NEWS IN DIGITAL AGE

News in Digital Age

What is happening to local media? Contemporary changes in local media are tied in with a wider change in the way in which we live our lives, the way in which the economy works, and the way in which politics works. At least since the 1990s,
The sociologist Anthony Giddens, for example, while  underlining  the  continuing  relevance  of  locality  and community as enduring features of the modern world, also argues that many parts of social life have become ‘disembedded’, that social, economic, and political relations have been ‘lifted out’ of the local context of interaction, but also of developments where people, goods, services, and power circulate in new networks that cut across traditional distinctions between the local, the regional, the national, and the global. These changes impact local media too. Transient populations represent a different kind of audience from long-term residents, local business news is less important for people who work and shop outside the community, and the incentive to follow local

politics is reduced if power is perceived to be elsewhere. Local journalism increasingly faces the challenge not only of covering local affairs, but also of identifying in ways that resonate with their audience what is local, what makes it local, and why the local is even relevant.2 Local media themselves have changed significantly too since the 1990s. Already then, journalism scholars warned of a bleak present and worse future for local and regional media (Franklin and Murphy, 1998), noting how newspaper circulation was declining, advertising revenues were shrinking, and many local and regional media companies were responding by cutting investments in local newsrooms and often consolidating operations in regional centres, leading to media that were ‘local in name only’.  There are considerable variations in how the local and regional media have developed even within the Western world in the postwar years – some countries, like Germany, have a media market characterised by very strong local and regional newspapers and public service broadcasters with a strong regional orientation, whereas others, like the United Kingdom, have much more nationally oriented media systems,  dominated  to  a larger  extent  by  media  based  in  the  capital.  (These differences in part reflect wider structural difference between, for example, a federal political system in Germany versus a more centralised one in the United Kingdom.) But in most countries, local media markets have been highly concentrated for decades. Typically, local newspapers have enjoyed a dominant position within their circulation areas, facing only limited competition from regional and national media and in some cases from  community  media.  Structural  diversity  has  been  low  and  incumbents often highly profitable due to their near-monopoly on local advertising. T he pace of change differs from country to country, and there are important  variations,  but  the  overall direction  since  has  been  the  same. Private local and regional newspapers have lost whole categories of advertising (classifieds, much of automotive, jobs, and real estate) to online competitors and are going through a structural transformation as their  historically profitable print product  declines  in importance  and their digital operations cannot make up for the revenue lost (even in cases where they reach a considerable audience). Commercial broadcasters make limited investments in local news. Public service broadcasters are primarily regionally oriented. Forms  of  alternative, citizen,  and community  media  increase media diversity in important ways in some areas, but their resources and reach are often limited, and most localities are primarily served by market-based
public service media. People everywhere rely on wide and diverse media repertoires to be entertained and stay informed. But when it comes to local news, local newspapers have historically played a central role.
These newspapers are under tremendous pressure today. T hese  pressures  are  important  not  only  for  owners  and  employees of local newspapers, but also for the communities they cover, as a number  of  studies  have  shown  how  central  newspapers  are  to  local  media ecosystems, especially in terms of the sheer volume and variety of locally oriented news they produce.  In many countries, people more often identify television and sometimes radio as their main  source  of local news than they name newspapers. But in terms of news  production, newspapers remain central.
Their decline must raise concerns over a growing local ‘news  gap’  between  the  information  we  would  ideally  want  communities to have access to, and the information that is actually made available from independent sources of news (Currah, 2009). In areas where local newspapers are not only cutting back on coverage but closing altogether, and where broadcasters and digital media provide little substantial local coverage, we face the prospect of local ‘news deserts’ where communities are not covered at all, and have to rely on the local grapevine of interpersonal communication and information from self-interested parties (politicians, local government, businesses) to stay informed about local affairs.
The growth of digital media has been accompanied by considerable optimism that new forms of local media would thrive online, where low entry and operating costs could potentially allow lean, efficient operations to focus on local communities and cover them in depth and in detail and thus produce distinct content and carve out their own niche in an increasingly competitive media environment. The ease with which digital media could potentially allow people to collaborate and produce new forms of alternative media, citizen journalism, or community media has also given rise to hopes that non-market forms of local news provision would thrive online.   Faced with growing concern over the future of established, legacy local and regional media, this optimism has been embraced by policy-makers in several countries.

BY

KIMATI ELITRUDAH. BAPRM 42582