The following is the first in a series of responses to the government inquiry into the future of local and regional media. We will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This post, by Alex Lockwood, looks at the first:

“The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information”

The final views of the committee will depend on how much the inquiry sees local newspapers responsible for local journalism – a little, a lot, or completely.

Writing in the Observer on Sunday, Henry Porter pretty much called them the same thing. For many who work there, the death of newspapers is disastrous for access to local information, not least due to the historical positions those papers have held.

The closures of the Glasgow East News and Ayrshire Extra, the Black Country Mail Extra, Wolverhampton AdNews, Daventry Post and Ashby Herald, the Lincoln Chronicle, the Northallerton, Thirsk and Bedale Times, and dozens of others that have either closed or felt the swingeing impact of mergers and office cuts, are devastating for their communities. These papers have been the homes for ‘hard’ journalism – reporting of the essential court and council stories that really matter to local lives.

Los Angeles Times reporter, Joe Matthews, quoted widely on this, has made clear the dire implications for democracy of the loss of quality journalism. Matthews wrote: “Much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can’t be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom.”

Those trained ears may have left the newsroom – but are they the only ears open to the whispers of local corruption?

Active participants, not passive recipients

The problem for existing traditional newspapers is that it is not part of their business model to innovate ways for local people to engage directly with the democratic process. The newspaper model is one of a journalist doing the work – being the eyes and ears of the local community. But the online model is one of seeking out direct democratic action. Of having direct access to information, rather than waiting for someone else to report on it. To report on it yourself (not simply to have an opinion, but to fact-find, and fact-check).

Other (and often better) ways to access information within local communities, including news and issues of local democracy, already exist. It was not a local newspaper that developed www.theyworkforyou.com, which, with its team of volunteers and email alerts, is perhaps the best way to keep track on what your local MP is saying and doing.

And every day innovators are opening up access to information – just last week, MySociety launched ScenicOrNot, which took a crowd-sourced image project and put it to local democratic use.

One impact of the closure of local newspapers could be to open up the space (and revenue opportunities) for media organisations based, from the outset, on community engagement and crowd-sourced gathering / production / distribution. Where the local community are active participants in, rather than passive receivers of, the local information that matters to them.

Does that explodes the idea that a patch has no ears if it has no ‘newspaper’ journalist? People are on that patch. Innovative, passionate and entrepreneurial, and nosy. The people for whom that information matters – a geographical community who wants to hold local powers to account over planning decisions, education provision, bins and holes in roads.

Some of them will be journalists. The future of local journalism is so pressing that it’s persuaded Roy Greenslade to go back to basics and cover his neighbourhood – Kemp Town in Brighton – for the local paper, as a community reporter.

Most of his fellow community reporters won’t be trained journalists. But all of a sudden they are all in the same category: the people who want access to the information and who are willing to work for it. In this, and many other cases, such as the award-winning Teesside postcode hyper-local sites, the community reporters are producing local – quality – journalism.

Journalism need saving, not newspapers

What is important here is not the newspaper’s historical position. It is not the paper’s brand that make this local journalism worthy of the stamp ‘quality’. It is the standards of journalism itself, which can exist independent of the structures of a local paper: the fact-checking, the transparency, the reporting for the public good. And that can be done by Roy at No.53 on his own blog, or by a crowd-sourced MySociety project. (So what about the money…? There’s a post coming on that, this Friday.)

What is important is that it offers a structure to innovate and create community. Although, very little of what the community contributors produce actually gets printed on paper itself.

This new-newspaper activity must be supported. One of the worst impacts of the closure of local newspapers would be the end to this support of hyper-local communities, the empowering of engaged citizens with tools, in local democratic action. It would be a blow to the work done in encouraging journalists to see news as a conversation with readers, rather than as a one-way flow.

Where this work is developing, local newspapers should be given as much support as possible to survive. That’s because journalism is crucial to local communities. It needs saving. Whether in the form of large organised publishing groups is up for debate.

Local newspapers hold a privileged position. As the guardians of democracy and access to local information, but also as established competition to potential new initiatives, new ways of approaching democracy in local communities. If their demise is to be seen as a disaster, it will be because they found ways to make sense of journalism as a participatory process, engaging with and opening up access to information, and not a static product.

What are your thoughts on the future of local journalism?

PHP Freelancer

Dear Roy,

For someone who believes in the merits of the web conversation, your decision to leave the NUJ strikes me as strange.

You say you

“cannot, in conscience, go on supporting this crucial plank of NUJ policy when it is so obvious that online media outlets will require fewer staff. We are surely moving towards a situation in which relatively small “core” staffs will process material from freelances and/or citizen journalists, bloggers, whatever (and there are many who think this business of “processing” will itself gradually disappear too in an era of what we might call an unmediated media).” 

The thing is, I agree with what you foresee. And Jeff Jarvis has a point when he calls the forthcoming NUJ report a “whiny, territorial, ass-covering, protecting-the-priesthood, preservation-instead-of-innovation faux report“, although I’m glad he’s since calmed down.

But I’m not leaving the NUJ.

I am a member of the NUJ for two reasons:

• part insurance policy (if I ever end up fighting a big legal battle)
• and part charitable donation (because I want to support others’ legal fights; campaigns for good journalism; and good pay and conditions for journalists)

If you look at what the NUJ stands for, which part don’t you support?

• fighting for journalists,
• their pay and conditions,
• their working rights
• or their professional freedom?

Although I agree that news organisations will have smaller core staffs, I don’t agree that we will have fewer journalists. We may actually have more – but these will be dispersed across a variety of mainstream, niche, online and voluntary platforms. In that situation, who protects pay and conditions? Who protects them from abuse? And who supports them when they’re taken to court? We shouldn’t be so enamoured of independence that we overlook the potential for divide-and-rule.

I don’t agree with everything the union does, but I do agree with its broad principles. And if the NUJ is sounding protectionist or Luddite, then I’d rather engage with it – as Neil McIntosh has done with his five things the NUJ could do to get more clued-up - and join the conversation, than leave the room to those who think the web is a “problem”.

Paul Bradshaw

OnlineJournalismBlog.com

PHP Freelancer

I’ve held back from commenting on the NUJ’s initial remarks on multimedia working but a call for reaction to Donnacha DeLong’s accompanying piece on the NUJ New Media mailing list - and some of the comments in response – have finally got me typing in frustration. In particular, one person’s remark that “The biggest problem is that on the web everyone thinks they are equal (and capable)” got me spitting.

On the web everyone thinks they are equal and capable? Do they really? Most bloggers don’t see themselves as journalists (64% if you want to put a figure on it); and most appreciate the work that journalist do (which is why they link to it).

I’d argue it’s more the case that on the web everyone thinks they deserve to have a voice.

That’s the democratisation that Donnacha Delong’s piece on web 2.0 mistakenly referred to.

It doesn’t mean they want to write for a paper, any more than wanting to vote means you want to be a politician.

But if the NUJ continues to appear to be arguing that people on the web don’t deserve to be heard (and I don’t believe this was Donnacha’s argument), then it will continue to alienate potential and existing supporters. Publishing those initial remarks online would be a good start to engaging in the conversation.

The NUJ appears to be framing its debate in the same terms as employers – posing user generated content against professional journalism, as if it’s an either-or situation. It’s clear why: owners are likely to see UGC as free content, and use it as an excuse to shed jobs. What they will discover – and what the NUJ should be demonstrating – is that UGC will not always remain free, and that managing it requires staff and investment. So:

• How about an NUJ training course on community management?
• How about recognising some of the best citizen journalism (i.e. ongoing reporting that justifies a press card, not ‘witness contributions‘) with membership of the NUJ?
• How about negotiating on behalf of citizen journalists for remuneration? (meaning employers are more likely to hire their own staff)

There’s a longer term problem here too: as startups beat newspapers at their own game, journalists will be increasingly working for small companies that are not unionised. Because the NUJ’s recruitment system is based on being ‘nominated’ by an existing member, startup and non-MSM outfits are unlikely to have an NUJ member on staff to nominate you. The NUJ already have a form of this problem in the magazine sector.

Roy Greenslade is right to highlight that the issue is about journalism vs journalists (although his decision to resign strikes me as an overreaction, or at least premature). If the NUJ concentrates wholly on traditional journalists – working for traditional news organisations – the NUJ will suffer the same decline as those large news organisations. If they concentrate on quality journalism and how that is to survive, then they need to be more adaptable and inclusive.

PHP Freelancer