‘Building community news’ our new research project on supporting independent locally rooted journalism
Social Spider CIC is excited to announce the launch of a new research project exploring the community news landscape and its links with community business and social economy. This project has been commissioned by Power to Change, an independent charitable trust that supports and develops community businesses in England. The research will be conducted in partnership with the Centre for Community Journalism.
Over the past few months, the importance local news has been increasingly discussed.
It has become apparent that the corporate model of local news publishing is facing terminal decline. The industry which once extracted huge profits through its dominance of local advertising markets has failed to respond effectively to a decline in paying readership and advertisers moving online. As a result the industry is seeing rapid closures and shrinking newsrooms.
While the corporate sector is shrinking, independent community news organisations are a growing part of the solution to this problem. The Centre for Community Journalism at Cardiff University launched an Independent Community News Network in 2017. It has over 100 members who are building new models for news — both online and in print — from the ground up.
These publications are rooted in communities and are responsive to them, motivated by public service rather than profit. It is a vibrant and diverse sector that offers huge opportunities but faces major challenges.
It is also a sector which is poorly documented — there is very little information out there about the variety of different organisations, how they operate and what their needs are.
Moreover, the potential relationship between community news and organisations created to promote and fund social good has yet to be thoroughly explored. As our Community Media Roundtable on 17th January this year showed, startlingly few organisations have been successful in securing grant funding to help them develop their operations. This, coupled with an increasingly challenging commercial market, means that many vital news outlets are reliant entirely on teams of volunteers or are led single-handedly by individuals in financially precarious positions.
Given the consensus that local news should be considered a vital public service, it is worrying to see so many organisations operating on shoestring budgets with little stability or security. And without better mapping of the sector, it seems unlikely that it will get the support it needs to grow any time soon.
Therefore, the aim of our research is to understand the current landscape for independent community news in England in terms of current activity, potential for growth and the support needed for new and existing community news organisations to reach their potential.
The research will map the sector: both in terms of the extent of independent community news activity and the business models and corporate structures that organisations currently use — while considering the business challenges these organisations face.
The intention is to understand the potential for these organisations to thrive and grow, and the role of different kinds of community business models in the development of the sector.
If you are interested in being involved in the research, please contact us on anna@socialspider.com
For more information about us, our newspapers and how we operate see Start Spreading the News: The Story So Far.
