Local News is Back! (Or is it?)

Is London the global capital of local media or a parochial backwater?

This piece is going to talk about a bunch of British things. I don’t want to alienate my readers in America, or elsewhere in this wonderful world we call home, so I’ll start by providing a glossary of terms.

London: the capital of the United Kingdom, located in southern England. With a population of c.9m, it is a major world city, a crucible of Western culture, and the author’s home.

Westminster: the icky, politics bit of London.

The North: a vague part of the country (no agreement on where it starts) that has become a byword essentially meaning ‘not-London’.

Bernard’s Watch: an excellent, yet creepy, dystopian children’s television show about a child called Bernard who had a watch that allowed him to freeze time, thus granting him near unlimited power for mischief and mayhem.

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Back in 2017, the New York Times reported on a new sports media start-up, The Athletic. In the interview with the founders, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, the new website’s ambition to learn from, and cannibalise, the practices of local news media were laid out starkly. “We will wait every local paper out,” Mather annonuced, proudly. “And let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing.”

Five years later, in January 2022, The Athletic was sold to a regional newspaper: The New York Times.

This was a vaguely poetic end to an unedifying saga. After all, bleeding local newspapers is nothing to be proud of. It is rather like stealing the lunch money of the kid on free school meals. Because local news has been in free-fall for decades, even whilst it has continued to serve important civic, societal and industrial purposes. For pressure and activist groups, small and independent creators, and local or regional reporting, local news has been vital. It is a place where good journalists cut their teeth – it has been the traditional first step on the ladder towards becoming a national journalist (ooh la!) – but also the petri dish in which news cultures blossom and form. So many of the big political and social stories of the past few years have started with local reporting, before national publishers and broadcasters pick up the ball and run with it.

Back in 2016/17, I was working at a weekly politics magazine here in London. There was a general consensus, among the editorial team, that though we were based in Westminster (and thus London (and thus England)), we were obligated to do a decent amount of regional coverage. It was accepted that, of the 50-odd print issues a year, 3 or 4 should, for example, be focused on Scottish politics (this was also a very interesting time in Scottish politics – the same might not be true today). And so every couple of months there’d be a cover with an illustrated saltire, some kilted politician taking a broadsword to their foes. This was a pragmatic way of being a British, rather than an English, publication.

It would’ve been considered much more unusual to do a cover story focused on London. The argument might be made that any publication fascinated by Westminster politics would, necessarily, be talking about London. But that’s not true. London is a metropolis with 32 varied boroughs, who face difficult, intransigent issues of their own. What happens in Westminster is of no more direct importance to ‘London’ than it is to ‘Scotland’. Yet even though London has a population of near 9m people, and Scotland about 5.5m (don’t get me started on the 3m people in Wales), it’s considered déclassé for UK publications to focus too much on London. The accusation of Londoncentricity has bred a different form of London exceptionalism: anti-Londonism.

But in the last year or so, we’ve seen a resurgence of London-based publications, which might ignite a new dawn for local news. This week, Press Gazette reported on the launch of a new publication, The London Daily Digital, which has hired an 18-strong team and is working out of offices on Fleet Street, the historic heart of British media. It’s being run by Azeez Anasudhin, founder of Asian Lite, which takes a focus on the Asian diaspora in the UK. In a landscape that remains inhospitable to media start-ups, this is a pretty significant undertaking, especially for a group without much of a footprint at present.

Slightly more realistic (or should that be ‘less ambitious’? I lose track…) is

London Centric

, a new Substack (hey, just like this!) from the former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson. It’s amassed an impressive 18,000 total subscribers since launch, of which ‘thousands’ are paying (that’s as precise as we can be, given Substack’s quite crude scale). At a cost of £7.95 a month or £79.50 per year (equivalent to £6.60 a month) it’s already earning Waterson & Co a minimum of £6,600 a month – more than sustainable for its current ambitions. These ambitions focus on detailed, long-form reporting, rather than chasing the news cycle: since it launched in September last year, it has published just 34 pieces. Good – maybe even great – revenue for that scale, but still, ultimately, a niche pursuit, in terms of both cut-through and audience.

There are more: Mill Media, the group led by Tab co-founder Joshi Herrmann has moved from its regional focus (starting life with its titular Manchester Mill newsletter) to cover the capital too, via The Londoner.

The Lead

, a similar business in many ways, has done the opposite, launching The Lead North. Both have understood that audiences crave specificity.

This all sounds rather parochial and I apologise for confused Americans (“what is the north? Canada??”) but it’s part of a broader trend in the news. The flow of traffic has been systematically away from regional and local news for a few simple reasons. Firstly, the total addressable market is necessarily smaller (people interested in story about the UK = 68,000,000; people interested in story about Newcastle = 300,000). Secondly, access to centralised news and entertainment has improved as linear TV has collapsed, newspaper publishing has gravitated towards major urban hubs, and the internet has created a flat immediacy to all news content. Thirdly, both the print and digital advertising markets have collapsed and this has disproportionately impacted publications with smaller audiences, and audiences that are perceived as less valuable by advertisers. Fourthly, because they have struggled for funding, local publishers have cut workforces and salaries, meaning they create less and lower quality content, thus ensuring they participate, cyclically, in their own destruction. And fifthly, and finally, the macro forces of globalisation since the Second World War have weakened geographic ties, creating a more mobile/itinerant population and fewer community investments. Thus endeth the lesson on why local news is fucked.

But in recent years, trends in news publishing have actually created an environment more hospitable to localisation. Two years ago (!) I made the video, below, after

Marie Le Conte

launched The Roost. The Roost has been and gone (flown the coop, to mix avian metaphors) and I don’t even live in that house anymore – but, the thinking remains the same.

What we are seeing is a benefit of fragmentation. The founders of The Athletic understood something quite key to the psyche of football fans. They might be broadly interested in football but they are hyper-interested in their preferred football team. I am exactly like this: I love watching Match of the Day but if I know that I will have to see video evidence of West Ham getting thumped 5-0 by Man City, I usually don’t tune in. Instead, I resort to despairing West Ham specific platforms, so that I can join a chorus of lamentations focused on the misery of West Ham rather than the glory of Man City. When I subscribed to The Athletic, I immediately selected my preference for West Ham, and the site knew that at least 50% of the content I was being sent should focus on West Ham. Within my general interest, they are catering my engagement niche.

This has long been the ethos in podcast world, too. For a decade, I’ve counselled (and been counselled) to avoid generalisation. Don’t be a politics show – be a show focused on the future of socialism. Don’t be a history show – be a 19th century women’s history deep-dive. Don’t be an entertainment show – be a Bernard’s Watch rewatch project. And so on. Find your tribe.

(This always makes me think of how, when I was about 13 years old, I started an online forum for people who were fans of West Ham United, the Artemis Fowl books and the 70s TV show M*A*S*H. I am still searching for that particular tribe.)

Almost all the emergent digital media platforms – podcasts, YouTubes, Substacks, whatever – prioritise this more siloed content. It’s easier to market, easier to discover. And most important of all, it’s much easier to extract revenue from a more targeted proposition. If I launched a brand spanking new news website, covering everything from what’s happening in Gaza to what Mikey Madison wore at the BAFTAs, I would be competing in a market with the Daily Mail, LBC and the BBC. If I launched a newsletter called ‘CATTY RED CARPET RANKINGS’ I would be a much more precise, more valuable proposition. It doesn’t mean it’d be a better publication (it sounds terrible, and soooo last season) but it would be easier, in the short term, to revenue extract.

And I do think there’s an element of short-termism here. Focusing on a more local proposition allows you to avoid competing with publications that have far greater resources, yes. Rather than fishing from a potentially infinite pool of potential readers/listeners/viewers, you know that there is a subset that you must locate. Maybe they like socialism, 19th century feminism, or Bernard’s Watch. Or maybe they, say, live in London. Knowing who your potential audience are is a key first step to finding them (not to mention how much easier it makes targeted digital advertising).

But it’s also fundamentally limited. A thousand paying subscribers in six months is a great return for a new publication with almost no overheads, but it’s also not a scaleable proposition, nor one that is likely to excite much investor interest. (For what it’s worth, I’m not suggesting any of the new publications mentioned in this piece are looking to scale or seek investment). Like so many new subscription based businesses, they feel anchored to a specific distribution mechanism, one whose terms might alter, whose directives might change. And so, it is eminently plausible that we end up with a news ecosystem where people opt-in to content that is relevant to them, rather than avoiding superfluous reportage and analysis.

The impact of that is quite significant.

Our news consumption has changed strikingly over the past few decades. In the age where newspapers were king, journalists and editors curated the importance of a story and decided how widely it was seen. Newspapers might have been on the wane for a while, but linear TV and radio had the same impact within my lifetime: a news bulletin or programme meant that passive consumers could be instructed, informed. Those two have also been seriously degraded. Now we have a much more proactive consumption pattern (even with all that idle scrolling) where people choose what to read, opt-in to the news (and views) that they want to explore. Fragmentation exacerbates this. If I decide that there’s too much waste in buying The Guardian every day, I might subscribe, instead, to a newsletter ‘The London Everyman’ (so that I don’t need to worry about what’s going on in the North, or Canada). But why stop there? ‘The London Everyman’ does a bunch of reporting about Hounslow and Barking and Bromley – all places I don’t live. So I subscribe, instead, to ‘The South London Every(other)man’. Here I read about restaurant openings that are near enough to attend, GoFundMes for the families of little old ladies lost in our pothole crisis, rankings and reviews of local secondary schools. I have found my tribe – but I have lost an awful lot of context.

It’s a balance. Local news is back, and that’s not a bad thing. But the scale is small and the forces driving it are the same ones that are imprisoning people in echo chambers of their own creation. And the fundamental reasons why local news sputtered in the first place (small market + centralisation + ad collapse + quality decline + globalisation) haven’t been solved, we’ve just found a workaround. It’s a workaround that will last until someone comes along, and, with the ruthless efficiency of a young VC-fuelled American technology founder, “bleeds” them out, all over again.

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