Local News Forum 2025: building the movement for local news

Last week, we hosted the Local News Forum 2025 at Leicester City Hall. Deputy Director Joe Mitchell recaps the two days. 

Image: Devon Winters | Amplify

Last Friday and Saturday, some 65 people from across the local news world and beyond gathered in Leicester to connect with their peers, get inspired and eat small triangular sandwiches.  

The Local News Forum 2025 was the fourth annual forum PINF has now held, and it was our biggest gathering yet. Joining in were local news providers from Devon to Suffolk, the Isle of Wight to North Yorkshire, and participants from think tanks, campaign groups, civic tech organisations, academics and funders.  

We didn’t waste any time. We leapt into the deep end, starting with a keynote on ‘Demanufacturing Consent’ from Eliot Higgins, director of Bellingcat, the open-source investigative journalism outfit. Eliot laid bare the extraordinary breadth and depth of fake news — both politically and financially motivated — and the threat posed to democratic societies. Bellingcat’s open source toolkit and its new council transcript tool should be of use to local news providers — who can help keep us all grounded in reality.  

Image: Devon Winters | Amplify

The financial sustainability of local news has been a consistent topic of conversation throughout the four years of forums. In Leicester, we were lucky to be joined by a panel made up of representatives of a philanthropic foundation, a social investment organisation and a community foundation — who tried to help paint a realistic picture of the fundraising landscape and gave some key tips for local news providers. 

And we weren’t done yet. The small issue of the future of the BBC closed out the first day. With charter renewal on the horizon, this was a useful opportunity for local providers to air their issues with the BBC, as well as to provoke ideas for win-win outcomes. We topped and tailed the first day with tours of the Leicester Gazette’s newsroom — including a sneak preview of their first-ever print edition. 

On Saturday, we broke out into around 15 different sessions — on topics as broad as choosing the correct legal framework for a local newsroom, to what’s going on with AI, to training and apprenticeships, to social impact and revenue growth.  

Interspersed among the above were lightning talks from three of the remarkable PINF x Changing Ideas Tenacious Journalist Award winners: Agatha Scaggiante from Tower Hamlets Slice on their work on synthetic opioids; Sean Morrison from The Bristol Cable on their soon-to-be-launched work on pupil exclusions — previewed here; and Sarah Hartley from the Northern Eco on their "In The Weeds" project to tell the stories of anti-glyphosate campaigners. And still we managed to squeeze in Agnes Gulyas’ lessons for local news providers from academic research and an introduction from Anu Anand’s Bath Bee — the baby of the forum at just six months old.  

Why did we do it?  

The forum is designed to share intelligence, ideas and good practice, and create connections and social capital among news providers. As most local news providers in the UK operate with very small teams — or as individuals — it’s vital to create the space for them to come together in solidarity — and to spend time in-person with folks that, in future, they can rely on for help when they need a bit of help.  

We were also keen to bring in friends of local news from beyond the immediate news providers — people who get the value of local news to communities and can help us defend and promote that value. We wanted those people to have a chance to meet with the people doing the work on the ground, as with each passing month, their work to restore and protect healthy information ecosystems becomes more vital — for almost all aspects of community life.  

The buzzing speed-networking session suggested that this approach was working. It’s hard to measure the impact of face-to-face time, but we do ask in the ubiquitous feedback form about whether participants had met anyone new — we’re still getting responses, but over three-quarters of people said they’d met at least five new people. 

Image: Devon Winters | Amplify

Teamwork makes the dream work  

We’d like to offer a big thanks to everyone who joined us in Leicester — and a special thanks to Rhys and the team at Leicester Gazette who helped us make the event happen.  

We’ve now a few other elements to work on, but we’ll start thinking about forum ’26 in the new year. We’ve already had a few pitches for locations. 

If you’d like to join us, if you’d like to suggest a location, or if you’d like to sponsor or support the forum — and support the growing movement for the regeneration of local news — get in touch!  

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