2 Literature review: local news in the UK

The past five years have marked an increased global interest in local news ecosystems, both on the part of scholars and on the part of organisations, governments, and the press. This interest has centred around the industry’s structure and sustainability, which have undergone major radical changes in the past decade as a result of technological innovations. Particularly, media companies are facing challenges relating to adapting to the digital ecosystem, which in itself has been the root cause to disruptions in business models, affecting both advertising and circulation revenues.

This interest has arised in several Western democracies, from the United States to the nordic countries. The UK is no stranger to this current stream of research, and it was indeed two British scholars who curated what became the volume that put together global perspectives on the state of local media in current times. The Routledge Companion to Local Media and Journalism, edited by Canterbury University media scholar Agnes Gulyas and Newcastle University’s David Baines, constitutes a major resource for anyone interested in obtaining a global overview on the subject, including a wide variety of sub-domains such as the meaning of “local” in local journalism, the rise of hyperlocals, and changes to business models. Both Gulyas and Baines are members of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA), whose Local and Community Media Network constitutes a central research promoter in this area in the UK, as outlined on their site:

The MeCCSA Local and Community Media Network aims to promote research into Local and Community Media in the UK. The contemporary landscape for local media, including journalism, is undergoing a period of unprecedented disruption and innovation due to the challenges and affordances of the structural changes precipitated by digital technology. This process has had a profound impact on the financial basis, and sustainability, of local and community media and journalism platforms, but also on the cultures and practices of production and consumption of local media. Local media ecosystems have seen the emergence of innovative channels, platforms and publications: but there have also been extinctions, leaving some communities in Britain (Firmstone, 2016); Scandinavia (Nygren et al 2018); and the USA (Abernathy, 2017) to be described as ‘news deserts’. Concern is such that in 2018, the UK Government set up the Cairncross Review into the Sustainability of the Media, with a specific remit to consider the local. Historically this area has been under-researched by academics, but it is now experiencing a resurgence in the wake of the disruption outlined above. The aim of the network is to draw together those scholars interrogating this landscape to raise the profile of research in this field and strengthen its future trajectory.

2.1 Main research

From this emergent stream of research, I selected what I reckon are important contributions one should be aware of. Here below appear some of the key studies that have come out in and outside academia regarding the state of local media in the UK, grouped by topic or contribution.

Comprehensive guide on the topic

  • Franklin, B. (2006) Local Journalism and Local Media: Making Local News. London: Routledge.

  • Hess, K. and Waller, L. (2017) Local Journalism in a Digital World: Theory and Practice in the Digital Age, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Agnes Gulyas and David Baines (2020) The Routledge Companion to Local Media and Journalism.

  • Cairncross, F. (2019) The Cairncross Review: A Sustainable Future for Journalism. HMSO London

Changing landscape: digital transformations, consumption habits, and ownership

  • Kristy Hess & Lisa Waller (2016) River Flows and Profit Flows, Journalism Studies, 17:3, 263-276
    Key contribution: local media reflect very closely the particular historical, geographical, social and political contexts out of which they have arisen.

  • Harte, D., Howells, R., and Williams, A. (2019) Hyperlocal Journalism: The decline of local newspapers and the rise of online community news, Abingdon: Routledge

  • Media Reform Coalition (2021) Who Owns the UK Media? www.mediareform.org.uk. The report uses ABC figures and has been done yearly since 2014.

  • Agnes Gulyas, Sarah O’Hara & Jon Eilenberg (2019) Experiencing Local News Online: Audience Practices and Perceptions, Journalism Studies, 20:13, 1846-1863

  • Ofcom (2022) News Consumption in the UK: 2022, Jigsaw Research. Done yearly and applicable to broadcast and radio.

The state of local journalism

2.2 Who makes up the local news ecosystem?

An important primary step for a researcher interested in studying local media in the UK is to understand the landscape: how many papers exist? how many websites? which regions, cities, communities, are underserved? How do people consume the news, and how does this vary across demographic factors?

To answer this question at scale, one needs to possess a directory of news titles. In this section, I put together the different directories in existence in the UK, namely the ones to be aware of. The list is made of regulators and circulation auditors, as well as scholars and trade publishers. Media owners’ own lists are excluded and will be reported in the next chapter in which I will build my own directory - and, to do so, visit each one of them.

This list has two characteristics:

  1. it includes what, in my knowledge, are the most current (post 2015) efforts to provide the number of local newspapers in the UK.

  2. of all efforts carried out after 2015, this table includes the most relevant ones, where relevancy is measures as legitimacy of the source, in turn established through my own research of the source, and signals such as the popularity of the source across other entities.

Authors Type Year Aim Sources Mapped Open
Ramsay and Moore Academic study 2015 To recalculate the number of local newspapers and map them to LADs and constituencies across the UK Local Media Works, MediaTel Connected, British Newspapers Online, newsbrands lists Yes No
Gulyas Academic study 2020 To map local news provision in the UK JICREG, ICNN Yes No
Independent Community News Network Association membership list 2022 To index titles represented by ICNN: independent publishers and hyperlocals Members Yes Yes
JICREG Circulation auditor 2022 To compile circulation figures for local media publishers Local Media Works, comScore No (only behind paywall) Yes
Local Media Works Association membership list 2022 To enable users to search local media titles in Great Britain by geographic location Independent research No Yes
IPSO Regulator membership list 2022 To regulate the press Members No Yes
IMPRESS Regulator membership list 2022 To regulate the press Members No Yes
ABC Circulation auditor 2022 To compile circulation figures Members No Yes
Media.info Independent Website 2022 To monitor media companies and provide information about them Independent research No Yes
HoldtheFrontPage Association membership list 2022 To provide a resource for people both inside and outside the industry to find out more about the UK regional media Independent research No Yes
PressGazette Trade publication study 2021 To monitor independent media publishers ICNN, HTFP, IPSO, IMPRESS Yes No
Mediatique Governmental research 2018 To overview recent dynamics in the UK press market ABC, own research No No
PLUM Governmental research 2020 To show number of titles by LADs and within LADs trends JICREG, ICNN Yes No
MRC Governmental research 2021 To show ownership concentration Independent research No Yes

2.3 Key studies

2.3.1 Academia

One thing the directories above have in common is that each of them is unique. No two lists are idential, for they are compiled for different reasons, they purposely target different titles or audiences with differing interests. The one I find mostly worth noting is Ramsay’s and Moore’s 2015 effort, which, unlike other directories who rely on their own data, is made from interpolating different sources.

Furthermore, this effort had the target to really capture “local news” in print and digital, and thus tried to be broader than other directories. I find it fascinating because if one wants to study the ecosystem as a whole it is simply not enough to look at print rather than digital, or look at legacy titles rather than hyperlocals, and their study has had this precise mission.

Their directory differs in this sense from the more recent academic effort by Gulyas (2020) who, despite relying on two sources (JICREG for titles, ICNN for hyperlocals), only uses the first when looking at local news provision (filtering for JICREG titles with at least 5% print audience adults monthly reach in the area), and only combines them to get a sense of whether hyperlocals emerge in those areas that have low number of titles by the same JICREG 5% threshold. Interestingly, she does not put on the map hyperlocals titles existing in areas where there are zero legacy titles, and without discussion on this by the author nor open data behind the study, we are left wondering whether it was an intentional choice not to look at this, or whether simply there are no hyperlocals in UK’s “legacy media news deserts”.

Another choice I noticed was to display on a map the digital reach, for any postcode district area (which I am not sure what geographical unit it equates to, in terms of official administrative geographic boundaries in the UK) of the main title for that district. This lead some areas to be displayed as very low in terms of relative reach of the title, when in fact their overall digital reach was much higher than the print one. Finally, the color scheme used highlights whether a postcode district area is high/low in reach compared to other districts, however an alternative way to look at the data would be to colour the difference between digital reach and print reach, to highlight instead or additionally the discrepancy in performance between the two modes of news provision.

Unfortunately, both Gulyas (2020) and Ramsay and Moore (2016) directories are not open and available. To analyse Gulyas I relied on her interactive story, and to analyse Ramsay and Moore I relied on their publication.^[The authors state in the booklet that at this following link the dataset is available for exploration, however I cannot access it: http://ww1.localnewsmapping.uk/. I have reached out to both authors to know if datasets were accessible, and Gulyas confirmed her is not, and Ramsay and Moore confirmed their site is no longer active.]

2.3.2 Governmental research

Most studies of resonance have been carried out outside academia.

The first to note is Media Coalition Reform’s yearly report “Who owns the UK Media?”, carried out since 2014 (although its primary researcher was Dr Ramsay until 2019). The main focus of the report is to keep track of ownership. They typically have a chapter for each medium (print, digital, tv, radio), and the press is further split into national and local. By counting ownership of local newspapers, they are also counting the number of local newspapers as a whole. The 2017 booklet reported results from Ramsay and Moore (2016). The 2019 and 2021 reports produced their independent counting of newspaper titles, although the methodology for counting is not detailed. They always mention PressGazette’s (PG) reports of newspapers launching/closing, so I reckon they have a dataset which they simply update over time using PG’s findings.

PLUM Consulting published a one-off report in May 2020, for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. In the research team sat Gordon Ramsay once again, alongside others. Their report examines recent dynamics of the press sector in the UK and globally. Inside the report, they use JICREG data on circulation within LADs to assess presence of news deserts, dominant publishers, presence of dailies vs weeklies, and more. All their geographic findings are displayed on static maps. The methodology resembled Ramsay and Moore (2016) with somewhat relaxed rules about the thresholds to be met for a title to be included as meaningfully circulating in a given LADs. Interestingly, they, like Ramsay and Moore (2016) and Gulyas (2020) all use these threshold as a proxy of the relevance of the paper for the local community, which I see as a shortcoming and is a primary concern of my research, where I will directly tackle this by analysing the content of article and establishing a link between content and geographic relevance.

The Cairncross Review was published in 2019 by Dame Frances Cairncross. It gave insights on the conditions of the media in the country, highlighting its struggles and suggesting courses of action to the government. From its findings emerge that generation of sufficient revenue will be particularly difficult at the local level, and even more in poorer areas that are least likely to draw advertising revenue and donations. This risks to reproduce economic inequalities. While it does not do its own count of number of titles in existence in the country, it still speaks of the decline of the industry. It states that between 2007 and 2017, the number of local newspapers dropped from 1,303 to 982 (cites Mediatique - which in turn takes these figures from ABC - in fact, Mediatique’s own analysis in 2018 shows a different number for spring of 2018 - see below).

Mediatique, similarly to PLUM, carried out a study in 2018 for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, oveviewing recent dynamics in the UK press market. This time the research team is not known to me, and it includes staff from Mediatique. The researchers built on data from ABC to calculate the number of local/regional titles in existence in the UK. They cross-referenced the ABC data with the Ramsay and Gordon 2015 dataset, and their own findings on papers launches/closures between 2012 and 2017. They topped the 982 ABC titles with 61 further ones, totalling 1043 titles applicable to March 2018.

2.3.3 Studies comparison

It was challenging at first to wrap my head around who used what, in terms of data, and who relied on who, in terms of knowledge, so I created a directed graph network that links these studies to each other, where the originating node has sourced the material from the receiver node.

Local news mappers: who cites who, and who uses what. Studies (in purple) relationship to each other and to dataset (in yellow). List of individual publishers’ brands are excluded from this graph as a dataset source, although used by Ramsay and Moore (2016).

So what did these studies find? Here below I summarise the key findings for each of these, and highlight the number of titles they deem exists in the UK, where “titles” refer to local newspapers, digital or print, and exclude large regional publishers and national titles. See the graph above to see which datasets the studies have relied upon to calculate the number of titles in existence. Studies that do not point at datasets have carried out their own research (most likely partly relying on Press Gazette, which is not displayed above).

Study Year Findings and notes Titles count
Monopolising Local News (Ramsay & Moore) 2016

Local dailies often located in urban or metropolitan areas. Rural areas and smaller towns often have only weekly coverage, even in digital.

  1. 4 publishers – Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press, Newsquest and Tindle – 73% of local newspaper titles in the UK
  2. 165 LADs are local newspaper monopolies in England, Wales and Scotland
  3. 96% of LADs in GB have a dominant publisher (accounting for >50% circulation)
  4. 271 of 406 LADs (in which 56% of the UK pop lives) lack a local daily newspaper with a reach threshold
 1,112
Overview of recent dynamics in the UK press market (Mediatique) 2018

Of 1,043 local and regional titles, 792 are published by the top 20 newspaper groups, representing 97% of the total weekly circulation. The rest are published by a long-tail of independent publishers, usually making one or few newspapers in a single area.

In July 2017 the ABC reported 982 local and regional newspapers; that figure does not include titles not measured by the ABC. We identified a further 61 titles, bringing the total to 1,043 titles. This number was calculated by cross-referencing the total number of local and regional newspapers identified by Ramsay and Moore (2016) with our own research on titles that have closed or launched between 2012 and 2017. It is possible that some small community newspapers with limited circulation are missing.

 1043
Who owns the UK Media? (MRC) 2019

Compared to 2015, in 2018 80 percent of all titles are now published by five, rather than six, publishers.

Mergers and closures combined with lag times in ABC circulation data (and the increasing likelihood of independent titles not being audited by the ABC) means updating 2015 figures is difficult. However, recording of the closures/launches by Press Gazette and HTFP means that assertions of changes are possible

65% LADs in the UK 0 dailies.

 1068
Research into recent dynamics of the press sector in the UK and globally (PLUM Consulting) 2020

A newspaper is recorded as covering a LAD if JICREG shows it is consumed by =>5% of households or if a certain proportion of the title’s total copies are circulated in the LAD (10% of copies for daily newspapers, 20% for weeklies). These thresholds have been set low in order to capture titles with even modest consumption but also to exclude a ‘long tail’ of newspaper who don’t provide in-depth local coverage.

Study uses “by LAD” approach using JICREG data. They basically mimic and slightly adjust the 2016 King’s college study but they only use JICREG data.

Limitations: JICREG data limited to newspapers and their associated digital iterations, excluding hyperlocals that do not undergo the typical processes of affiliation with representative bodies or auditing.

  1. 142 LADs in 2019 have >= 1 daily title

  2. 358/380 LADs have local titles

  3. 2.07 mean titles per LAD in 2019

 ~520
Mapping Local News Provision (Gulyas) 2020

Also follows by geographic area approach, although instead of LADs uses postcode district areas.

  1. The average print reach 23%. Areas with lower number of newspapers tend to have lower levels of audience reach of main title.
  2. The average digital audience reach was 42%, which means that digital reach is usually higher than print reach for local news.
  3. Average figure for number of titles is lower in areas with hyperlocal than in areas that do not have hyperlocal (1.83 vs 2.19).
  4. 1608 postcode district areas: 4.6% 0 titles, 30.7% 1, 31.4% 2, 23.1% 3, the rest 4 =>
  5. 78% weeklies, 17% dailies, 5% monthlies
 n/a
Who owns the UK Media? (MRC) 2021
  1. 83% of UK local newspapers are controlled by just 6 companies.
  2. 295 titles have closed since 2005 - approximately 20% of the total UK local press
 1018