Shirish Kulkarni draws on community research in Wales to ask what journalism should offer people already overwhelmed by information, and how public funding might support that work.
Much of local journalism is still trying to solve a problem that no longer exists. We built our whole industry around the idea that people didn’t have enough information. Now they’re drowning in it, scrolling past news in feeds alongside cat videos and conspiracy theories, or skipping news sites entirely because an AI summary got there first. The world has changed underneath us, and we’re still answering yesterday’s question.
When communities don’t engage, the usual response is to give them more journalism, often with less money and fewer reporters. But I’ve yet to meet a single person who’s actually asking for more, cheaper content. Quite the opposite.
We’ve recently published the findings of Newyddion i Bawb, a research project in Blaenau Ffestiniog, a Welsh-speaking former slate-quarrying town in Gwynedd, as a case study, policy paper and podcast. The project was funded by the AHRC’s Creative Communities programme, with partners including S4C and the Welsh Government, alongside local community organisations, creative facilitators and user-centred designers.
It follows News for All, which took the same questions to Grangetown, a diverse inner-city neighbourhood of Cardiff. The two places could hardly be more different, but people in both told us the same thing.
Their problem is too much information, not too little. What they want is spaces to process it together, where they can work out who and what to trust and make good decisions for themselves, their families and their communities. That fits a growing body of evidence that even people in so-called news deserts don’t feel they’re missing out.
In Blaenau, the evaluation backed this up. Participants told us that having creatively facilitated spaces for collective sense-making (rather than simply more news) left them more connected to each other and more willing to take part in local civic and democratic life. One said they’d discovered “more hopelessness and hope in the community than I realised.” Another said the activities “make you feel like you have a voice or you might be able to contribute to a change.” I’d argue that’s our job.
This isn’t an argument against journalism, of course. Many PINF members already do this work: they run the public meetings, the events and the WhatsApp groups that keep a place talking to itself. It’s an argument that this work, which funders and policymakers tend to see as engagement on the side, is actually the heart of it.
What’s changed is that the pull towards this work is now inexorable. As AI makes content faster, cheaper and more plentiful, its value keeps falling. What’s left is what only people can offer each other: trust, belonging and the chance to work things out together. The uniquely human stuff - that’s where journalism has to land.
What Wales can do
Our policy paper argues that Wales has an unusual opportunity to act on this.
Broadcasting is reserved to Westminster, so Wales has no regulatory powers of its own. In July, though, the Welsh Government announced plans to set up a Shadow Broadcasting and Communications Authority. It is a “shadow” body because it would only take on formal powers if broadcasting were devolved, and that isn’t likely any time soon.
A body without regulatory powers can still do a great deal. It can set out what public interest means in a Welsh context. It can take the long-term view of journalism’s sustainability that nobody else is responsible for. It can support new approaches. And it can give Wales an evidence-based voice in the BBC Charter Renewal process, which will shape public service media well into the 2030s.
Our paper recommends that the SBA’s founding remit include a funded strand for community-led, community-centred information work. That funding should be open to communities as well as newsrooms, and it should be judged on social cohesion and democratic participation rather than on how much content gets made. If you measure output, you get output. If you want people to trust each other enough to take part in local life, you have to measure that and fund it.
Why this matters outside Wales
The SBA would be a Welsh institution, but the problem it could tackle is shared. Every part of the UK is debating how to sustain public interest news, and most of those debates still assume the product is content. Governments and funders (of all shapes) in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland all have a stake in the answer.
Because it would have no regulatory powers, a shadow body would be free to experiment and find out what works. If it were to build a serious evidence base about what communities need, the rest of the UK could learn from it.
Wales’s great cultural theorist Raymond Williams argued that communication isn’t a cultural extra laid on top of society. It is part of how a society holds itself together. In Blaenau Ffestiniog, people living in what the industry might call a news desert showed us what that looks like in practice. The question for policy, in Wales and beyond, is whether we’re prepared to build something truly fit for the future, rather than propping up models built for a world that’s already gone.
Shirish Kulkarni is a journalist, researcher and community organiser, most recently News Innovation Research Fellow at Media Cymru.
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