Daily Junction.mobi portalOpinion · September 28, 2024 · Daily Junction Editorial Team · 6 min
As local newspapers close, whole communities lose the reporting that holds power to account and holds them together. This is the case for why local journalism matters - and why its decline should worry everyone.
National news dominates our attention - the elections, the scandals, the crises that fill the front pages and the feeds. But ask yourself a simpler question: who is watching your local council? Who sits through the planning meetings, reports from the magistrates' court down the road, or notices when the local hospital's waiting times quietly worsen? For most of the last century, the answer was the local newspaper. Increasingly, the answer is no one. That should worry us all, and not only out of nostalgia. The decline of local journalism is one of the quieter crises of our age, and this is the case for why it matters.
This is an opinion piece. It argues a point of view rather than offering neutral reporting, and you should weigh its argument as such.
Local journalism is reporting devoted to a particular place - a town, city or region - covering the institutions, decisions and daily life of that community, from the council chamber to the local courts to the high street. It is the layer of news closest to where people actually live, and historically it was sustained by hundreds of local newspapers, each keeping watch over its own patch.
It is also, increasingly, endangered. Across the country, local titles have closed, merged or shrunk to a skeleton, leaving many communities with little or no dedicated coverage. To understand what is being lost, it helps to be clear about what local journalism actually does - because much of its value is invisible until it is gone.
The first and most important role of local journalism is accountability. Local reporters scrutinise the institutions that shape everyday life but rarely make national headlines: the council deciding how your taxes are spent, the planning committee approving or rejecting developments, the magistrates' court, the local NHS trust, the schools and the police.
This is unglamorous, essential work. National media simply cannot do it - there are thousands of local councils and courts, and no national newsroom has the reach to cover them all. So when the local paper goes, scrutiny of local power does not transfer elsewhere. It largely disappears.
Power that is not watched behaves differently. A councillor, an official or a contractor who knows a reporter might be in the room makes different decisions from one who is sure no one is paying attention. The watchdog matters even when it is not barking.
The evidence bears this out. Where local news vanishes, studies have found, public accountability tends to weaken - and the cost is borne by the very residents who never knew the reporting was protecting them.
When a community loses its local coverage, researchers have a stark name for what it becomes: a news desert. It is a place where no one is consistently reporting on local affairs, where decisions are made without scrutiny and stories go untold.
The consequences are measurable and troubling. Research has linked the spread of news deserts to:
That last point connects to a deeper truth about how news is funded and why it is failing. The collapse of local advertising - explored in how newspapers make money - has hit local titles hardest of all, because they relied so heavily on the local classified and display ads that migrated online. Strip away the revenue and you strip away the reporters; strip away the reporters and you get a desert.
It would be a mistake, though, to defend local journalism only as a watchdog. It does something gentler and just as valuable: it tells a community its own story. The school fundraiser, the local sports team's cup run, the obituary of a much-loved shopkeeper, the campaign to save the library - these are the threads that knit a place together.
National news cannot supply this, because it is by definition not local. A community without its own journalism loses not just oversight but shared narrative - the sense of being a place with its own life, triumphs and concerns, rather than a postcode that occasionally appears in someone else's statistics. This connective role is part of why local reporting feels different from the national variety, even when both follow the same standards of verification and sourcing, such as a reliance on primary sources.
It is tempting to file the decline of local news under "sad but inevitable", a casualty of changing technology like the video shop or the phone box. That would be a serious mistake, because what is at stake is not a product but a function of democracy.
Local government spends vast sums and makes decisions that affect housing, schools, social care, roads and public safety. Much of how power actually operates in this country happens at the local level - the level that national media, by its nature, mostly overlooks. Bodies designed to scrutinise government, from the council chamber up to a parliamentary select committee, work best when an informed public and an active press are watching. Remove the local press, and a whole tier of public life slips out of view.
The point is that the harm of a news desert falls on everyone in it, not just those who used to read the paper. The unwatched council, the unreported court case, the development nodded through with no scrutiny - these touch the whole community, readers and non-readers alike. That is precisely why it cannot be left purely to the market to sort out.
None of this is hopeless. The model that funded local journalism has broken, but new ones are being built - subscriptions, memberships, non-profit and community-owned outlets, and philanthropic support. What they all need is for people to decide that local news is worth paying for.
For readers, the practical steps are clear:
Local journalism will survive only if enough people treat it as something worth paying for - not a free utility, but a shared good that someone has to fund. That choice is ours to make.
Local journalism is the watchdog over the institutions closest to our lives and the mirror that reflects a community back to itself. As local papers close and news deserts spread, we lose both - and with them go accountability, civic engagement and a shared sense of place, leaving a vacuum that rumour is all too happy to fill. The cause is largely the collapse of the advertising that once paid for it, but the consequences fall on everyone, not just former readers. The good news is that the decline is not inevitable. If we choose to value local journalism - and, crucially, to pay for it - we can keep the lights on in the rooms where local power is exercised. That is not nostalgia. It is self-defence for a healthy democracy.
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