Media Wealth Building:
The Report of the Local News Plans Project
Between September 2022 and January 2023, the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF) worked with local communities in Bangor, Bristol, Folkestone, Glasgow, Manchester and Newry, to create ‘Local News Plans’ for their areas.
We facilitated discussions between local stakeholders, including news providers, businesses, community groups, councillors and others, to find out what they think about the state of local news, what impact this is having on their communities, and what they believe is needed to build a more sustainable local news economy.
We're excited to share the full Local News Plans project report, written by Jonathan Heawood and Sameer Padania in collaboration with NewsNow, the UK's independent news discovery platform.
We found that:
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People believe that local news should be truly local. They don’t want ‘cookiecutter’ local news, but original local news that truly reflects their area.
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Despite their passion and commitment, local news providers are struggling to meet this need. Commercial providers are chasing page views, whilst independent providers are burning themselves out with long hours and low pay.
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Local stakeholders are keen to support new funding models for local news. They recognise that old revenue models have been disrupted, but they believe that, in many places, new sources of local funding can be found for local news.
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The Local News Planning process unlocks collaboration. It brings people together in a powerful spirit of creativity, agency and optimism.
These findings confirm the scale of the challenge facing local news, but they also
contain the seeds of a new approach that we call ‘media wealth building’.
Read the report to learn more.
If you'd like to organise a local news plan in your own community, get in touch with us! We are thinking about how best to expand this project and use the local news plans to make sure every community in the UK can benefit from public interest news that speaks to them, for them and with them.
