1 Introduction

This small book is meant to act as a guide to the structure of the local journalism print and digital industry in the UK. Having recently commenced my PhD at the Institute of People-Centred Artificial Intelligence at University of Surrey, I am studying the geographical characteristics of the local news industry and its outputs. My starting point was researching the structure and properties of the local and regional journalism industry in the UK.

This text’s composition stems from the desire to put together the different studies, approaches, theoretical contributions and frameworks that combined constitute the literature on local news in the UK. Compared to substantive efforts such as The Routledge Companion to Local Media and Journalism, the focus is to offer, succinctly, a meta-analysis of the conclusions to which researchers, journalists, and legislators have arrived regarding the structure of local journalism, and compare the different approaches used to get there.

Why am I pursuing this effort?

There is no updated comprehensive directory of UK local media. Different directories exist, each of which is bounded by the composers’ methodological choices, which are shaped by specific purposes and which in turn shape their directories sizes and characteristics. For example, JICREG’s popular directory does not encompass hyperlocal media, although these might be read by thousands of people. On the other hand, the prominent and methodologically sophisticated 2014 directory by media scholars Ramsay’s and Moore’s is a) no longer accessible online, and b) likely outdated by now, given the large number of newspaper closure and quickly changing news landscape. Generally, there is a lack of a directory whose aim is to a) stay updated and b) measure the real presence of journalistic outputs tied to a specific local community. This is imperative to my research, and thus I feel motivated by attempting to build a directory that stays updated, through automation, and that puts titles to a map.

1.1 Structure

Chapter 2 gives an overview and compares the different studies that have attempted to show the structure of the local journalism industry in the UK.

Chapter 3 constitutes my own attempt at building a current directory of local print and digital news media in the UK using automation and interpolation of sources. The directory is then compared to preceding efforts.

Chapter 4 puts my directory on a map and assesses the demographic properties of the local news landscape.