Media Storm - The local news decline and why it matters

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! 64 years ago, national news journalist and editor Francis Williams lamented the decline of the local press in the UK. “Once the battle for freedom of news and opinion found its daily reflection in competing morning and evening newspapers with deep roots in local interests and loyalties. The position has so altered that [the public] must content themselves with what is offered to them by one evening paper only.” In 1958, Williams was outraged by the close of 225 newspapers in 40 years. Yet fast forward, and in just 10 years (2009-2019) more than 320 local titles closed.  Why is this happening? The decline is multifaceted: a huge shift to online advertising means stretched publications push to get clicks on the company website at any cost. Local news stories fade away while celebrity gossip grows. Time-poor journalists replace court reporting with write-ups of press releases, and duplicated clickbait becomes the bread and butter of ‘zombie’ papers.  Why does it matter?  Well, bad journalism is bad for democracy, bad for community – and good for disinformation. Multiple studies have concluded that people who live in areas with poor local news coverage are less likely to vote. Plus, with less information on local health or education services and a lack of understanding of your local area, communities become more insular and isolated.  To talk through all this and more are two journalists who live and love local news. Before becoming head of news at both HuffPost UK and openDemocracy, Ramzy Alwakeel edited the Islington Gazette and Hackney Gazette, and worked at the Barking & Dagenham Post and the Romford Recorder. Joshi Herrmann is the founder of Mill Media – launched during the Covid-19 lockdown as a newsletter in Manchester, the local news company has since grown across seven cities.  This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  It was edited by ⁠⁠⁠Christy Callaway-Gale⁠⁠⁠ The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@mediastormpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you in partnership with Open Britain. A grassroots campaign group making democracy work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. Hello, Matilda. Hi, Helena. How are you today on this fine sunny morning? Do you know what? I'm a bit upset because I just got this horrifying message from my friend, Maxime. Why?

He goes, OMG, do you want to hear something grim? Do you know who your dad actually looks like? context, we were having a debate about what celebrity my dad looks like the day before. And then he goes, Rupert Lowe, right? He's the leader of Restore Britain. Oh, that is upsetting. I saw that on my screen though and I was like, nah. And then he sent me a photo.

Can you see this? Oh my God. Right? Is that not a photo of your dad? No, it's Rupert Lowe. Oh my God. It's actually deeply upsetting. That's really upsetting.

And also, I recently found out as well that your uncle's name is Andrew. Tate. My uncle's name is Andrew Tate. My family is cursed. He actually like gets really pissed off about that now. Oh my God. I would as well. I have a friend called Charlie Kirk. Oh no. She messages me a lot and her name pops up on my phone, Charlie Kirk. And people are scared. Why do the far right keep coming for our names? I know. Well, it's good to get it all out in the open. Disclaimer, I'm not related to Rupert Lowe or Andrew Tate. Right, on with the show. In scores of towns and cities where once the battle for freedom of news and opinion

found its daily reflection in competing morning and evening newspapers with deep roots in local interests and loyalties. The position has so altered that in 56 of the 66 provincial cities which are capable of sustaining any sort of daily newspaper press, those who wish to read a paper concerned with the social and civic problems of their region must content themselves with what is offered to them by one evening paper only. That is a reflection on the decline of the local press in the UK from a former national news journalist and editor.

Matilda, when do you think this quote was said? Other than the fact that the language is quite flowery, It could almost be from today based on the story it's telling. Yeah, but it was actually from 1958, written by Francis Williams in his book, Dangerous Estate, The Anatomy of Newspapers. So even 64 years ago, the local press was considered to be in decline. Williams was outraged by the close of 225 newspapers in 40 years. I wonder what he would have thought about the fact that between 2009 and 2000,

2019, so just 10 years, more than 320 local titles closed. And the closure of local media is something that you have personal experience with. It absolutely is. This episode is personal, okay? I've got beef with this. Because on and off for about six years of my life, I worked for a local TV channel called London Live. It was my first full-time journalism job almost 10 years ago, and I came back occasionally over the years to be their news anchor. But when I started, my role was me and a camera being sent out across all of London to cover local stories on the ground. And when London Live shut down, it was really quite traumatic for you, I remember. Yeah, for everyone involved.

Not only did, I love the people who worked there, but the station had survived so many setbacks over the years. Redundancies, studio downgrades, staff mergers, we went through it all. I have some pretty hilarious videos of us trying to present a live news show while our studio had a huge hole in the wall. So when it finally just folded, yeah, it sucked. But the reason I have so much fondness for it is because truly, working in local news taught me everything I know as a journalist. It taught me how to find real human stories on the ground, how to speak to and engage with different communities, and how to accurately represent the voices of the people around me. So I guess the question is why?

Why did London Live close and why have so many other outlets before and after it? It's a good question. London Live went from receiving the most sought-after and lucrative licence in 2014 after a hotly contested bidding battle. But profits quickly plunged. When local TV licences were issued, there was still a lot of local advertising. So the move to online advertising is a partial but significant explanation.

I guess another explanation for the loss of local media is something that we've discussed in previous episodes, ownership. You got it. Over 80% of UK local newspapers are controlled by just six companies. The three largest local publishers each control a fifth of the local press market, which is more than the share of the smallest 50 local publishers. combined. The three largest publishers who own more than two-thirds of UK titles are NewsQuest PLC, Reach PLC and National World. And this is not just a UK problem, it's global. A 2022 report shows newspapers in the US are closing at a rate of two a week. This may seem like a weird question, but have people noticed, not just journalists or those of us who are in the industry, but the public,

who consume this news? Yeah. The thing about local journalism is that there is a demand for it and there's evidence that people value it. In general, people trust the mainstream news media far less now than they did several decades ago,

yet the same people find local news sources significantly more credible than national news sources. A 2021 survey from the Public Interest News Foundation revealed that the British public are twice as likely to trust news from an organisation that was based in the news. their area. I mean, would you? Yeah, I think the main thing is that if journalists were embedded in my community and had a real understanding of what was going on locally in my area, I would trust that

more than someone sitting in a national newsroom reading about what happened through a press release. Right. Community is a big part of why people say they like and value local news. And as we'll talk about later in this episode, there are also benefits to eradicate. Disinformation, creating a diversified news industry, and crucially benefiting democracy. With production costs increasing and businesses cutting back on advertising, can local media succeed? If this has been a problem for decades, why hasn't it been fixed? Can local news survive in a digital age? And why does it even matter?

Local journalism and regional journalism is a shell of what it once was. After 10 years, this is our final ever London Life News at Sixth show. The US has last three-fourths of its local journalists over the course of the past few decades. When crisis hits your community, you want those journalists on the ground, advocating for you with their stories. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Helena Wadia. And I'm Matilda Mallinson.

The local journalism decline and why it matters. Welcome to the Media Storm Studio. Our first guest is a journalist and author who has worked at local and national outlets. Before becoming head of news at both Huff Post, UK and Open Democracy, he edited the Islington Gazette and Hackney Gazette, worked at the Barking and Dagenham Post and the Ronford recorder, and is currently the deputy editor for news and investigations at Hyphen. Welcome to Media Storm, Ramsey Awekeel. Hello, nice to be here.

Our second guest is the founder of Mill Media, during the COVID-19 lockdown as a single subscriber-funded newsletter in Manchester. The local news company has since grown across seven cities, with stories leading to political resignations, questions in Parliament and police investigations. Before founding Mill Media, he reported for The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and like all four of us on this podcast recording today, the London Evening Standard. Welcome to Media Storm, Yoshi Herman. Thanks very much.

Do we want to do some group therapy about working at the standard before we start? We all share our favourite, our favourite Yevgeny memory. Oh my goodness me. Yeah, that would be a whole separate podcast. We could be here for a while. Right. Well, before we start, we have to examine how we got here. It's easy to blame the deterioration of local media on the pandemic.

After all, thousands of journalists were laid off. Lots of newspapers ceased physical circulation. and many advertisers pulled out of their contracts. But as we heard in the introduction, the cutting of local papers has been an issue long before the pandemic. Press Gazette pointed to 265 local newspaper closures between 2005 and 2020. A headline from 10 years ago on BBC News reads

The Death of the Local Newspaper, reporting that the government was warning that the closure of hundreds of regional papers is dangerous for democracy. Ramsey, pre-pandemic, what is to blame for the steady decline in local news? It's a few things that all kind of made each other worse. I mean, I think the number one thing is basically corporate ownership

and the running of local news on the basis that it has to deliver profit to shareholders rather than value to communities. Local news giants, like the ones that some of us used to work for, you know, the Northcliffs and the eyelifts and the Archants and NewsQuest and all the rest of it, basically went around in the 90s and naughties buying up smaller publishers, often for vast amounts of money because at this point these were very big businesses.

Not long after that, the rise of the internet started to threaten how profitable those papers were. They kind of reacted by panicking and like assets stripped them all staff cuts, quality falls, amount of coverage falls,

stuff being shared between different areas that isn't relevant to them, all of this stuff. And so of course, when the product gets crap, people who used to buy it, start finding it valuable. And so that drives sales down further and the cycle sort of continues. I think a really key thing linked to that is this sort of erosion of the link

between the paper and the community that it serves, which is something that happens partly because of that thing before where staff numbers are declining, offices move out of expensive town centre offices, which makes them less visible to the public. All of that kind of means that people who are supposed to be served by the paper see it less and less as a kind of a local shared asset that they rely on that they're proud of.

and that they want to support. And that means they're less likely to engage with it, not just by buying it, but actually by ringing up and giving it stories that other people will care about because that really, the lifeblood of any local paper is its ability to get stories from its readers, I think,

because otherwise it's just talking out people. Definitely. And something that I think really compounded all of these factors was the COVID pandemic. The pandemic led to the first of several massive layoffs at the evening standard, for example. And it affected the media industry as a whole, even as demand for vital health information spiked.

But Yoshi, why did local outlets feel the blow of the pandemic especially? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think initially they benefited from the pandemic because people really needed to know what was going on. There was a spike in traffic and there was a spike in interest. It was much more important to know local information during the pandemic than sort of any other time. Like what really mattered was like how high were the like transmission rates

in your community rather than the sort of the national ones. I think what it actually exposed in local is the lack of a strategy, a business model, to grow their revenues. So what happened to national outlets that had like a strong subscription business, like the FT or the Times, or even the Guardian with its membership model, is that during the pandemic, when people needed information way or, and they were spending way more time online, subscriptions for those outlets went up.

They picked up hundreds of thousands of new subscribers, because people really cared about what was going on. Most local outlets didn't have that. None of the major media groups who own about, you know, there are three companies that own around 85% of local newspapers in the UK. They didn't have meaningful subscription models running. So they couldn't really, like, capture the demand. Like they briefly got some page views and then the page views went away.

It exposed the fact that they had not set themselves up for a kind of reader revenue future, which has been really damaging, I think. What was it that made you think, oh, 2020, this is. is a great time to start a local journalism outlet, given this decline that you're describing in the local sector, how confident did you feel when you started the mill? Well, in a sense, it was the fact that no one else was running a proper business model that sort of motivated me to try and do it. Like when I found out that like the large media companies who own most of the local newspapers weren't running online subscriptions,

which was obviously the right business model for the future of quality journalism, that it was a business model that was working for the New York Times, the economist, the FTA, the Wall Street Journal, et cetera, it was almost like a most basis to be like, well, obviously someone should try to do that in local. Like, I can't build something as big as like the Manchester evening news, but I bet I can get a few thousand people in Manchester to pay for something that they really value. And coming back to something, you mentioned, Helena, like the fears that like hundreds of local papers would die. It's not really what's happened. What's actually happened is that hundreds of papers have turned into these kind of zombie papers that don't really have any local

news in them anymore. Like, nothing ever seems to die anymore. It's just sort of like a very, very bad version of it continues to stagger on. So I think I, you know, I think I was just sort of motivated to find out whether people would pay for local news again and, you know, and it sort of turned out they would, so we've sort of taken it from there. I think a lot of people might be aware that the news landscape has significantly shifted, but maybe unaware of quite how it's happened. And the decline is multifaceted, as we've heard from both of you. But one thing that can't be ignored is that we live in a digital world, probably for news consumers under 30, maybe even under 40, the act of buying a local paper

seems, I mean, not just like vintage, but maybe pointless to them. You know, why walk to your corner shop when you can open an app? And where the consumers went, the advertisers went too. Yoshi, why has it been so hard for the news industry to adapt to the digital world? Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't just be sort of like kind of like weird thing for a local person to do to buy a local paper. It would seem almost like Baroque. and like, I mean, they would do it as like a joke or something. They definitely would never do it seriously. A part of that, by the way, is that younger people have never consumed local news as much as they have

national news. So it tends to be the case that in your like mid to late 20s, whatever, you get more into the national news. You get into local later when you're like really rooted in a community. You might have a mortgage. You might have kids at a school or something. So that's always been the case. But you're right to light on the advertising thing. That is the fundamental problem that's happened in local journalism. So in the 19, 70s and 80s, 90s, the Manchester Evening News was an enormous business that was more profitable than The Guardian. They were part of the same company. But the Manchester's evening news used to basically subsidise the Guardian's 60s, 70s. And what happened is that the digital world meant that

people could advertise in a million other places. Like if you were selling a car, you used to do it in the paper, but now you started to do it on auto trader. If you were selling a house, you used to do it in the local paper, you started it on like right move. If you were trying to like employ people, try and post a job, you used to do it in the local paper, now you did it in Indeed or whatever. So there are just like a million examples of where you used to advertise in the local paper and now you don't anymore. And that basically meant that local papers' revenues plummeted. And that has been a total disaster for them. And that is why they've had to cut so many jobs fundamentally. I think there's actually also a relevant point about what happens to advertising,

which is picked up on what Yoshi was just talking about. As I think probably all of us know on this cool. Like, the prioritisation of page views from sort of anywhere in the world actually is very low value to advertisers, especially in local news, because one of the only, like, selling point I think that local news advertising has is that it is local. Maybe you're not going to reach 500,000 pairs of eyeballs, but actually the 2,000 pairs of eyeballs we're going to reach for your advert, for your funeral director, all of them live next door to you. When I was at the Gazette, our secret weapon, really, was our local advertising team, because everyone in Israel and everyone in Hacking knew Morey. They would ring her, you know, with moans about stuff that she would pass on to us

as stories. She would ring up and sell them an advert at the last minute because, you know, that kind of relationship, if you drove into Hackney with her, everyone knew who she was. And I think that kind of dual relationship between local people and not just the journalism department, but actually the advertising department. I think those have always been much more closely linked in local papers than their own nationals. So I think it's bad for, I think it's bad for revenue as well. Now, this brings us on to content. stretched publications push to get clicks on the company website at any cost, and that means grabbing the reader's attention. This has inevitably made local news stories with limited audience

numbers fade into the background, while clickbait celebrity gossip is pushed forwards. In late 2024, two memos sent to reach PLC reporters described page views as the best thing we've got right now, with the other setting and expectation of reporters writing at least eight articles a day. Similarly, a NewsQuest scheme launched in 2022 saw reporters on daily papers receiving bonuses if they pulled in more than 500,000 page views a month. Ramsey, what happens to reporting when large companies take over local outlets and implement this eyeballs first strategy? They always have to get worse because the stories that build, I mean, not just because those kinds of like, you know, 500,000 clicks and then an audience that never comes back, stories tend to be

quite low value, you know. I remember there was a notorious example not long after I left auction of like, I think every paper in the group ran a web story that was like, click to find out if a Greg's drive-thru is opening near you. And obviously in like all but one of the areas, it was like, no. But, you know, that kind of thing is obviously so low quality that I think it will put book readers off returning to those sites. But also the stories that build those long-term relationships, that trust between the community and the paper that we were talking about before, they take

longer to do, they take more resource. It takes time to sit in a magistrate's court all day. It takes time to do an investigation. You know, it can't take months to do an investigation. It takes a lot of experience and a long time to understand a kind of complicated, nuanced, local issue that's been rumbling on for years and that you want to be able to kind of report well, So either you end up with reporters doing these stories badly, you know, incompletely, or just not covering them at all. So yeah, I think it gets worse is the answer. And we can see this in studies that have been done about local journalism. A recent study from Simonea Bizziani analyzed 55,000 articles produced by 27 REACH PLC local newspapers in 2019, 2022 and 2025. It concludes

the newspapers in our panel are on a zombie trajectory. Yoshi, you mentioned the term zombie newspapers earlier. What do you mean by that? And what would you say was the most shocking part of this study? Yeah, the study was really, really good. And what these research has found is that effectively the newspapers are becoming less local. They've got more content that's like aggregated in from other parts of the network. So in Reach PLC, we'll have so many newspapers and then they'll have national newspapers like the mirror, the express, they'll pull in stories, they'll pull in lifestyle content. So when you open the paper, if you're in Manchester, less of it will be about Manchester. They also found that like the kind of a level of originality wasn't the same as

before as in, there'll be more stories that appear in other newspapers as well. The zombie point, I think, was they were more saying, if these trends continue, you will get to the point well, there'll be very little original reporting and very little local stuff in a newspaper, true. I mean, I think that the danger of what Matilda asked about and the danger of what you've just asked about is that you end up with local news that sort of like has the same mast head and it claims to be doing the same thing. But the reporters don't have enough time to do any original reporting and people end up just feeling like really tricked and sort of almost defrauded by local news. And therefore this local news, which used to have a really good reputation, used to be really

trusted, ends up being this thing where people are like, doesn't really do what it says on the can. And on that note, we'll take a quick break. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca.

Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian Newvia total registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair. com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Welcome back to Media Storm. Now, it's one thing, being fed, sensationalist, clickbait headlines. It's another thing altogether when we realize the damage that this does, to our society at large.

Bad journalism is bad for democracy. Multiple studies have concluded that people who live in areas with poor local news coverage are actually less likely to vote. How does this happen? When I first started at London Live, for example, there were dozens of reporters, each of us going out daily with a camera to different stories across the capital. One person could monitor the emergency services. One person could attend magistrates court.

someone would be at an inquest, someone would be at a council meeting. But by the time I left, court reporting was replaced with write-ups of press releases and generic national stories were ever so slightly adapted with sometimes a kind of shoehorned local angle. This is not because reporters stop caring about courts or emergencies or communities. It's simply because there were literally not enough of us to be on the ground. Ramsey, who benefits when the public get their information directly from government press releases or police statements, for example? Well, I mean, I think the obvious answer is the government and the police, but I actually think it's deeper and a bit more sinister than that. So when I was at the Hackney Gazette,

we did send reports to court fairly regularly, but we did also rely on police press releases for a lot of our crime reporting. I remember really clearly that a reader once said to me, why are you always putting out stories about black people being convicted of crime and your initial response to that is well we're just accurately reporting what the police are saying about who's being convicted but then you think well hang on a minute

there are obviously loads more people are being convicted than the police are telling us about so that kind of like bubbled away in my head for a couple of years and then when I was at Huff Post a few years later we did I managed to commission an investigation with a really great reporter called Sarah Turnage and we came up with this data

exercise where we got a huge amount of data from the Ministry of Justice through FOI about basically everybody who'd been convicted for particular categories of crime and sentenced to a sentence over a particular threshold within about a six-month period in London. And then we compared that with every press release that the Met Police had put out, you know, she'd been gathering every single one every day and putting into a special inbox. And we did this data crunching exercise. And basically, the conclusion was that there was a striking bias in favor of press releasing convictions or mainly sentences whether a person being sentenced was black.

So basically you're more likely to get your picture in the paper if you're black and you're convicted of crime than if you're not black. That's what we found. Obviously, that is bad in itself. When you think about the kind of, there is a centuries-long tradition of racist myth about black people being somehow more prone to criminality

and that dates all the way back to like the abolition of slavery and like Hollywood used to, you know, help manufacture this narrative and stuff. when you think about being kind of part of that without really intending to be, you know, you realize how bad it is to allow state institutions to determine what you cover. Wow, that is quite a story. Yeah, it's not surprising, but it is shocking. I didn't know that you'd actually manage to demonstrate that that was a real bias.

Something I've noticed recently is that some of these local media companies, instead of them rewriting the press releases, they now have an AI bot that rewrites them. They say editors to look over them. But if editors are looking over like a dozen stories a day, they probably don't have the subjects matter expertise all the time to really work out what the problems are. So what we are now doing is we are turning over newspapers to the hands of press offices. And by the way, these press offices now tend to outnumber the newspaper staff. So, you know, Manchester City Council will have, you know, I don't know, 10 press officers maybe. And, you know, we only have like five reporters.

So they're bigger than us. if you took the press offices of all the councils in Greater Manchester together, they would have significantly more people than the Manchester New New News has. And the police will have, you know, 25, 30 press officers. So there is now a serious imbalance between the number of people working in press offices across Greater Manchester and the number of people working in journalism.

And that means that if you don't have a rule against running press releases, you look at a lot of press releases and think, well, it's easy, it could do some traffic, you get that AI thing to rewrite it. So what people are now coming back to my point before about people almost being defrauded by local news, in another respect when people read a story, they don't really know if a journalist has properly scrutinised it. And in many cases, it seems like they haven't. So I think that's like a slightly concerning development. Another concerning development, Yoshi, is that the Londoner, which is part of Mill Media, is being sued.

Now, you've said that you want to show the lengths powerful individuals will go to when it comes to silencing. the press. So in as much detail as you're allowed to tell us, what has happened and why? Yeah, we've actually had various legal cases over the past year. The one on the Londoner that you're referring to is an Italian businessman who sued us because he didn't like a story that we wrote about him in August last year. And, you know, the story was incredibly deeply reported. It had very good evidence behind it that effectively he was, you know, ripping people off in his sort of property dealings. He was a sort of property arbitrariness. He was a sort of property arbitragee and you know he sued us it's probably cost us you know 50 grand or something to deal with

the lawsuit we actually got rid of it we got rid of his first lawsuit he sued us in the county court he actually went after our reporter our freelance reporter comack kehoe personally so he tried to sue him personally in the county court he also sued me personally in the high court and cormac and the media company and it's really only because he did it so badly that the damage was limited to like 50 grand. But, you know, realistically, what tends to happen in local is if people threaten you before a story is going to go out, you tend to not run the story on average. And then if people threaten you after the stories come out, people tend to make changes to the story, change the headline, change the stuff because they want it to go away. The reason we chose to fight it is because I think

we have to set the precedent that we will fight bogus lawsuits when we believe in a story. And we'll only ever change a story if we've actually got something wrong, which we didn't in this case. And I think once we've set that precedent, now we've won that case, I think it sends the message like, don't bring bogus lawsuits against us. But the main effect of these threatening letters from lawyers and these bogus lawsuits is that loads of stories are not getting published. There's an awful lot of intimidation of media companies going on by expensive law firms, hired by, you know, wealthy individuals or just people who want to, you know, stop a negative story from appearing. So it's a pretty big problem in the UK.

Ramsey at the Islington Gazette, you commissioned and edited and co-wrote an investigation into the handling of historic child abuse. This is another example of holding power to account through local media. Can you tell us about the story and the outcome? Yeah, sure. This was a story about Islington Council's run children's homes. So the children's homes that were run in-house by the council during the kind of about the 1970s to the sort of early 90s, maybe late 80s. possibly someone going back a little earlier. And the reporter on the story,

Emma Yule, who's fantastic investigations reporter, she and I discovered that the counsellor who had had kind of political oversight of children's services when that scandal was first broken in the early 90s. She, about a decade before that, had been actively involved in a group called Fallen Angels, which had campaigned basically for paedophiles right in the early 80s in Islington.

They'd attended, which was kind of a smoking gun in the end, attended the International Lesbian and Gay Association conference in about 1980, I think, and presented basically at that conference the case that paedophiles should be seen as part of the wider LGBT movement because it was all about the state trying to limit who people could have sex with it, which obviously is a bad, bogus argument. I think, you know, there was a lot negative response to it, but that was what they had been sort of campaigning for. So this councillor's background with this movement had not been known about at the time that 10 years later, she was in charge of children's services at Islington and going, oh, I must commission an

investigation into this shocking historic scandal. Emma found some photographic evidence of her at this conference in 1979, 80, whenever it was, and some other literature from the time, and she kind of slowly pieced together this whole sort of web of communications between the various groups. And we went to this councillor's house once it had been kind of firmed up as much as it could and presented it all to her. So she initially denied that she was there. Then she admitted it was her after a series of conversations on the phone.

Then she kind of changed her story again and said it wasn't her. And we kind of, all we could really do was print every single version of the story that she'd given us and said, well, you know, it's not for us to decide. But anyway, as a result of that, the town hall commissioned a senior barrister

to do like an independent review into our investigation, basically, which concluded that it was true. And we took, this is probably one of the proudest moments of my career, we took a group of about 25 survivors from those children's homes, who obviously went to point with adults to the town hall. Basically, these people had never faced the council directly before. And obviously, although it was a long time and the councillors now were not the same people, they had been 40 years earlier, they'd never got like an in-person apology for what happened to them before.

And they were able to stand up and say what the effect of the abuse had been on them. It was really, really powerful to witness. And I know a lot of people locally were personally affected by the day we ran that story, somebody invited the entire Gazette team out for a free dinner to say thank you for doing it. So it was like real people in the community were like, this is our story. This is really important to us. Wow. And that story really shows that good local journalism is not just essential for democracy,

but it is essential for community and the health of a community. Now that same study that we mentioned before from Simone Abiziana, it also showed the number of articles about local issues, like the one you've just talked about Ramsey, or like health and education, these have halved falling from an average of 30 articles per edition to 13. Yoshi, what impact does this have on community, on services and people's day-to-day lives?

Yeah, I mean, I suppose it means that there are just, There is less scrutiny of lots of the local things that are happening. I suspect that long term what it does is it allows for more corruption to take place, for more kind of incompetent people to be allowed to stay in jobs. I think there's a second point to be made, which is the thing you mentioned about community connection. I think that one of the biggest dangers of the collapse of local journalism is that it was a way which helped people to feel connected to the places that they live.

It's like you read about the experiences of other people in your, community who you wouldn't interact within your day-to-day life and you feel a connection to them, a certain solidarity with them. You hear about the person who's running the local school. You hear about, like, you know, regular human stories. You hear even about like the experiences of homeless people, etc. And you feel more connected to your place and you feel more connected to these people he wouldn't bump into day to day. And I think losing that might actually be as damaging in the long term is like the institutional scrutiny that we're losing. Because I think like people need to feel connected to places they live. Otherwise, you don't really feel like you're on the same team as other people

in your community. You don't really feel like you need to act for them, et cetera. And I think that's like a really big danger with the loss of local news. And massively agree with everything the officer said as well, like that sort of point about seeing your neighbours as people and understanding parts of the community where you live, who are affected by your behaviours and sort of understanding how that holds things together, I think is so important. And I think you can probably draw a line from like the collapse of that to, I mean, you know, I wouldn't want to be kind of hysterical about it. But, you know, the rise of these kind of atomized online populist movements and conspiracy theories and all of that stuff, I think, has a, you know, the decline of local press, I think, does play a part in that. Absolutely. And Bramsey, you at the Hackney Gazette commissioned and edited the Hidden Homeless Investigative series that ended up winning the Poolfoot Award and an Amnesty Media Award.

And can you tell us why that's an example of community-focused, local journalism, that perhaps wouldn't have been able to be completed at a national scale? I mean, I don't think it's that it wouldn't have been able to have been done on a national scale. I think it's just that it wasn't done because, for whatever reason, that those stories kind of weren't seen to be valuable. It started because there was a guy who died, I think, in 2016 or 17, while living in temporary accommodation in Hackney. basically if you're in urgent housing need and the council has a responsibility to find a home for you

but it doesn't physically have any way to put you then often it will house you temporarily and kind of bed and breakfasts houses that are going to be demolished but are still fit for purpose currently basically kind of squeezing people into you know wherever it can find them a roof it's often poor quality guy died there and his body wasn't found for a long time and that kind of started us off thinking about this kind of housing really, I think, for the first time. It wasn't something we knew an awful lot about. We started looking into kind of who held contracts to deliver this housing and how much it was costing the council to run it. We ran a series of stories under this banner. And, you know, what we found was spiraling waiting lists, huge amount of money being spent,

I think it was about 35 million pounds or something being spent a year to essentially, as we put it, to keep the homeless homeless, rather than spending that money on finding them actual homes, building them or procuring them or whatever. And just that, you know, that actually, these properties were supposed to be getting used for six weeks, a few months, and actually people were in them for months, years, you know, often like several years. They were raising families in these, like, really inappropriate tiny rooms where nobody could, like, there was no space for kids that learned to walk and stuff, because there was nowhere, there were no homes for these families to move into.

I think the standard of housing reporting in the UK has actually got quite a bit better in the last 10 years, notwithstanding the decline of the local press that would have been doing it at one point, because I think actually these were kind of issues that nobody was really devoting much time to understanding. There was no kind of real sense of urgency that there's a story that should be reported. And I think, as Yoshi says, actually, there was a point where it kind of came

and we thought, well, actually, hang on, the people living in this housing are the community. You know, they are our readers and our readers' neighbours. And, you know, so yeah, we found people, I think, through a combination of local contacts and appeals who were living in a combination of these whole their stories about the impact of not having a permanent home and what it meant for them and their children.

I think one of the reasons that it won an Amnesty Award was all of the people that we spoke to as a result of our intervention did get properly housed. It does humanise those kinds of stories to have them given the kind of prominence that perhaps an individual case wouldn't get in a national paper. So I think maybe that's the difference. It's clear local journalism is so important for our community and for our society. It's also really important for our industry and specifically for journalists themselves. Ramsey, you started your career in local journalism.

I feel like this used to be the way in when I was getting career advice about how to become a journalist. The generation above were, you know, go to your local paper and just get work experience there. This story is now so common with annual losses and advertising, increasing online ads, barely touching the sides. Redundancies in cutbacks mean a dwindling number of employees and a decreasingly diverse and accessible industry. local outlets could fund journalism qualifications. They allowed people from different corners of our society to access the industry. But without the outlets, the opportunities aren't there. Ramsey, how much opportunity has the lack of local outlets taken away from young journalists?

Oh, I mean, all of it, basically. I don't really have any advice to give young reporters anymore because all of the avenues that you to be open to like to my generation. I'm not that much older than these people, but you know, in the course of like 15 years, they've just basically vanished. You know, I don't think I would have had a career in journalism had I not been able to get my first local paper job because it was that, you know, that was a ladder that I was able to sit on, as you say, it put me through my senior exams, you know, I was able to work up through senior reporter, news editor, you know, editor, you know, editor, group editor, all of that stuff. And that meant that I was then able to compete

with the same, you know, I'm not some like story of rags to riches, but like, you know, I don't have family and journalism. I didn't go to private school, any of that stuff. But I mean, I was able to compete with people who could afford to do internships, people who went to private school, whose faculty parents were, you know, reporters or leapsery or whatever, for news desk jobs and national papers, you know, and when you get people who've come up through local news, who do tend to be from a wider kind of, you know, a wider pool, both economically and in terms of diversity in other regards as well. If those people make it into national leadership roles, then to some extent they are also then able to positively influence the hiring culture at those

places and also the journalism culture in terms of all stories get covered. And so I think actually with that tap switching off, it means that the kind of already really bad representation in national news just gets even worse. I think it's bad for both young reporters and also for journalism and brilliant as a whole. And looking forward, What is the solution to the local journalism desert? A government report issued in 2023 on the state of local media showed only 3% of Brits pay for online local news. Yoshi, Mill Media is often the poster child of optimism for local journalism.

Why do you think subscribers pay for Mill Media and how have you made that work? On a basic level, it's because we asked them to pay. There haven't been that many media companies and local who've said, like we're going to be redefunded. And so people are not going to pay for stuff unless you really like make them the priority and run that business model. More recently, you've got sort of reached PLC

who are trying to do subscriptions, newscasts, etc. But it's very late in the day after giving away your stuff for free for 20 years and covering it in ads and doing clickbait and writing about like the latest like Piers Morgan nonsense and doing all this AI slot to now say

can you pay us in order to get fewer ads? I think that the value proposition you have to offer people is here's a thing that's really good. It's for you. It's crafted by actual human beings. It's from people who care about the community. Will you pay for it both to get some journalism, but also to get behind it? I think that's why people pay. And I think the solution is loads more people doing that. I mean, you know, we've got, I think, 15,000 paying subscribers now, but we could easily have, like, you know, twice that number. I think that the BBC means we'll never have the same number of people paying for local news as you would have

in another country because people are already paying 160 pounds a year for the BBC. So I think a lot of people naturally feel while I'm paying my media subscription. So people are paying that. You're probably not going to get to the high rates of you get in Scandinavia or Germany or whatever paying for local news, but you could definitely like double it or treble it from where it is at the moment. And that would employ hundreds of more people in local news. I think that's the way it's got to be rebuilt rather than hoping that these large media companies, if you give them a bit more government subsidy, or if you give them a little bit more help, or you give them a big advertising campaign, that they're going to be able to sort of like turn the tide because they haven't been able to do so.

Some other solutions put forward have included expanding the BBC's local democracy reporting service under which the BBC funds journalists at other regional organisations, or asking the government's tech regulator to make sure that small publishers are fairly paid by big digital platforms. Others have spoken of VAT exemptions, innovation grants, charitable status for newsrooms who contribute to the public good. For example, in 2024, Guilford Dragon News was recognised as a charity after an 18-month process. This is really significant in the UK. This was the first local paper to have successfully fought for that designation. And charitable status can help local papers survive by lowering taxes

and enabling them to access more sources of funding. Also, if we look to the US, philanthropic subsidies are a key financial pillar for independent and local news outlets. Here in the UK, the Bristol Cable revealed much of their funding comes from two US-based organisations because of the lack of a philanthropic ecosystem for journalists in the UK. That's also a funding model that we have used here at Media Storm previously. Ramsey, what do you think other tools needed to fix this crisis? It's interesting that you've mentioned charitable status actually, because I think that can be quite a double-edged sword in terms of it doesn't necessarily limit what you can do,

but I think a lot of people would think it would, and it would potentially result in quite a lot of that they should as kind of charity commission appeals and stuff. I see what you mean because you have to jump through quite a lot of political loops to get that status. Having struggled always to source grants and funding for media storm, I think it's good that we establish a sort of culture where we understand that journalism is a charitable cause in itself because at the moment, you know, it's much easier to get that funding from the US. We don't have that culture in the UK.

But you're so right. actually registering as a charity, it does mean you have to tow the political line quite carefully, and that could be damaging to journalism in itself. It's a catch-22. It's tricky, isn't it? I mean, I think as, as you've said, and as I've said as well, I don't think you can just necessarily throw a tool of this and fix it. I think we need a complete rewiring of the way that local news is owned and funded to basically take it away from private corporate ownership and put it into the hands of the communities that it's supposed to serve, whether that's through kind of membership structures, cooperative structures, reader funding, but, you know, people need to be, I think, physically

invested in it for it to work. You can't, but basically, I think, as I said before, you can't solve the funding crisis without solving the kind of crisis of relevance and, like, the crisis of community attachment of papers in tandem. Having, like, a strong local paper is, it's not just about local people ringing up with good stories. It's about them seeing it is a thing they want to protect and fight for as a community asset, like Yostchie said about, you know, a thing that brings them all together. Because ultimately those are the people who are going to make it financially resilient, not private owners that might invest one day and then sell it the next to a venture capital firm when it stops being, you know, a kind of reliable tap for money. It needs to be

kind of, you know, a situation where the community and the paper are mutually looking out for each other and essentially have like a mandate to keep each other going, I think. Thank you so much. That brings us to the end of this episode. But before we lose you, just want to know where can people follow you and do you have anything to plug. Yoshi, let's start with you. I'm at Yoshi, J-O-S-H-I on X and I started posting quite a lot on LinkedIn as well. So I'm over there. Nothing massively to plug, but if people are interested in the journalism we're doing and they're based in London,

we've got a public issue called The London now. I'm guessing a lot of listeners were in London or our original one in Manchester is called The Mill. So I'd love you to just sign up to one of our free newsletters and just see what you make of it. And Ramsey, where can people follow you? Do you have anything to plug? Yeah, I'm on X and Blue Sky. I think it's the same handle. It's J-O-R-N-O-R-A-M-Z-Y,

have a look at like other independently owned local news brands where you live and actually, frankly, not where you live, especially if you're a media professional. They're full of great ideas. So, yeah, we need to support and value these things. Thank you for listening. Next week we're taking a quick break, but we'll be back the week after on the 20th of August with an episode fit for a heat wave

about net zero the good, the bad and the ugly. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. If you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends. And obviously, leave us a five-star rating and a review. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helena Wadia and follow the show at MediaStorm Pod.

MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Matilda Mallinson. It was edited by Christy Calloway Gale. The music is by Samfire.