The internet didn’t create participatory journalism – reporting has always relied on conversation, tip offs and a two-way flow of information. Really good local journalism reflects and is part of its community. It’s how you get the best stories.

The internet has enabled new tools for journalism that can also be used by a wider group of people than in the past and you’re right to highlight TheyWorkForYou and the other MySociety projects, but what those tools don’t give is context, and they don’t give the public at large the time required to analyse that information. Journalism is as much about time as anything else.

It’s also misleading to suggest that simply because anyone can publish that is neccesarily democratic. Anyone can edit Wikipedia but they can introduce fiction as well as facts. How democratic a decision is a vote cast based on lies?
Blogs can be well-sourced, checked and accurate but they don’t have to be – anonymous hosting is easy and there is no pot of money for a libel lawyer to extract or an identifiable individual to be hauled in front of a judge for contempt. Newspapers give you an audit trail and that visibility bestows legitimacy and trust – compare that to the Red Flag.

Democratic accountabilty also requires scale. The established media has a visibility that a network of blogs – however good – will struggle to match, and without which they can never have much impact on local democracy. It’s a common misperception of web advocates that everyone loves trawling Twitter as much as they do – in reality social media lags far behind TV, radio and newspapers and will do for some time.

Most people don’t get home from work and rush to read their local authority’s committee papers online. They don’t have the time or, when thing’s are going well, the inclination.

That’s why we need to support local journalism and why as worthy as many of recent web developments have been, local newspapers are still the best way of doing that.

@Sue thanks for the red pen And watch out for Andy Price’s (Institute of Digital Innovation) post on the subject in a few days on the blog, again in response to the government inquiry

Secondly, I agree it isn’t (wasn’t?) part of newspapers’ biz model to find ways to “engage their community directly with the democratic process”, even if, as journalists/editors that was what we wanted to happen as a result of reporting. The split between ‘want to’ and ‘can afford to’ in local newspapers has been widening for a lot of years.

I also agree that part of the future of local journalism and local democracy relies on that community becoming more actively involved in reporting on itself and its own concerns than they have been in possibly hundreds of years.

We’re helping them to do that through sweeble – and to do it in print. Three weeks after a shoestring launch, we’ve already got over 150 tiny local groups and clubs busily creating their own ‘newspapers’, which I think is a sign that there’s more of an appetite out there than any of us could have imagined for communities to report on themselves.

Business models that support that in the future will probably need to be hybrids of print and web and social media and anything else that makes sense for that community and the journalists working with them.