, and though they did not present detailed findings on source status, they noted the presence of “high status” voices that suggested news was controlled to some extent by social and political elites, and that source diversity was not as widespread as hypothesised (Voakes et al., 1996, pp. 584, 590).
The deterioration of quality in local news is concerning, however the loss of what Fenton et al call “political knowledge” and “community understanding” when a local newspaper closes down altogether cannot be underestimated (Fenton et al., 2010, p. 29), as five studies of news absence in America suggest.
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The first of these is a seminal study about the absence of a newspaper, which centred on the 1945 strike of delivery men in New York. This strike stopped the delivery of eight New York newspapers for 17 days and left the city without news (Berelson, 1948). Berelson attempted a new method of capturing attitudes and feelings about the loss of a newspaper that went beyond the “surface facts” captured by two other agency polls at the time, noting:
Both agencies attempted to get at the nature of the substitute for the newspaper, and in both cases respondents stressed that they listened to news broadcasts over the radio.
Both attempted, in quite different ways, to discover what parts of the newspaper were particularly missed, and in both cases respondents stressed news (national, local, and war news) and advertising. Finally, both attempted to get at the degree to which the newspapers were actually missed, and in both cases respondents indicated that they missed the papers intensely. (1948, p. 112)
Berelson suspected that there might be more going on than the polls suggested, and coined a new research method – an in-depth interview-survey hybrid – which he used on a sample of 60 readers, capturing what he called “the more complex attitudinal matters operating in the situation” to answer the following questions: “What does ‘missing the newspaper’ mean? Why do people miss it? Do they really miss the parts they claim, to the extent they claim? Why do they miss one part as against another?” (Berelson, 1948, p. 112). Recognising that the sample was not large enough to be statistically robust, Berelson instead concentrated on using this intensive interviewing technique to provide qualitative data on why a newspaper “really mattered” to the people he interviewed. The researchers accordingly asked typical survey questions such as “Do you agree with the following statement: "it is very important that people read the newspapers”, and noted that most people answered with a strong yes, following up by saying newspapers were important for informational and educational purposes. However, further questions attempted to find specific examples of news that readers had missed being able to read about. The answers to these questions demonstrated that, in fact, though many
65 readers “paid tribute” to the newspaper’s informational role, very few of them actually used their newspaper for this purpose. He identified five uses for which people employed
newspapers: information about and interpretation of public affairs; as a tool for daily living; for respite; for prestige; and for social contact. In identifying and separating out these different uses, Berelson uncovered a complex and dynamic relationship between readers and local newspapers and the way they were embedded in many aspects of personal, democratic,
community and social life. Berelson’s methodological innovation in supplementing quantitative data with qualitative interviews to add further layers of nuance to his insights has partly informed the methodology of this study, and I describe this in more detail in Chapter 4.
A second study conducted much more recently by Scheufele et al researched the role of the Internet in the democratic engagement of citizens, and found that it was no substitute for traditional news consumption from newspapers, noting: “In particular, newspaper hard news use—at a local, national, and international level—is a crucial tool for disseminating information about political issues and processes among the public and, ultimately, one of the strongest predictors of participation in the political processes” (Scheufele & Nisbet, 2002, p. 69). As well as finding a correlation between political engagement and the consumption of news from newspapers, the study found that those who said they used the Internet frequently for
entertainment “were less likely to feel efficacious about their potential role in the democratic process and also knew less about facts relevant to current events” (Scheufele & Nisbet, 2002, p.
63).
A third study has examined newspaper closure more deliberatively. Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido’s 2009 study of Cincinnati analysed voter turnout, the rates of re-election for incumbents, the numbers of candidates standing for election and campaign spending in the years leading up to, and immediately following, the closure of Cincinnati’s second newspaper, the Cincinnati Post. They found that after the newspaper closed, the states that had been served by the Cincinnati Post showed lower election turnout rates, fewer candidates standing for office,
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and that incumbents were more likely to be re-elected following the closure, concluding that
“newspapers – even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed – can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life” (Schulhofer-Wohl &
Garrido, 2009).
Fourth, a relatively similar study in Denver and Seattle analysed newspaper closures from the point of view of civic engagement, using data from the Current Population Survey carried out by the United States Census (Shaker, 2014). To measure civic engagement, the study analysed responses to several questions about whether respondents had contacted a public official, bought or boycotted a product or service because of social or political values, whether they had attended particular groups including a PTA or neighbourhood watch or civic
organisation such as a Lions group, or whether they had been an officer or served on a committee in any groups or organisations. The study found a decline in civic engagement measures after the closure of the two newspapers compared with civic engagement in other major American cities. Again, the focus was on cities that had formerly had two newspapers, and its findings were within the context of one of these newspapers closing while the other
continued to publish. Even so, it found a measurable decline in civic engagement in the two cities following the newspaper closures.
Fifth, a large scale review of political data from 1869 to 2004 was correlated with statistics on newspaper “entries” and “exits” across America. It found that newspapers have a measurable impact on political engagement, with new newspapers or newspaper closures affecting voter turnout in presidential elections by 0.3 percentage points (Gentzkow, Shapiro, &
Sinkinson, 2009). They found the effect was strong before the introduction of radio and television in 1928, showing the positive impact of newspapers in providing information on candidates and reporting the activities of incumbents before elections.
Added to these five studies of course is the research by Fenton et al. This study was particularly focused on newspaper closures in the UK. The research was conducted by Goldsmiths
67 Leverhulme Media Research Centre, funded by The Media Trust. The study used a variety of methods, including content analysis, interviews and focus groups to discover whether changes in journalism practices (for example the closure of a newspaper, an increase in hyperlocal activity, increased community engagement by a radio station, or the increased use of digital and social media platforms) had affected communities’ relationships with the media (Fenton et al., 2010). Some of the conclusions have already been discussed above, but it is worth reiterating that, in interviews and focus groups, former readers of the newspaper that had closed said they felt under-informed, under-represented and vulnerable without their local newspaper. They also said they found it difficult to find relevant information to help them live their lives (Fenton et al., 2010).
3.2.2 The informed citizen
As I suggested above, according to theorists, a significant element of the role of news journalism in democracy should be in providing information to citizens. What this means in practice is generally agreed to include “contributing vital resources for processes of information gathering, deliberation and action” (Fenton, 2010, p. 3) and “to provide citizens with the information they need to understand and address problems” (McChesney & Nichols, 2010, p. xv). This provision is theorised to be essential: “information is to democracy what oxygen is to fire. Without one the other cannot survive” (Phillips & Witschge, 2012, p. 3).
But the media’s provision of a flow of good quality information is thought to contribute to another normative ideal: the “informed citizenry” (Baresch, Knight, Harp, & Yaschur, 2011), which is, according to democratic theory, an essential component if democracy is to flourish and if citizens are to make informed judgements come election time. Anderson agrees: “high-quality, independent journalism which provides accurate and thoughtful information and analysis about current events is crucial to the creation of an enlightened citizenry that is able to participate meaningfully in society and politics” (2007, p. 65).
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Until the 1940s, it was generally assumed that this information was gleaned by citizens directly from the mass media, a notion that visualised “the omnipotent media, on one hand, sending forth the message, and the atomized masses, on the other, waiting to receive it”
(Lazarsfeld & Katz, 1955, p. 20). But a study of the 1940 presidential election enabled researchers to deconstruct this framework. In their study, Berelson, Lazarsfeld and Gaudet discovered that a large group of voters who were undecided about which way to vote until late in the campaign, were eventually overwhelmingly swayed by the influence of a personal contact or friend (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948, pp. 49-51). This led them to deeper analysis, and the eventual formulation of the “two-step flow model”, further developed by Lazarsfeld and Katz (1955), which theorises the existence of an “intervening variable” between the mass media and citizens in the shape of a layer of “opinion leaders”. These were people who paid more attention to the mass media, who came from “every stratum of a community” and played “relay roles in the mass communication of election information and influence” between the mass media and
non-opinion leaders (ibid, pp. 21, 31). This “person-to-person influence” was said to “[serve] as a bridge over which formal media of communications extend their influence” (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948, p. 152).
Some later theorists found the two-step flow problematic, and suggest it became outmoded when television appeared and challenged the flow of information and ideas in mass
Some later theorists found the two-step flow problematic, and suggest it became outmoded when television appeared and challenged the flow of information and ideas in mass