The Routledge Companion to Local Media and Journalism

Agnes Gulyas, David Baines, Agnes Gulyas, David Baines

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032474595
• eBook ISBN: 9781351239929
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This comprehensive edited collection provides key contributions in the field, mapping out fundamental topics and analysing current trends through an international lens.

Offering a collection of invited contributions from scholars across the world, the volume is structured in seven parts, each exploring an aspect of local media and journalism. It brings together and consolidates the latest research and theorisations from the field, and provides fresh understandings of local media from a comparative perspective and within a global context. This volume reaches across national, cultural, technological and socio-economic boundaries to bring new understandings to the dominant foci of research in the field and highlights interconnection and thematic links. Addressing the significant changes local media and journalism have undergone in the last decade, the collection explores the history, politics, ethics and contents of local media, as well as delving deeper into the business and practices that affect not only the journalists and media-makers involved, but consumers and communities as well.

For students and researchers in the fields of journalism studies, journalism education, cultural studies, and media and communications programmes, this is the comprehensive guide to local media and journalism.

PART I

Histories and legacies of local media and journalism

1

HISTORICISING THE AFTERLIFE

Local newspapers in the United Kingdom and the ‘art of prognosis’

Rachel Matthews

Introduction

The dominant understanding of the local newspaper in the United Kingdom is that its days are numbered. Such is the precarity of income streams that it is facing nothing short of an ‘apocalypse‘, with peak sales a distant memory (Thompson, 2017). In the UK the twin drivers of digital technology and the 2008 recession means traditional news brands have seen a 50 per cent fall in both advertising and circulation revenue (Mediatique, 2018, 4).¹ The majority of commentators argue that the once-great industry, dominated by a few huge corporations, is in a state of managed decline and that the situation amounts to nothing short of an ‘existential threat’. This analysis is predicated on the reliance of the newspaper on advertising revenue for profit – a revenue stream that has been fundamentally impacted by the advent of online competitors. Similarly, it is this reliance that underwrites the dominant response to the contemporary landscape of cost-cutting and closure. The effects of this ‘mini-max’ strategy, epitomised in the corporate-owned newspaper, have been well documented (see, among others, Franklin, 2006; Ramsay and Moore, 2016) and characterised as resulting in fewer staff being asked to do more work in more ways while titles shrink, merge and close in an attempt to maintain revenues.

However, local newspapers are complicated products; they are, at heart, commercial in nature but they are simultaneously charged with a key role in the local democratic process. Local newspapers in the UK have their roots in entrepreneurial products launched in early eighteenth century to capitalise on the emerging market for ‘news’. Since then, a wide range of products have lay claim to the moniker ‘local newspaper’, from highly local, even amateur free sheets covering a village or small town, to sophisticated daily titles aligned with cities and regions, selling hundreds of thousands of copies per day. For the past 100 years, the local newspaper market has been dominated by highly commercialised products, owned by a decreasing number of national and international corporations. Now reduced in number,² but more significantly in revenues, their decline has produced anxiety for those who see these titles as stitched into the fabric of communities, acting as watchdogs to scrutinise those in power. The centralisation or closure of titles is interpreted as leaving behind impoverished “news deserts” (Abernathy, 2018). In turn, this brings a sense of urgency to the question of the future of these titles and in the UK has prompted government intervention, most recently via the Cairncross Review into the sustainability of quality journalism. This reveals the duality that underwrites the understanding of the local newspaper. On the one hand is the social value ascribed to it via the service it provides to communities;³ on the other, it is a free-market product, which commodifies the audience to draw profit from advertising. It is this tension that underwrites much of the response to the perceived threat to the local newspaper. Significantly for this discussion of the contribution of history to our understanding of the current predicament, it is this tension that can be usefully illuminated by locating the local newspaper as an historical entity. As Koselleck (2002, 135) suggests,

there are structures that endure and there are processes that persist; both necessitate and outlast the respective individual events in which history itself takes place.

History enables us to disentangle the local newspaper from the current crisis to work out what has endured or changed, and so what the future might hold. This chapter suggests history can do this in three key ways: first, by revealing the nature of the relationship between newspaper, people and profit over time; second, by critically engaging with the social expectations placed on local newspapers by demonstrating that profit has shaped their form and content; and third, by analysing what the contemporary anxiety about those social expectations suggests for the future.

The utility of history to understanding the local newspaper

Though often absent from scholarly approaches to the media, history is particularly useful to understanding the newspaper, in order to move beyond its inherent focus on change. Jeremy Black contends the dominance of change is both internal, because of the focus of news and speed of delivery, and external, because of the “contextual transformations” that are significant to its development. To understand the newspaper at points in time is to recognise, for example, the impact of the rise of literacy in the late nineteenth century, or the invention of the telegraph, or of rival mediums like radio and television, or shifts in law and regulation, all of which shape newspapers and newspaper practice. This means that the considerable task of newspaper history is to chart “shifts in content, production, distribution, and the nature of competition and the social context” (Black, 2001, 1). However, the dominance of change also disengages the newspaper from a sense of history so that our vision of it can be reduced to something that is relatively ephemeral, punctuated by events in the recent past. Press Gazette does not look far for the factors that sent Johnston Press into administration in November 2018.

This is a story of how decisions made in the JP boardroom up to 2005, by executives who made their money and then headed for the golf course, have dogged the group and its 200 newspaper titles.

(Ponsford, 2018)

This short view of history is amplified in a digital landscape where the rapid introduction of technologies and platforms means transience can be mistaken for innovation and where mastery of the latest digital tool replaces contemplation of fundamental shifts. It truncates institutional memory and reinforces the obsession with the immediate that condemns our consideration of events to a “collective amnesia” (Pickering, 2015, 12).

Historicising the newspaper is further dogged by the nostalgic perspective of the autobiographical and celebratory accounts that dominate descriptions of the past of the provincial news industry and that reproduce and reinforce the mythology of its people and their work. Like its national counterpart, whose story has often been told either through the lens of the great men – and it is overwhelmingly men – or via the Liberal interpretation as the battle for press freedom (O’Malley, 2012), the story of the provincial newspaper has largely been told by people who document the origins of their own careers, or by titles that are celebrating landmark dates. So, Richard Stott, editor of the Daily Mirror in the 1980s and 1990s, recalls with fondness the weekly Bucks Herald where he started his career aged 19 (Stott, 2002). And writing of regional dailies in Scotland, Harry Reid, editor of The Herald, describes his book as a “last hurrah for those who took part in what was undoubtedly a golden age of the Scottish Press” (2006, ix). Reid admits that

journalists, even the most cynical and hard-bitten, do nostalgia like few others do. They take a sumptuous relish in retelling the gorgeous tales of the past, and in perhaps just embroidering a little bit here and there.

(2006, ix)

Here nostalgia simplifies the meaning of the local newspaper by presenting it as enduring and unproblematic. Underpinning Stott’s remembrance, for instance, is the view of the function of local newspaper implied by work routines dominated by the coverage of courts and councils. He describes senior reporter, Phil Fountain.

Local councils and courts were meat and drink to him. Immaculate shorthand note, all the councillors and the coppers at his beck and call, the holder of 1,000 borough secrets.

(2002, 90)

Such laudatory accounts go some way to explaining populist conceptions, such as community friend or unerring watchdog, which are reproduced both inside and outside of the industry. This process has become magnified in relation to the local paper by the comparative lack of critical engagement by academics with its history so that they are similarly seduced by the idea of a golden age. Such an approach creates a flawed mirror to hold up to the contemporary title by the implication that something has been lost because the pursuit of profit has driven out some higher goal, despite the lack of evidence that titles have ever put purpose before profit. This nostalgic view becomes entrenched as the gap between the apparently gilded past and the problems of the doomed present seemingly widens “in order to dramatise the headlong fall from grace to the present” (Tosh, 2008, 34), without recognising that the image of the past off which it feeds is itself distorted.

Provincial newspaper: community servant or shareholder powerhouse?

The lay understanding of the local newspaper is that the reader is the audience; in contrast, a political economic analysis of titles demonstrates that it is primarily the advertiser who is the main funder, and therefore the first audience in a process that is amplified by the dominant corporate-owned newspaper. In this tri-partite relationship, the reader is a commodity to be sold to the advertiser in a process that finds its apotheosis in the free printed newspaper where all pretence of sale is abandoned for the ease of mass distribution that guarantees a circulation. This free-distribution model transfers online courtesy of digital technology but falters in terms of generating revenue because of competition from alternative platforms and because advertisers will not pay the same for an online presence as they will for print adverts (Douglas, 2016). However, critiques such as those outlined in the opening of this chapter mostly compare the contemporary industry with an imagined past where newspapers were focused on delivering service to readers. In contrast, my historicisation of the provincial newspaper (Matthews, 2017a) demonstrates that it has always been a commercial venture and that the pursuit of profit is the central premise that underwrites all other elements, including its name, content, relationship with the audience and social standing. I suggest a typology of the provincial press with six stages, characterised by a shift in emphasis between the key elements of state control, political economy and, significantly, ownership, social influence and production techniques – typically driven by new technology.

In brief these six stages are: first, the local newspaper as an entrepreneurial and opportunistic product from the early eighteenth century, produced by printers capitalising on the emerging market for news and allied with other business interests such as quack medicines. Second, these titles are used – and subsidised – for political campaigning and so an association with the idea of the fourth estate emerges in the nineteenth century; third, this political partisanship gives way as these titles become aligned with local markets as they become increasingly commercially sophisticated with the advent of New Journalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Next, this commercialism results in an increasingly consolidated form of ownership in chains, which has implications for structure and purpose; fifth, editorial is increasingly subjugated to the market as titles are increasingly corporatised; and sixth, the contemporary picture of a crisis of this model, disrupted by digital technology.

This typology calls on us to rethink how we understand the local newspaper and its relationship with profit and community service. These ‘epochs’ of the provincial newspaper industry can also be understood in terms of variances in the balance of power between content, audience and advertiser in the production process. This enables the historian to trace the emergence of what we might consider to be fundamental principles of the local newspaper alongside its development as a profitable business proposition. For instance, the editorial focus on the ‘local’ is increasingly evident as newspapers seek to capitalise on profitable advertising markets by developing circumscribed circulation areas, which differentiates them from competitors at the turn of the twentieth century. It is from this commercially driven position that the notion of the local newspaper as a community champion emerges; therefore, our understanding of the local press as a watchdog, or localised fourth estate, is as a by-product of this commercial position rather than a raison d’etre of these titles, as nostalgia would have us believe.

This understanding therefore sheds a new light on how we think about the ‘now’ of the local newspaper and how we approach the anxiety about the ability of the local newspaper to serve this supposed democratic function. As Laslett suggests in his critique of the nostalgia for the extended family, “… all historical knowledge is knowledge with a view to ourselves as we are here and now” (1965, 229); his survey of family structure reveals that the nuclear family, far from being a modern anomaly, is an historically dominant norm. Therefore, harking back to the extended family is inappropriate because it has not been ‘lost’. Similarly, my analysis, which positions profit as the consistent motive for newspaper production, suggests the nostalgia we have for the local newspaper as first and foremost community champion is similarly inappropriate. However, this is where the utility of history as a tool for prognosis comes in by leading us to re-examine this nostalgic attitude and to ask, what does the anxiety about this loss itself tell us? The question becomes not ‘do local newspapers act as watchdogs’, but ‘should they’? And if they should, ‘what do they need to be like in order to do so?’ In this way we can begin to look past the ‘now’ of the current crisis, to the future.

‘Potholes’: what trips us up, what changes, what stays the same?

The nostalgic assumptions we hold about the provincial newspaper are further challenged by what appear as “potholes” (Tosh, 2008, 49) in the historical road – anomalies that demand that we revisit assumptions. One such challenge com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: demarcating the field of local media and journalism
• Part I Histories and legacies of local media and journalism
• Part II Local media policies
• Part III Local media, publics and politics
• Part IV Ownership and sustainability of local media
• Part V Local journalists and journalistic practices
• Part VI Communities and audiences of local news
• Part VII Local media and the public good
• Index