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Research Article
Assessing the contribution of local journalism: the local newspaper as accidental social infrastructure
Abstract
The value of local journalism is a pressing question for society because of the challenge posed to established business models by digital platforms. However, while local journalism is understood to be of benefit to people, discussion of the nature of those benefits and the ways in which they are accrued is dominated by a comparatively narrow focus on its outputs. Using the case of the legacy commercial local newspaper, this paper argues that local journalism as a process, practice and presence can be considered part of the accidental social infrastructure—part of the fabric which underpins strong communities, even if its intended purpose is something else. Data drawn from interviews with people working with local newspaper archives demonstrates how local journalism facilitates the development of social capital and processes of sociality. It demonstrates an expanded conceptual lens to articulate its benefits.
Keywords
local journalismlocal newspaperaccidental social infrastructurecommunityIntroduction
Normative societal expectations in relation to the form and function of local journalism have been shaped by the tradition of the commercial local newspaper, which has dominated local journalism practice for nearly 200 years. This is local journalism as information on a variety of subjects, encapsulated in the traditional print local newspaper which provides a smorgasbord of editorial and advertising content. At the soft end, it might be providing information about leisure and sporting activities. At the ‘hard news’ end of the spectrum, local journalism publicises wrong-doing and roots out bad actors to regulate behaviour among community members. The allegiance to a locality is proclaimed in a publication’s masthead, which conjures a myriad of moments. Considered trivial by outsiders, the reporting of these act as a record of happenings for those in a place. In this way the local newspaper draws on our imaginary, mythologised connections with a place (Pauly & Eckert 2002).
However, an historical analysis of the political economy of the local newspaper industry (see Matthews 2017a) demonstrates that this normative conception is contingent on a set of editorial practices which meet the needs of an industry. In a process established at the turn of the 20th century, these titles laid claim to a locality as they built often-monopolistic control of an advertising market. The work of journalists was tailored to this process so that local content was prioritised (Mathews 2014) and local audiences were packaged for advertisers. At the same time, as the notion of the fourth estate gained ascendency as a value for the national newspaper industry (Hampton & Conboy 2014), the notion that local content served the interests of communities, developed as a justificatory ideology.1 This localised fourth estate—epitomised in the conception of the local newspaper as a watchdog—gave, and continues to give, value to the work of local journalists, despite the reality of working in the corporate-owned local newspaper, which dominates in the UK, where that value can be compromised by local news working conditions (Matthews 2017b). In the 21st century, local newspaper brands are now more likely to be found online than in print and may be subsumed into a generalised web presence serving a regional area, a process which disrupts the relationship between title and place.
The professed geographical allegiance of the legacy local newspaper is driven by, firstly, the business imperative which seeks to commercialise a given area to sell to advertisers. In contrast, the second driver is the journalist who seeks to resist that corporate, central influence by making claim to a more home-spun form of journalism.
No matter how large or complicated the world gets, the local remains. It promises a haven in a heartless world, where journalists can discover their true and ultimate ground of being. The local world that calls to journalists is vivid and compelling (Pauly & Eckert 2002: 318).
Despite these apparent contradictions, it is the emphasis on the positive impact of local journalism on people in a place which has become the normative expectation for its contemporary presence, as expressed by audiences, external stakeholders and those who practise local journalism. Thus, the impact of local journalism on the provision of public interest content and civic engagement is acknowledged, as is its potential to have a positive impact on community cohesion (DCMS 2023a). The News Media Association (NMA), which promotes the interests of the commercial news media in the UK, states:
Local journalism plays a vital role in society and democracy by providing reliable and editorially controlled news and information sources for communities across the UK. They act as watchdogs for their communities, bringing social, economic, and democratic benefits, including increased local election turnout, and community engagement. Local news brands are personal in a way no other media is. (NMA 2024)
This notion of local journalism which serves the ‘good of the community’ (Jackson 1971) has some commonalities with the values of the community newspaper sector in the US (see, for instance, Kaniss 1991), which is dominated by small, independent titles serving populations of just a few thousand. However, this form of newspaper differs from the weekly and daily regional newspaper sector in the UK, which is overwhelmingly owned by corporations and which operates in centralised units with shared premises, staff and content. Most individual local newspaper products are now also subsumed into the regional websites which dominate the UK market. This structure means that newsroom norms may be operationalised for profit (Matthews 2017b), so that the commercial legacy local newspaper can be criticised for its failure to operate in a way which promotes the goal of serving the good of the community.
This contrasts with those local journalism outlets, which are perceived to be more closely linked to the people they seek to serve. In the UK context, this includes local media with community benefit as their primary purpose. Often niche organisations, able to draw on charitable or other not-for-profit statuses, these may serve a particular specialist audience.2 Next are independent or family-owned titles wholly based in a locale, who may enjoy a more immediate relationship with a community and who may sacrifice profit levels to maintain ways of working which maintain that relationship (Matthews 2017b). The smallest of these have the most in common with US community newspapers.
In the UK, however, most local newspaper brands are owned by just a handful of global companies, for whom media can be just one profit-making activity among many.3 Their managerial approach to newspaper production means reductions in resources and homogenisation, so that these local newspapers have been criticised for becoming ‘local in name only’ (Franklin & Murphy 1991: 56). In the 21st century, these titles are increasingly produced by news workers based at arm’s-reach from those places they profess to serve in a process termed ‘dispersal’ (McAdam & Hess 2024).
It is the impact of this process on content provision which is the most common focus of researchers who seek to establish what is lost to people through that process of withdrawal. For instance, research has produced empirical evidence to demonstrate correlations between journalistic output and increased voter turnout and citizen engagement with local politics, including an increase in candidates for political roles (see, for instance, Rubado & Jennings (2019) in the US and Kubla & Goodman (2018) in Switzerland). The corollary to this is that the lack of output and the closure of an outlet can create a ‘democratic deficit’ (Howells 2015). Local journalism content can also promote financial probity among institutions (Gao et al. 2018) and areas with a thriving local press can benefit from increased public spending (Yazaki 2017).
However, this paper argues that, to fully appreciate the benefits accrued by the legacy local newspaper, one needs to consider not only its practice, but also its presence—an aspect which has ‘arguably been overshadowed in the digital world’ (McAdam & Hess 2024: 2). It advances the conception of the local newspaper as accidental social infrastructure, to suggest more fully what those benefits might be and how they are accrued, despite the tensions and challenges presented by a commercial business model. It demonstrates that this media form is also an active participant in a community and an agent of community processes. It argues that the local newspaper facilitates sociality and the development of social capital, so that it may be considered to constitute an element of the social infrastructure which ‘benefit[s] and sustain[s] the social fabric’ (Tomany 2023: 27).
This position is supported by my own reflections on my fifteen-year career working across weekly and daily, local and regional newspapers. It is illustrated with data drawn from my study of a group of people who engage with a title’s presence in a place through their work with local newspaper archives. This enables the development of an understanding of this form of local journalism, which goes beyond the information it provides to consider the contribution of those engaged in its production as well as the physical presence and legacy of the organisation itself.
My proposition is that the legacy local newspaper fits the category of ‘accidental social infrastructure’, as investigated and developed by the British Academy and the independent trust Power to Change (British Academy 2023). Alongside intended social infrastructure, like public libraries for instance, sits the concept of accidental social infrastructure, defined as those places which are intended to serve a different purpose, but which nevertheless act as social infrastructure. A supermarket can be considered part of the accidental social infrastructure because it provides a place where people meet and communicate, although its primary purpose is to sell food and other goods. By including the local newspaper within the range of organisations which may be considered accidental social infrastructure, the way is paved for the recognition of a wider range of benefits which it, and other local journalism platforms, accrue to society. This in turn impacts the way in which their value is conceptualised.
The decline of the local newspaper
Recent scholarship in relation to the benefits of local journalism has been underwritten by the disruption of the legacy local newspaper sector, which is now of such magnitude that there are real fears about its long-term sustainability. The local newspaper sector is widely perceived to be in crisis,4 largely due to the loss of income to competing digital platforms. This has caused a marked decrease in the number of titles through merger and closure. In 1985 there were nearly 1,700 local newspapers in the United Kingdom. By 2014 this had reduced by around one third to just over 1,100. The numbers are still declining, albeit at a reduced rate, and, increasingly, digital start-ups are adding to the local journalism ecology. Where legacy local newspaper titles do remain, they are often a slimmed-down version of their former selves, relocated from landmark town-centre buildings to edge-of-town locations with fewer staff working to produce more stories for more people, so that they increasingly rely on contributed content. In some instances, whole swathes of the workforce have been removed, most markedly in the field of press photographers, who have been subject to near-wholesale redundancy.
At the extreme, this decline means some areas are left without local journalism. Conceptualised as ‘news deserts’, these are places where residents are said to be ‘facing significantly diminished access to the sort of important news and information that feeds grassroots democracy’ (Abernathy 2018: 16). Establishing these gaps can be difficult—complicated by variations in the definitions of ‘local’ and by methodological issues with mapping the circulation of local news outlets. Nevertheless, work by Gulyas (2022) in the UK and by the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF)5 has made it clear that there are spatial inequalities in relation to access to local journalism and it is the most deprived communities which are most likely to be without access (Gulyas 2022), perhaps due to the dominant commercial basis of provision, which makes those communities less valuable as commercial audiences.
Because of this, the question of the benefits accrued by local journalism has become a pressing question. Policy reactions to this in the UK are widespread and embrace a range of interventions, including direct financial assistance; for example, business-rate relief has been given tor those newspapers which maintain a high street presence, although this is due to end in March 2025. The BBC-Licence-Fee-funded Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS)6 also provides additional editorial resource. The issue has been subject to examination by three government inquiries, including the Cairncross Review and the Sustainability of Local Journalism review (DCMS 2019 and 2023a, respectively) and the House of Lords review into The Future of News (2024a). At a policy level, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) updated its areas of research interest (DCMS 2023b) in recognition of the need for more evidence in relation to the social impact of local news provision and how that impact might best be quantified, and late last year the government announced plans to develop a local media strategy (House of Lords 2024b). Most recently, Ofcom (2024) published the outcome of its own review into local media to support policy development. However, little of this research considers what McAdam and Hess have called the ‘nuance of presence’ (2024: 6).
Purposes of local journalism: social capital and sociality
The commercial local newspaper can be understood to perform three interconnected roles in society. First is its role in communicating trusted information to enable citizens to make informed decisions about their lives, including democratic participation such as voting, the extension of which is the local journalist as ‘watchdog’. Theorised by Nielsen (2015) as ‘keystone’ media, the local newspaper plays a key role in originating content about local politics in the media ecosystem. Second is the role of local journalism as market product, a conception which is particularly pertinent to the corporate-dominated landscape of the UK. Third, and most pertinent to this paper, is the social role of local media, which, as previously noted, is codified in UK local journalism practice as ‘serving the good the community’.
These interconnected purposes can make it difficult to articulate the benefits of various local newspaper forms because the balance of power between them is enacted in varying ways in different products, which gives rise to the characterisation above of some products being more community focussed than others. Research is further hampered by definitional problems and a lack of consensus in relation to key terms, including ‘local’ and ‘community’ (Gulyas & Baines 2020). For instance, while place-based definitions of ‘local’ dominate, it can also be conceived of as a mediated and symbolic space perceived in terms of ‘myths, symbols and ideologies’ (2). For commercial organisations, ‘the local’ is equivalent to a distribution area which meets the needs of the business and guides an editorial philosophy. Significantly, Gulyas and Baines identify as a meaning in common, the fact that the local is both geographic and social—so that it is a ‘place formed by its social setting’ (3). Similarly, ‘community’ is ill-defined and sometimes used interchangeably with local. Often drawn upon for the warm, fuzzy feelings it promotes, ‘community’ as a term is easily objectified (Studdert 2005), so that it can be commodified and sold back to audiences because of its positive connotations.
Research into the role local journalism plays in community attachment builds on the established scholarly tradition largely associated with concerns about the decline in social cohesion in the US.7 This focusses on the relationship between local newspaper use and community ties at a time of increased concern over the disruption to social structures by suburbanisation. Some consider local journalism as a contributor to such ties (Janowitz 1967; Kasarda & Janowitz 1974; Stamm & Fortini-Campbell 1983), while others consider the ties to be predictive of local newspaper usage (Barthel et al. 2016; Jackson 1982).8 People in areas where newspapers have closed feel more disconnected and less local pride (Mathews 2020).
This contribution is associated with the theorisation of local journalism as an actor in the networks which produce and sustain social capital—the ‘currency that results from the social networks that humans enjoy’ (Hess 2013). Social capital is the ‘profitability’ which accrues from active relationships and networks and so recognises the value of them; it is at once active, symbolic and proximate (geographically as well as economically or socially) and rests on the idea that social relationships have positive benefits (for example, Putnam 2000).
Introducing a focus on social relationships opens a new way of accounting for how the contributions local newspaper practices can be understood to make to communities. For instance, while some titles might rely on contributed pictures sent by readers—so-called citizen photographers—others have been observed to financially invest in practices such as maintaining a photographic staff because they help to build relationships with the community (Matthews 2017b). These people spend time out and about in the title’s circulation area developing those social activities which generate social capital. As Bourdieu observes:
… the transformation of economic capital into social capital presupposed a specific labor, i.e, a gratuitous expenditure of time, attention, care, concern which … has the effect of transfiguring the purely monetary import of the exchange and by the same token, the very meaning of the exchange. From a narrowly economic standpoint, this effort is bound to be seen as pure wastage, but in terms of the logic of social exchanges, it is a solid investment, the profits of which will appear, in the long run, in monetary or other form. (Bourdieu 1986: 25)
The notion of sociality underpins Studdert’s theorisation of community as action, which positions community as a process which can be studied—as opposed to conceptions of community as object. Seen through this lens, community is a relational activity, the act of ‘communing’, often through acts of ‘micro-sociality’, which can be supported by, among other factors, the products of local journalism, including news reports, notices and advertisements, and the practices, activities and processes which deliver those products. This approach diverges from conceptions of community as a noun to consider it a verb, embodied in a series of actions: community as something we do. It therefore enables the study of community as a series of linkages and commonalities. Drawing on Arendt’s9 concept of sociality, Studdert argues that:
Community is never a fixed state, rightly it should be considered a verb not a noun, and it is always the outcome of sociality as an action—be that action or speech—and it is therefore impossible to perform without the presence of other people. (Studdert 2005: 2)
Arendt emphasises three things which enable us to reconceive community: the primacy of action over thought, the social nature of existence and the inter-relationality of experience. Together these reconstruct the world as a social world and mark an ontological shift from the privatised self to a social one.
Action is not just what I do, but how I appear to others: it exists as an end in itself, not just for instrumental purposes’ (149).
This concept of community as a living thing, enables us to study the contribution of local journalism to community by investigating the extent to which engagement with it—including its people as well as its products—leads to action, the practising of community. Community is plural, active and constantly created—a living thing, and examples might include:
… the smile between two strangers who live in the same street, the groups chatting in the supermarket, or at work, at home, or at the school gate. It occurs when fans sing team songs at football matches. It happens in business meetings, at work, in corridors. … Such sociality surrounds us constantly and eternally. (Studdert & Walkerdine 2016: 30–1)
This conception of community as action offers a way to consider the roles local newspapers play in the relational processes that constitute community as a ‘co-operative beingness’. For instance, the interactions between the photographic staff and the people they meet generate social capital in themselves; they contribute to the relationships between organisation and audience, which itself can feed back into the economic value of the business, albeit indirectly. Such activity has been described by the managing director of a family-owned title as a ‘virtuous circle’ because the sustainability of the title and community are interdependent (Matthews 2017a).
Local journalism as social infrastructure
Building on this, we can begin to understand how the commercial local newspaper can be understood as an element of social infrastructure, both by virtue of its physical presence in communities and because of the benefits afforded by its unique ability to ‘connect people, consciously and unconsciously, across various social, economic, and cultural spaces’ (Hess & Waller 2017: 113). Social infrastructure is most understood as those ‘physical spaces and community facilities which bring people together to build meaningful relationships’ (Kelsey & Kenny 2021: 6). This can include a variety of spaces, civic and commercial, which serve as social amenities. The Bennett Institute, which has been commissioned by the British Academy to research the area, followed by Kelsey & Kenny (2021), puts forward a model for social infrastructure which can be applied to local journalism. This definition considers both public and commercial spaces which are designed to link people and asks questions which help identify social infrastructure which are highly pertinent to the study of the legacy local newspaper. For instance, what role do these institutions play in feelings of identity and pride and cohesion and social ties? Kelsey and Kenny argue that these ties ‘do not exist independently of those facilities, amenities and levels of provision within the town’ but depend upon them (12).
This definition also opens a consideration of the role of the physical presence of local journalism in a community—an aspect which is apparent to those with experience of working in the local news industry. This identification arises from my own reflective approach to my professional practice as a journalist. Post-university, I completed a journalism apprenticeship with a local weekly newspaper and achieved my professional qualifications from the National Council for the Training of Journalists. My fifteen-year career was spent in weekly and regional daily newspapers in a variety of editorial roles, including reporter, district reporter, news editor, sub editor and deputy editor, and in freelance roles for news agencies. My experience spanned both rural and urban areas with a focus on news production and news gathering, which meant constant contact with people and places.
My reflection on this professional experience has led me to conclude that the existing literature neither identifies nor conceptually accounts for a range of less obvious, yet still tangible, benefits of local journalism accrued by the local newspaper. I am mindful of the challenge posed to researchers by such positionality—particularly in relation to local newspapers, where descriptions of the past can be dominated by a nostalgia for a golden age.10 Analysing journalists’ reactions to the decline of daily metropolitan titles in the US, Gilewicz (2018) suggests that this nostalgia is itself an attempt to preserve the social value of their practice in the face of economic constraints.
However, Tyra Jackson (2024) is one of the few journalists-turned-researchers to demonstrate the utility of an autoethnographic approach to understanding journalism practice, drawing, as she does, on her own experience to analyse the lived experience of black female reporters in newsrooms. This positioning of the self in relation to the object of study can facilitate the analysis of characteristics and experiences—in Jackson’s case of being a black woman experiencing a bullying culture— which might not otherwise be obvious. It therefore enables personal insight to be contextualised by the framework provided by the literature, but also to extend it. In this instance, I contend that my experience has led me to identify additional aspects of the impact of local newspapers on communities which deserve scrutiny. At the same time, I acknowledge that it largely pre-dates the physical restructuring of the past ten years, but I would contend that my experience is vital for understanding the impact of those changes.
One aspect all-but missing from studies of the changing local newspaper, is the contribution made by its physical presence. The history of the local newspaper demonstrates how post-Victorian titles developed for themselves a niche in the physical infrastructure of towns and cities. The larger titles created landmark offices, often positioned alongside other institutions, such as municipal authorities or flagship department stores (Matthews 2017a). Even smaller newspapers with fewer resources had a high street presence. They also displayed their allegiance to their locality in their architecture and in their position, so that the Greenock Telegraph, for instance, which was founded for communicating news on the fishing industry, had offices at the centre of the maritime community (O’Reilly & Vine 2023). This was not accidental; as O’Reilly and Vine have argued, these buildings were ‘strategically located in terms of the wider landscape of the city and were designed to reflect the power of the newspaper’ (13).
Newspaper buildings were also designed for interactions, both between the people working within them and between those and the wider community, because the space is ‘very much external, communicating with external publics’ (4). As beleaguered local newspaper brands have withdrawn from these central locations to cut costs, it becomes important to realise what is lost in this process. Where present, the traditional newspaper building is inherently accessible to the people in a place. As a district reporter—a role which involves running a satellite office away from the editorial HQ—I was acutely aware that my most powerful news gathering tool was the promise of a cup of coffee because it was that which brought people in through the door. In the act of socialising, these visitors may share a tip for a story or ask for help; they may place an advert or purchase one of the allied services which local newspapers provide;11 and landmark offices often boast impressive reception areas which include seating, libraries of back newspaper copies and local information for people to consult at their leisure. Significantly, anyone can contact their local newspaper: it costs nothing and admits all so that the local landed gentry and a convicted felon can share the same social space.
Local newspapers also have a physical impact beyond the office itself. A study in a northern market town in England led to the creation of an impressive list of such impacts (Baines & Matthews 2024). People valued: being up to date with key information about the people in the areas, such as recent deaths; incidental and purposeful interactions between newspaper staff and people, which facilitate on-going social relationships; and being able to attend events because they had been publicised in the paper. For weekly titles, publication day might make a town particularly busy as people travel in from surrounding villages—and choose to meet friends at the same time. As mentioned above, people also described visiting the newspaper office, which doubled as an information office and a shop.
In this way, we see local journalism as the facilitator of social interactions. As O’Reilly and Vine observe, the newspaper building is of necessity porous and reciprocal:
This space is occupied by receptionists, managers, accountants, librarians, advertising agents and myriads of other departments. This space is very much external, communicating with external publics. (2023: 4)
The organisation is also porous beyond its building, as the process of local journalism depends on interaction between those producers and the audience, which is also often a participant in the production itself as a source and material for editorial content. This is particularly pertinent to the example of editorial workers who can be ‘out and about’. This may be in a directly work-related capacity, such as a photographer or reporter who attends an event, but also occurs on an informal basis, as news workers who are part of the community they seek to serve go about their daily lives. Again, as a working news reporter, I lost count of the number of stories I came across in my out-of-work time, and such was this level of demand that I eventually purposely chose to live away from my ‘patch’. As the editor of a weekly newspaper described to me during a research interview into the relationship between his title and the community, being an editorial worker in a local newspaper carries a certain expectation that you will be visible in the place you profess to serve.
Kelsey & Kenny (2021) emphasise the significance of the services a workforce provide to definitions of social infrastructure. In relation to local journalism, these services function on a variety of levels; firstly, the processes directly related to the journalism product, providing information and a service via editorial and other means, such as acting as an intermediary between people and those in power, which is a common feature of new values in local journalism.12 The consequence of this loss can be catastrophic. For instance, veteran broadcaster Sir Trevor Phillips has contended that the Grenfell Tower disaster, which claimed seventy-two lives, would have been less likely to happen in the presence of a vibrant local press, which would have represented the interests of those residents in lobbying for change ‘year after year’ (HoldTheFrontPage 2024).
A second facet of local journalism as accidental social infrastructure is the incidental information service provided by virtue of the wide range of specialist knowledge local newspaper staff have. For instance, the public may come to the paper for contacts, particularly for those in authority or for those who can help with a specific issue. A reporter, who will have been trained in public administration and legal matters, may explain processes and rights to people during a conversation about something else. Such aspects of local journalism can be hidden from all but those who practised it. I recall signposting the young victim of an industrial accident to professional support, so they could begin the process of seeking compensation. In another striking example from my own career, as a news editor for a regional daily newspaper, I answered countless requests for information from people who expected us to have what they needed, and who were confident we would share it. Similarly, Wahl-Jorgensen et al. (2022: 52) document how local journalists shared essential information and thereby promoted community cohesion during the Covid 19 pandemic.
The local newspaper becomes interchangeable with other sources of local information, such as the council or tourism office or perhaps even the health authority. It is an example of a commercial organisation, which by design links people—both physically and metaphorically—and which ‘has the potential to nurture an improved degree of mutual understanding among different parts of the community’ (Kelsey & Kenny 2021: 28). More broadly, this accumulation of local knowledge is linked to a tacit understanding of a place and ultimately contributes to the journalist’s ‘cultural capital’ (McAdam & Hess 2024: 6). These elements combine to suggest that the local newspaper acts as a ‘symbolically powerful’ (12) asset, which promotes shared identity and cultural belonging in a place. Their resonance with communities can give trusted journalism brands significant influence in an area.
The local newspaper as community activator: memorialisation and archives
My research into the legacy of the Coventry Telegraph has also revealed the symbolism the title has to the city’s residents, working through the lens of its historic presence. The newspaper, founded in 1896 as the Midland Daily Telegraph, was for most of its history owned by the Iliffe family. At its peak it boasted a circulation of some 100,000 copies as day and had a newsroom staff of 100 (Hetherington 1989). In 2016 the title, which is now owned by Reach Plc, left its landmark, purpose-built office in the city centre for an edge-of-town office. But its ongoing impact on the city’s imagination was made evident by the opening up of its deserted former home as a part of events for Coventry City of Culture in 2021. People were able to tour the building, which had a just few remaining vestiges of the newspaper process, and the building hosted several artistic performances, one of which focussed on the newspaper itself. The newspaper’s presence has subsequently been celebrated in the name of the business which now occupies the building, the Telegraph Hotel.
A series of oral history interviews I collected with former Coventry Telegraph employees to mark this event, additionally demonstrated how such titles can be aspirational for residents. As a former photographer described,13 as a Coventarian, a career at his local paper was his goal:
I wanted to work for the Coventry Telegraph, that’s what I wanted to do. …Soon as I put my foot in the door, the buzz, the camaraderie, everything that went with the paper was fantastic. The vibe … I only ever wanted to work for the Telegraph. (oral history interview, Coventry History Centre)
The irony of these acts of memorialisation is that it they were born of the reduction in the presence of local media described above, which threatens the physical presence outlined here. Just as with the Coventry Telegraph, the trend for the industry, particularly post-Covid, has been for smaller offices and more home-based working. This process has been a widespread cost-cutting measure in the corporate local newspaper industry, where technological change and redundancies have also resulted in a much-reduced staff needing much less space. As such, the continual disruption of digital technology has radically altered the physical presence of the local newspaper, so that its once-ubiquitous physical presence has all but disappeared.
This reduction means many of those smaller, yet critical, benefits outlined in this section have also been reduced or lost to communities and localities. This decline can be a contributory factor to impoverished feelings of place attachment and belonging, to the extent that communities can ‘experience bereavement and loss in the face of disruptive and social change’ (Tomany 2023: 21). The negative impact of the decline of the local newspaper on the emotional life of a community can explain the motivation to memorialise the vestiges of its presence.
As O’Reilly and Vine note, however grand, the newspaper building is not a symbol of power in and of itself; it is the relationship between the newspaper and the people around them and the extent to which they newspaper influences the actions of people which activates that symbolism (2023: 177). In addition to the contemporary presence of the local newspaper, its historical vestiges indicate a longitudinal influence, which contributes to our understanding of the local newspaper as part of the social infrastructure.
One area of activity is in relation to the local newspaper archive. Here we have multiple examples of communities stepping in to preserve specific aspects of collections relating to newspapers, such as photographs, cuttings and bound copies, which can be disposed of as the industry's phsyical presence contracts. The people of Barnard Castle, for instance, have digitised the back catalogue of their local weekly newspaper, the Teesdale Mercury14—this despite the fact that local titles are already held in local records offices on microfiche and conserved in the British Library. The Magic Attic in Swadlincote15 is a local history archive in part founded by the wish to preserve the bound copies of the Burton Mail. The Stamford Mercury,16 which is among the oldest titles in the UK, is preserved by a specially founded trust. More recently, part of the photographic collection of the Wolverhampton Express and Star17 has been digitised. These projects are community driven and often sit outside of ‘official’ archival holdings. As such, their existence tells us something about the ways in which local newspapers resonate with, and are used by, communities.
As Tomany (2023) argues, communities are constituted by the past and it is the type of narrative put forward in the pages of local newspapers which underpins its traditions and which directs collective memory. Therefore, part of the cultural and social value of local media lies in its ability to underpin local identity by ‘highlighting and promoting the unique characteristics, values, and traditions of the community they serve, and so create a sense of “belonging and solidarity” among residents’ and by its contribution to collective memory through its documentation of ‘significant events, milestones, and cultural practices’ (Gulyas 2023: 7)
Perhaps not unsurprisingly, examples of collecting have increased with the reduction in physical space for the local newspaper and the subsequent disposal of records. This is the point at which a city’s Civic Society stepped in to salvage records relating to its daily title, and sister weekly, one of the oldest continually published local newspapers in England. Since 2022, a small team of volunteers have met each week to sort through the extensive collection, which is housed in a grace-and-favour room underneath the city centre carpark. It includes bound copies of the newspapers dating back to 1805 but also the title’s own library of cuttings, the photographers’ diaries and more than 500,000 photographic negatives in a variety of formats from glass plate to digital.
These findings are drawn from a series of semi-structured interviews with these volunteers, carried out in winter 2023. The aim of the study was to understand the value they placed upon the archive. Participants were recruited following an initial visit to the archival base, which enabled me to understand the collection and the work they were carrying out. All participants volunteered to be interviewed. Their roles in the project included one person who was an overall organiser, one group working on the photographic archives—including scanning and labelling photographs—and one group who were auditing the cuttings library. The interviewees additionally included two members of the society’s committee—one of whom had been instrumental in the initial salvage of the material. One participant worked part-time while the others were all fully retired. Another participant was a former employee of the newspaper.
The interviews sought to establish: the value volunteers ascribed to the collection, their personal motivation for taking part, and the ways in which they thought it might be used and which aspects of the collection they personally found interesting. They took place either in the interviewee’s home or virtually, depending on their preference. The recordings were fully transcribed, so that the researcher was familiar with the data, which was then iteratively coded accorded to thematic headings relating to the research questions. The findings have been fully anonymised for publication. The participants were aware that I am a qualified journalist.
The analysis reveals the value volunteers placed both on the collection and on their involvement in it, value which was often expressed in emotional terms. Interviewee 2 described how the society was ‘astonished’ that the official city archives did not want the collection which they considered to be ‘gold’. This meant they ‘kept going’ (Interviewee 1) to salvage the collection as the newspaper prepared to relocate.
I was in an industrial skip the size of this room digging boxes of slides out and I couldn’t get another box in my car. The boot was full, the back seat was full, the passenger seat. And I looked inside [the skip] and I thought this lot tomorrow is going to be destroyed. Nobody cared. That’s the point—nobody cared. (Interviewee 2)
For the volunteers, the salvaged collection was viewed as a ‘blessing’, with each individual perhaps placing most value on different aspects of the collection, describing them as ‘nuggets’, which are ‘brilliant’ or ‘fantastic’ (Interviewee 1). The newspaper collection was valued for its role in documenting the life of the city, telling stories of people who are not in history books and of events. Sorting through the collection provoked powerful reactions for volunteers—particularly those who had lived in the city for a long time. One volunteer was delighted to see a report of a visit by a long-distance walker, an event they had witnessed as a child. Another was struck by the power of the documentation of aspects of city life.
There are some pictorial editions dating back to the First World War and I was I was quite shocked when I saw all the soldiers going off to war. Being recruited … and marching out of the city. I just thought, wow, they’re people’s sons and brothers going off to war. (Interviewee 6)
For other volunteers the collection formed source material for family and social history and for local projects, such as research into sites for the English Heritage blue plaque schemes. The collection has been used to foster wider links in the city, for instance prompting a school prize for pupils who conduct a project based on the archives, and has been seen as a tool for widening the membership of the society itself, by widening its appeal beyond a primary focus on the built environment.
Additionally, there was a recognition of the significance of the collection to the history of the newspaper company itself, a history which was also expressed via personal memory. Part of the collection included a photographic document of the paper’s relocation to a new edge-of-town landmark building. Recalling the newspaper’s old office in the city centre one volunteer said:
They used to have two bay windows with photographs in and those were the highlights to look at because you could go in and order a photograph. Up the side passage, because it was so hot when they used to print, they used to have the doors open so you could see the paper being made. (Interviewee 1)
The volunteers also spoke of the social aspect of the project and how the collective act of engaging with the project ‘felt good’ (Interviewee 4) and seemed worthwhile. They explained how they enjoyed the background stories the former newspaper staff member supplied to certain items, saying she ‘has me in stiches’ (Interviewee 6).
… sometimes with the cuttings we’d be groaning about some of the puns that the reporters have used for the headings … . I mean, it’s quite fun. (Interviewee 5)
It has become a routine, but for some of the people that go to the group, it does have a social purpose as well as doing the archive. I know for at least one of the people there, it’s an opportunity to chat and meet people because they don’t see many people in the week outside. (Interviewee 6)
The working space provided for the archive is also socially reciprocal. The company which owns the shopping centre allows the society to use the underground room. In return, the material is now being showcased to the wider community via an exhibition space in the shopping centre, which additionally offers the opportunity for people in the city to look for themselves and others in key moments of the past as recorded by the newspaper.
These interviews therefore reveal the role the archive in documenting the history of the place, but also how engaging with that documentation can itself prompt memory and an interpretation of the past of a place in a social context. As Tomany says, such collective memory can provide stability and can be key to enabling civic activism. ‘While it is individuals who remember, typically, they draw upon the social context to recollect and recreate the past’ (2023: 22). Activities such as those described by the Civic Society in relation their local newspaper, therefore, evidence, not only their connection to a place but also their connection to each other and to wider networks in the city. As such, they can be understood to be a ‘less visible, more intangible aspect’ of social infrastructure, that is, an element of ‘the networks of formal and informal groups organisations, partnerships, activities and initiatives that both benefit from and sustain the physical and social fabric of a place’ (27).
In a similar vein, Studdert & Walkerdine (2016) describe in their work for the Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities programme how engagement with history can strengthen communities. Drawing on comments on a local history social media site, they argue that such projects can reveal shared meaning between community members. Like the everyday content of the local newspaper, or the childhood memory of a long-distance walker sparked by a newspaper cutting, these may also be ‘grassroots’ meanings which can be excluded from ‘top down’ and ‘official historic narratives’. Such meanings underpin those moments of sociality which combine to form community.
Every day, everywhere, sociality of different strengths and meanings is what composes our lives. It is the smile between two strangers who live in the same street, the groups chatting in the supermarket, or at work, at home or at the school gate … . Such sociality surrounds us constantly and eternally. (2016: 30–1).
Conclusion
This paper has focussed on the articulation of the range of benefits accrued to local people by the presence, practice and processes as well as the products of the form of local journalism most associated with the legacy local newspaper. This is because of its dominance in terms of professional and societal conceptions of what local journalism should be and what it should do. As noted, the decline of the presence of the local newspaper is particularly acute in the most deprived areas where residents are less likely to have access to reliable local information. A discussed early in this paper, the presence of local journalism has been correlated with multiple advantages for communities, by virtue of its ability to support and generate social capital.
In common with the work of Tomany, Hess (2013) describes how local media can ‘bond’ people, by imagining a community in the present which includes its relationship with the past and developing a sense of place. As an active participant, Hess argues that local media can develop its own social capital, rather than just being the ‘door’ through which people access it. Social capital is ‘a specific resource of power that comes from the news media’s ability to control the information that brings people together and to consciously and deliberately connect people across different social structures and across both public and private domains’ (116). This paper has illustrated this process both by drawing on my own professional experience as a journalist working in local newspaper, but also in relation to the activities of a city’s Civic Society in relation to the archives of their local newspaper.
The corollary of the above is that ‘news deserts’, which are underserved by local journalism, experience multiple negative impacts, including a reduced sense of community and diminished pride in their area (Mathews 2020). If we apply the notion of local journalism as social infrastructure, then we see parallels with Tomany’s discussion of left-behind places, and the feeling of ‘left behindness’ which accrues when ‘former centres of community activity disappear’ (2023: 21). People in such areas have less access to the structures which generate social capital and no longer benefit from the social capital which local journalism itself creates.
However, the availability of the legacy local newspaper to local places is not simply a case of lack or plenty; as outlined, the impact of managerialism and the gradual decline in revenue experienced by the news industry has led to a reduction in resources. At the extreme, titles may be staffed by just one or two reporters or with no local editorial presence at all. These ‘ghost newspapers’ (Abernathy 2018) may still be published, but are based at remote locations from the people they profess to serve, with a much-reduced quality and quantity of content. These titles therefore contribute less to communities, but not only in terms of content, but also, as argued in this paper, in terms of the processes and practices associated with their production. This loss is not simply because of the shift from analogue to digital,18 but is the impact of the decline of local journalism as a presence and as a practice carried out by workers who can be active members of the community they seek to serve. Instead, these hollowed-out newspapers are memorialised in archives or hotel names which remain as a symbol of their value and as a way in which people can engage with their legacy.
Significantly, newer entrants to the local journalism landscape are foregrounding their community purpose, which makes their inclusion in definitions of social infrastructure more obvious. In Glasgow, for instance, the member-owned Greater Govanhill Community Magazine has joined forces with The Ferret, an investigative journalism cooperative, to open a physical community space, which contributes to community development as well as journalism itself.19 This organisation intentionally supports processes of community as acts of sociality. The space acts as a community newsroom where people can meet journalists but has also been a focus for community-building activities, including addressing health inequalities. It can also host events and workshops and so creates opportunities for local people to interact with each other. In a similar vein, devolved ownership has also enabled the town of Langholm in the Scottish Borders to preserve the traditional Eskdale and Liddesdale Advertiser newspaper from conglomerate ownership; such is the value placed on the role of the title, that the community-owned newspaper continues to operate out of a central location which positions it as a key actor in the area. Organisations also exist to support the emerging sector including the Independent Community News Network at Cardiff University and the Public Interest News Foundation.
This emerging ecosystem brings its own challenges and controversies. Perhaps the most obvious is continued financial sustainability of these entrepreneurial organisations who are seeking revenue beyond advertising. This leads to the pressing question of who in the local journalism sector should benefit from those resource subsidies which exist, such as the BBC LDRS or the revenue from local authorities’ obligation to publish public notices20 (Heawood 2021) and to the concomitant policy discussions about the sustainability of local journalism. Key to these discussions is not only the conviction that local journalism matters, but also a comprehensive understanding of how and why it is important. Envisioning local journalism as accidental social infrastructure provides us with a road map to effectively intervene in that conversation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the foundational work of Dr David Baines, of Newcastle University, with whom I have ‘thought through’ the relationship between newspaper and community for some years. This paper owes its inception to that collaboration.
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1
The centralised nature of England means the economic and professional relationships between national and local newspapers are stronger than, for instance, those in more distributed nations like the US. This means comparisons between local newspapers in different national contexts must be treated with care, so that nuances are not elided.
2
This section of the media is termed ‘community media’ in the UK, as exemplified by the community radio sector as funded by Ofcom.
3
Figures for 2023 from the Media Reform Coalition demonstrate that six companies owned more than 71 per cent of the 1,189 local titles in the UK.
4
As the Press Gazette (2024) coverage of closures note, the decline in print titles is now outstripped by the number of new actors emerging in the digital local journalism arena.
5
PINF has created a live resource which maps the provision of local journalism in the UK. It can be found at https://www.publicinterestnews.org.uk/map
6
The Local Democracy Reporting Service has funded 165 reporters in UK local newspapers to cover local government and other public service organisations. See https://www.bbc.com/lnp/ldrs (accessed 26 November 2024).
7
Much of this work has focussed on those ‘community’ small-town weekly titles in the US.
8
This latter position echoes UK local newspaper lore that people don’t start buying their local newspaper until they have bought a house and have a stake in an area, such as having children at school.
9
Arendt outlines this theory in her 1958 work, The Human Condition.
10
My research into the history of the local newspaper was in part driven by the search for a ‘golden age’ of local newspapers which had been mythologised by practising journalists. My conclusion was that that golden age had never existed (see the preface to Matthews 2017a).
11
Both national and local newspapers continue to draw on the trust they have built in communities to offer a range of products, such as holidays.
12
This news value is key to the ‘watchdog’ role, so journalists may lobby on behalf to people for improvements to such things as housing.
13
This data was gathered as part of an oral history project with workers of the Coventry Telegraph conducted as part of the City of Culture 2012 activities. The recordings are held in the city archives.
14
The project, which was supported by a variety of funding sources including the Heritage Lottery Fund, is available at http://www.teesdalemercuryarchive.org.uk/ (accessed 15 November 2024).
15
http://www.magicattic.org.uk/attic_history.html (accessed 15 November 2024).
16
https://www.smarchive.org.uk/ (accessed 15 November 2024).
17
https://photo-archive.expressandstar.co.uk/ (accessed 15 November 2024).
18
Hess & Waller (2017) argue that digital forms of local media also generate a sense of place, even if the technology means they are not solely aligned to a geographical location.
19
https://www.greatergovanhill.com/newsroom (accessed 15 November 2024).
20
The House of Lords committee report (2024a) into The Future of News has recommended that policy in relation to this spend be reviewed.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a14
Published on: 25 February 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 1
Article view count: 506
Article download count: 50
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Matthews, R. (2025), ‘Assessing the contribution of local journalism: the local newspaper as accidental social infrastructure’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(1): a14 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a14Crossref
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July 2023
The civic importance of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) Isobel Armstrong
In the Harvard lectures that became Art as Experience (1934) Dewey developed a democratic account of art that not only expanded the range of creative experience (watching a huge digger, the architectonics of a mutually satisfactory conversation, are included in the reach of art) but developed an account of art that was vitally reciprocal, participatory and social. Maker and perceiver are equally interactive creators as they mutually develop new modes of feeling and thinking. For Dewey this relationship necessarily re-makes the experience of community and, just as important, creates a civic space for interrogation and critique. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
17 September 2024
---------------TEAR HERE-------------- Simon Shepherd
This contribution is a record—apparently—of a presentation about the function and effects of dramatic performance within communities. It lurched from the Covid pandemic and the British government’s ‘levelling-up’ project back, over a century earlier, to the beginnings of the municipal and amateur theatre movements. These latter produced some of the earliest formulations of the idea that participation in performance-making enables self-expression and a sense of fellowship, thus building community. But, as Granville Barker, one of its greatest proponents, warned, this same activity, where it’s not rooted in the ‘hearts’ of people is merely a professional product, not ‘vital’. Which produces a dilemma for an author asked to take a live event, shared among participants, and substitute for it a journal article, civic, perhaps, but not necessarily vital. (This article is published in the thematic collection `The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
19 September 2024
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