Finding the way forward for local media

Today the regional media group Johnston Press announced five of its daily newspapers will be going weekly soon as part of a move to ‘platform neutral’ publishing. This means a focus on websites and other digital output alongside a weekly print edition.

Community and trust are at the heart of local media

Local is shaping up as the big media battleground. Twitter is offering increasing localisation. Smart phone apps can tell services exactly where you are. Now Google Buzz is the latest social media player to focus on your location. According to Mashable, Buzz will be fully integrated with Google Maps so you can see the conversations going on around you. And this obviously gives an opportunity for locally targeted advertising to find you. 

Of course traditional local media companies are online delivering the news and much more in their patches. There are local bloggers and national players focusing on the same territory. And as mobile social media develop, there’s a lot more noise going on out there. Some of it will be people breaking news via their social networks. So journalists have to be part of these networks, in a transparent way, monitoring the streams, filtering what’s useful and acting on it. They should then be posting confirmed and reliable updates back to the networks.  Amidst all the rumour and gossip, which are after all the currency of informal conversation, people want a reliable source of facts. And that can still be from a news provider with a trusted reputation and a place at the heart of the community. But this principle is not new.

A few years ago I worked as a reporter on The Orcadian, the weekly newspaper for the Orkney Islands. The close-knit community had a population of about 6,000. It really was a case of everybody knew everybody. Not much happened without it quickly becoming common knowledge. But the paper had an almost 100 per cent penetration – nearly everyone read it. There was queue outside the main newsagent in Kirkwall on publication day every Thursday. People wanted to confirm from a reliable, independent and trusted source what they may have already heard. The paper added value by ordering the news and delivering the facts. It was at the heart of its community.

The media scene is now more complex, with a variety of ways to deliver news and real-time digital platforms becoming the foremost. But the guiding principles of being a trusted source at the heart of a community remain crucial to what journalists do.