The LNP Review gives us scope to grow and improve this trailblazing partnership

The BBC has recently completed a detailed review of the Local News Partnerships (LNP). It felt a bit like a school inspection, with the director of BBC Northern Ireland Peter Johnston and his team taking a thorough look at partnership and the outcomes it delivers.

The LNP began in 2017; a joint venture between the BBC and the News Media Association (NMA), the body that represents news organisations in the UK. The central aim was to support public service journalism at a local level and in particular improve coverage of local government, which was in decline and becoming increasingly hard to resource. It’s a complicated operation that involves hundreds of individuals and nearly 1,000 newsrooms.

On the basis of the evidence gathered for this review, the LNP has delivered on its objectives. More than 900 news outlets are signed up to receive the benefits: the feed of stories from the Local Democracy Reporters (who cover the work of councils and other public bodies across the UK), the training opportunities and content from the Shared Data Unit (which won an award for editorial innovation this year) and the BBC video clips from the News Hub. The Local Democracy Reporters have filed more than 140,000 public interest stories since they started, more than 8,000 on the Covid-19 pandemic since March alone. This month we celebrated their achievements with an annual award ceremony and once again, I was deeply impressed by the standard of the submissions. The reporters, and the newsrooms which employ them, can take great pride in the difference they’re making to local news provision in the UK.

As the reviewers said, there has never been a programme like this anywhere in the world, no precedent before it started and no handbook throughout its implementation. So clearly there will lessons to learn and things that can be improved. But it is good news for us, our partners and local news in general that the benefit and positive impact of the project have been fully recognised. Our latest survey of those newsrooms - conducted last month - shows not only a continued high level of use of the content, but also rising appreciation for the quality and impact of the content which the Local Partnership distributes.

The report provides a detailed assessment of every area of the partnership and examines how well it is working. It can be read in full here.

It highlights the areas where we believe the LNP could make important improvements. In the main these are about increasing the opportunities it provides – to smaller companies looking to take part directly, to journalists seeking to enter the scheme and to do their best work, and to the wide range of media companies, big and small, print and broadcast, who make up the local news industry. They have also called out where the wider BBC can get more value from the LNP than it currently does and we expect this to continue to improve over time.