UK FOCUS
nce you lose your local news, you lose the ability to trust.” So
observed Yale historian and best-selling writer Timothy Snyder in a recent panel discussion on the crisis of modern democracy. One of the great victims of the 2008 global financial crash was news. At the time, the major banks, considered ‘too big to fail’, were bailed out at public expense, but the Fifth Estate was generally let go. Local news sources, already in trouble, were hit especially hard. Business Insider reported that in 2009 over 105 US newspapers closed, with 10,000 jobs lost. And in the UK, according to Press Gazette , 242 newspapers closed between 2005 and 2011 (alongside 70 new launches). Technology cheerleaders said the Internet would take up the slack. Social media would replace investigative reporting. Why send a journalist to report on an event when you can collate multiple angles in real time from user-generated content already at the scene? When everyone has a blog or a vlog, isn’t it pointless to commission regular takes from dedicated experts? Shouldn’t newspapers and broadcasters become aggregators of content, rather than wasting money and resources trying to chase down all of those stories themselves? The big search engines and social media platforms – Google, Facebook, Twitter – began to fill the gap, but they didn’t produce their own news. They acted as a routing system for information created by the remaining few news sources. The digital platforms pushed traffic back to news outlets, and these outlets became increasingly dependent on how these platforms ranked stories in their feeds. New stories were tweaked based on best guesses about the platforms’ most recent algorithmic preferences. News services also began to directly publish pages on social media platforms, forgoing the need to link back to their own sites. Greater integration with these social media platforms allowed news sources to reach bigger audiences, but didn’t solve the problem of failing subscriptions and lost advertising revenue. Local news was hit hardest by this downward spiral – letting go of staff and resources, producing ever- shallower coverage, which accelerated the haemorrhaging of readers and, consequently, the confidence of advertisers. The local reporter – the person who asked obnoxious questions at city council meetings – became an almost extinct species. News became something called
‘the media’, transmitted to you from someplace far away by people who never had, and never would, set foot in your town. This information vacuum produced, at one end, an appetite for conspiracy theories and misinformation, generated by a variety of global sources and amplified by social media algorithms. At the other end, it created a blanket mistrust (or at least disinterest) in ‘trusted news sources’. And so here we are. FACTS BEGIN AT HOME In November of last year, Facebook announced a new initiative: the Community News Project. At the centre of the new programme, being trialled in the UK, is a £4.5 million fund designed to support local journalism. The grant will enable Britain’s NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) to oversee the aggressive recruitment of around 80 trainee journalists. The journalists will receive particular
training on new online and social media technologies, including social media monitoring software like CrowdTangle, which was acquired by Facebook in 2016. Facebook’s Community News Project isn’t the first, or largest, attempt to rescue local journalism in the UK. In 2017, the BBC launched its Local Democracy Reporting Service. The initiative allots £8 million per year, paid out of the BBC licence fee, with the aim of funding 150 Local Democracy Reporters throughout the UK and across all types of media. A Local Democracy Reporter’s main responsibility is to cover topics of local and community concern, particularly local government. Nick Wrenn, Facebook’s head of news partnerships EMEA, explains the project: “Its goal is to enable people in under- served communities to get more authentic, reliable news and information from the communities which they live in, and also to enable publishers to get more news from those regions. It’s a two-year pilot scheme.
THERE HAS TO BE REALLY ROBUST, PROPER TRAINING, TOMAKE SURE THAT THESE POSITIONS CAN GROW WITHIN THE NEWSROOMS
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