Reappraising Local and Community News in the UK: Media, Practice, and Policy

Drawing on expert contributions from around the UK, this collection brings together a series of insights into the contemporary local and community news media landscape in the UK.

Offering an analysis of the ongoing ’crisis’ in the provision of local news, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the book provides a critical space for practitioners and scholars to reflect on emerging models for economically sustainable, participatory local news services. It showcases new scholarly analyses of local news provision and community news practices, giving voice to the experiences of practitioners from across the local news ecology. In a set of diverse contributing chapters, campaigners and practitioners map out the period of recent rapid change for local news, questioning contemporary government initiatives and highlighting the advent of diverse, entrepreneurial reactions to the spaces created by a decline in local mainstream news services. This book is a timely examination of what we can learn from the variety of approaches being taken across the local media landscape in the commercial, subsidised and non-profit sector, shining new light on how practices that place the engagement of citizens at their centre might be propagated within this policy and funding landscape.

Reappraising Local and Community News in the UK is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in local news and journalism, as well as for anyone interested in the evolving local media landscape in the UK.

David Harte is an associate professor within the Birmingham Institute of Media and English at Birmingham City University. He is co-author of Hyperlocal Journalism, published by Routledge. He has published widely on community and hyperlocal media, as well as running his own hyperlocal news website in Birmingham since 2010.

Rachel Matthews is Associate Head of the School of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University. A former journalist, her research focuses on the local newspaper - past, present and future. She is the author of A History of the Provincial Press in England published by Bloomsbury Academic.