Judith Townend

Plurality, Policy and the Local

Over the last 15 years, the acceleration in media consolidation has presented a series of policy challenges around diversity of editorial output. While policy debates on national ownership limits and other regulatory interventions are important, developments at the local level are often marginalised. And yet, the direction of travel—towards more consolidation and more deregulation—has arguably been more debilitating for democracy at the local level, where the vast majority of citizens interact with hospitals, schools, transport systems and local councils. The decline of local media—including, in some towns, the wholesale disappearance of local newspapers—leaves citizens starved of information and local institutions less accountable. This article uses an existing conceptual framework for assessing whether and how journalism makes a real-life contribution to democratic life at the local level. Against this normative framework, it then assesses the contribution of hyperlocal media sites to local democracy. We present findings from the most extensive survey of the hyperlocal sector to date, a collaboration with research partners at Cardiff and Birmingham City Universities and Talk About Local, which analysed online questionnaires from over 180 local online media initiatives. Our research offers a unique insight into the funding, operational problems and sustainability of community media sites, and suggests they have the potential to fulfil a vital democratic and civic role. These data inform our conclusions and recommendations for policy initiatives that would invigorate hyperlocal sites and therefore provide a real alternative for otherwise democratically impoverished local communities.

Hyperlocal media and the news marketplace

When the BBC began life in the 1920s, the ‘7 o’clock rule’ applied: it could only broadcast news between 7pm and 1am. Why? Press interests in Britain and elsewhere ‘saw broadcasting as a directly competitive medium’ to newspapers (Schlesinger, 1978, p. 15). The restrictions to reduce the impact of broadcasting competition were relaxed a little by 1927, when the corporation was allowed both to broadcast news earlier and to produce its own bulletins rather than rely on the newspapers’ ‘approved’ agencies (Briggs, cited in Schlesinger, 1978, p. 16; Barnett, 2011, p. 22). Jump forward 86 years: the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport declared that ‘as news moves online, local newspapers with five or even four figure circulations have found themselves going head to head with one of the world’s biggest broadcasters’. Is it, he asked a room full of newspaper journalists at the 2014 Society of Editors conference, ‘healthy for a publicly funded broadcaster to compete with commercial newspapers?’ (Javid, 2014).

‘And what good came of it at last?’ Press–politician relations post-Leveson

James Margach famously argued that Prime Ministers from Lloyd George to Callaghan had been intent on exploiting the media in their determination to centralise power. From Margaret Thatcher onwards, however, there is a strong argument that the power relationship has been reversed, and that the Leveson Inquiry—set up in the wake of the phone hacking scandal—exposed a political class which had become deeply fearful of the power and influence of the national press. Citing evidence to Leveson and subsequent recommendations by the inquiry, this article presents two case studies—on data protection and on media ownership—where the public interest clearly demanded political intervention, which would be inconvenient for the major publishers. And yet, despite recommendations by Lord Justice Leveson and despite clear support from leading politicians of all parties, there has been virtually no policy progress in either case. While the Leveson Inquiry was billed as a watershed in press–politician relations and an opportunity to counteract decades of unhealthy press power, political inertia in these two areas suggests that very little has changed.