How Local Newspapers Have Caused Deep Divisions In Society
Community reporting has created a mindset of us v them
I care just as much about a big news story in Australia as one in my own street in the UK.
I said that once to my local newspaper editor, just after he’d taken over in the role. He seemed baffled and bemused.
But should something matter more just because it’s on your doorstep?
All news is local of course — local to someone. I worked on ‘local’ newspapers — those informing people about what was happening in their communities — for many years.
I was never interested in the obsession with all things local. I was in journalism to inform, educate and hopefully entertain. Those three things still drive me as a writer.
Look close to home for signs of division
Let me state before any further explanation that I love living in Cumbria, on the edge of the stunning English Lake District. I am extremely interested in what goes on in my home region, and I am always here for clients who are based in Cumbria and want to put their message out to Cumbrian people.
But I don’t think it’s healthy to have a totally inward-looking viewpoint — and that’s where I believe local newspapers should share the blame for some of the evils in society.
It depends on how you look at things, I suppose. I see every single person on this planet as an equal citizen of Earth. Sadly, equality doesn’t exist in many ways but I see everyone in the same light, whatever their nationality.
That’s why I decided to offer my PR services on global platform Fiverr. In the first week alone, I helped people in Australia, Latvia, Italy and Portugal.
I also received some strange requests and there were a number of time-wasters, so now here I am on Medium, but again, talking to the world.
Often my home region reaches the rest of the planet. I’ve recently been helping football club Workington AFC raise thousands of pounds to survive post-Covid, and got the message out — and donations in — from South Korea to British Columbia.
I’ve worked in the past with WHIS — the World Health Innovation Summit — a perfect example of a Cumbrian enterprise serving the globe.
People who operate daily in foreign markets will think nothing of this, but in my game, the emphasis can often be on ‘local’, to the detriment of anywhere outside this bubble.
Hyperlocal — not so much the saviour of journalism
Many of the thousands of journalists who have lost their jobs through the industry’s decline have sought to make a living setting up newspapers or newsletters that not only go local, they go ‘hyperlocal’.
I hate hyperlocal with a passion! I never understood the attraction. But it was touted as the saviour of journalism, and so most media outlets jumped on the bandwagon.
Hyperlocal is exactly as it suggests — digging down further than a region, town or village — it could be centred on just a few streets — one street even!
People are delivered news from that area, advertisers are encouraged to sell to people living in that tiny area.
An inward-looking focus on what’s on your own doorstep, sold to you as ‘this is what you need to know.’
This is an inverted extension of the newspaper circulation area model. You don’t report anything outside your patch. Which means people living on the edge of your distribution area might receive news from a village 40 miles to the east — but not 40 metres to the west.
No fluidity, no recognition of what and where people care about.
The advent of the internet could have cured all that.
I remember attending a management conference when newspapers were finally trying to get to grips with the internet (they were very slow to do this, many argue they have still not achieved it).
I remember suggesting that this was finally the chance to move into a more lucrative neighbouring patch without requiring the usual resources of a newspaper launch — just cover the area online instead.
But again I was given that look of bafflement. The big boys in media were always followed, and hyperlocal had started to catch on. So all talk was about setting up individual pages for micro areas. On something called the WORLD WIDE Web. Incredibly blinkered.
Community is important — but there could be a cost
Focusing on community life is hardly evil though, is it? No, of course not, it is vital that we all look out for each other — but hear me out.
One disease ripping through societies is the attitude of ‘us v them’. Whether it’s migrants fleeing war zones, black v white or Brexit (and I’m not offering any political view on the latter), there is a tribalism in the world today that I believe was aided and abetted by local newspapers.
People are swayed by what they read in the media. If the focus is on local news, that’s fine — it’s when there is a conscious disregard of bigger things happening nearby that I have a problem.
I remember some years ago, a particularly distressing murder was reported by the newspaper I was working for. It demanded three pages of coverage.
Thirty miles away, a sister newspaper, owned by the same company, in the same county, afforded the story just one paragraph on page five. The reason? It wasn’t local enough. So not important in their eyes.
Many people have only ever bought one newspaper — often a local paper, and they’d get their national news from the TV, and more recently the internet.
Local papers effectively tell their readers which stories are important. But they won’t ever be stories outside the often randomly drawn up boundaries of their sales area.
Shop local, but keep your eyes on the horizon
Buying local, protecting local, speaking up for local, are all extremely important missions — but they should never be at the detriment of looking outwards and seeking to co-operate.
Perhaps it’s because I’m originally from Liverpool, where the Liver Birds stand proudly back to back, one looking out to sea, the other keeping watch over the city.
I often wonder why business network groups are defined by town, city or county boundaries. Why shouldn’t they accept a business situated three miles over the border?
I hate boundaries! They are man-made political lines not visible from space. Aliens have no idea of the trouble we’ve caused. It’s one reason why I named this publication ‘No Borders’.
It’s horses for courses.. of course. Many businesses will see value in promoting only to local people.
Our views on what should be important to us have been skewed by boundaries of all sorts over the years, I know that. Doesn’t mean I like it.
Should boundaries matter when it comes to reporting news? Are you even interested in what’s happening in the next county, country or continent?
And if not, why not?!
