The future of local journalism: no easy answers

In 1995, when I started my career at BBC Radio Leicester, my first position was the "civics reporter". The role was to cover council meetings, court cases, employment tribunals, NHS and police authority meetings - not the most glamorous but it was important.

Each week would begin with the news editor handing over great swathes of minutes to go through. This trawl meant I knew of all the important decisions being made in Leicestershire that week.

I was a watchdog, but not the only one: the Leicester Mercury also had three reporters covering the beat at district and borough council meetings. Leicester Sound, ITV's Central East and BBC East Midlands Today would also send reporters to the big county council budget meetings. It was a core part of what the local media did: we kept the local politicians and decision-makers accountable.

I was one of the last regular civics reporters; in the late 1990s the shift was disbanded. I remember one respected Leicestershire county councillor telling me the BBC was a disgrace for abandoning local democracy. To be fair to the BBC and local radio in particular, in recent years they have gone some way to redressing this. There are now dedicated local radio political reporters, special teams have been established to analyse the impact of cuts on local authorities, and there is a real effort to engage with and support grassroots journalism. However, there is still a need for greater coverage of the local democratic process by the whole of the media.

This vacuum was in part filled by councils taking on the role of local media by putting information online. This is a source of worry for, among others, the Media Trust, which in a recent report said:

"This direct control of the local news agenda is not only undemocratic but an unsustainable and ineffective use of taxpayers' funds."

The report goes on to give a stark assessment to the state of local media:

"Job insecurity and commercial priorities place increasing limitations on journalists' ability to do the journalism most of them want to do - to question, analyse and scrutinise. What we are left with is a contradiction between the democratic potential of news media and the pressures of a recession-affected market."

A fairly pessimistic view. This, along with my own no doubt rose-tinted reminiscences of the golden age of journalism, might suggest that we are entering the dark ages.

However, a couple of developments suggest the opposite - that we are on the cusp of a new and fascinating era of local journalism: the rise of hyperlocal blogs and the proposals for local television championed by the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt.

Each faces a range of challenges before it would be able to assume the responsibilities of the previous incarnations of local media.

So, for instance, local television would initially be created on the DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) network. A working party headed by Nicholas Shott recognised the limitations in its report:

"Immediate distribution by DTT would give time to establish a brand confidence in local content, in advance of its eventual transfer to IPTV [Internet protocol TV], once it becomes the primary distribution platform. This brand, though, could only be built if there are high-quality standards underpinning the production of local TV and the content was professional, compelling, immediate and relevant."

On DTT, local TV services must stand alongside the high production values of existing broadcast television with expensively collected news and high investment in presenters. Shott's report noted that user-generated content is only occasionally useful, to support news stories and other small pieces; it is not good enough to rely on regularly.

Hyperlocal blogs, another potential saviour of local news, have no such daunting technical dilemmas, but share the business problems of local TV.

The current scene is charted on Paul Bradshaw's Online Journalism Blog. Just look at Talk About Local, Will Perrin's King's Cross Environment, Pits n Pots in Stoke on Trent, The Lichfield Blog (left), London SE1 and Saddleworth News (above). These local news sites have been around for several years; they have a strong base and are increasingly important.

Analysts often focus on the fact that these websites are not making money. Claire Enders, founder of Enders Analysis, says the lack of income for hyperlocal websites means they will be run by unpaid "activists and enthusiasts" for some time yet.

But surely this is exactly the point: these websites are a natural successor to the parish pump newsletters. They are at the heart of a local community and a genuine grassroots media. So, The Link, a bi-monthly newsletter for my village in Leicestershire, is run by volunteers and is a vital part of the community. It provides the basic requirement of local news: council decisions which effect Wymeswold, planning issues, crime, births, marriages, deaths and events, both upcoming and past. It's a great source of information and local journalism.

Whatever the challenges, hopes for local journalism look like resting on a complex mix of grassroots media, hyperlocal blogs and local TV. If, at the same time, local papers can somehow solve the business challenge of online news and the BBC and commercial broadcasters play their part, then perhaps there will be new incarnations of the civics reporter back on the beat in years to come.

This is an extract from an essay from Face the Future: Tools for the Modern Media Age, edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble, published this week by Abramis.