Here I will briefly examine the period between 1995 onwards which has been a very turbulent era for mainstream local news production, as a result of the well documented
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crisis in legacy newspapers (Franklin, 2006; Lewis et al, 2008; Fowler, 2011; Nielsen, 2012; Ramsay & Moore, 2016; Ramsay et al, 2017; Williams, 2017). By the start of the research period, in 2015, the local news landscape had changed dramatically and this transformation is important in the light of Cohen’s findings that that subcultures emerge as a result of a crisis in the parent culture (1972: 22; 1980: 82). This section will consider the conditions that led to the emergence of a hyperlocal media subculture in the UK in response to that crisis.
A turbulent era began with what John Mair terms the ‘merger mania’ of the 1990s (2013: 26), in What do we mean by local? The rise, fall – and possible rise again – of local journalism, this was followed by the disruption of the internet to the advertising-based business model and then compounded by the 2008 recession which put advertising revenues under further strain (Fowler, 2011). But as with any crisis it is no single problem which ultimately causes catastrophe, instead it is the precise timing of a combination of factors. The effects of increasing consolidation, the internet and the recession added to other more deep-rooted problems, both longstanding and more recent, to challenge the business model of local legacy newspapers. Newspapers are a mature industry (Küng, 2008: 35) and circulations have been in decline for many
decades, as societal changes and newer technologies like TV and radio have chipped away at their previous dominant position as a news source (Howells, 2015: 23-29).
Circulations continued to decline during an era when local legacy newspapers were increasingly owned by large corporations (Williams and Franklin, 2007; Howells, 2015;
Ramsay et al, 2017) whose ‘economies of scale’ business strategies put profit above editorial quality and distanced them from the communities which they used to serve.
Although Ramsay and Moore cautioned that: ‘anxiety about the concentration of ownership in the local press is also longstanding with consolidation having persisted in fits and starts since the middle of the 20th century’ (2016: 4). Nevertheless Bob Franklin observed that early in the new millennium: ‘Local newspapers are increasingly a
business success but a journalistic failure’ (2006: 4).
Before continuing the discussion about what has caused the decline of print in local news media, it is important to stress that the platform itself is not redundant technology.
Print is a mature technology (Küng, 2008: 35) but it has evolved in response to
technological changes over the past 40 years, reducing the entry requirements in terms of both the costs and level of professionalisation. By the new millennium print had effectively become a digital product with a ‘retro look’. The photocomposition and direct
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keying software, that allowed the legacy organisations to cut printers and thus costs, had evolved into affordable desktop publishing (DTP) software. This rendered them a
discontinuous innovation which as Küng states are dangerous to established companies or ‘incumbents’ because: ‘They lowered the cost of entry to the publishing business, allowing new institutions and individuals to enter the publishing field’ (2008: 136).
Cheaply available DTP software, that did not require professional training to operate, could produce pages to the ‘camera ready’ stage and the only industrial process that remained was the physical process of putting ink on paper.
At the start of the new millennium, print was far from a redundant medium because of its ability to attract local advertising (Williams et al, 2014: 29). As Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford said free-distribution print is still: ‘a pretty effective medium’ for carrying ultra-local advertising (2014) and many hyperlocals were utilising it for revenue (Radcliffe, 2012a; Ponsford, 2013; Williams et al, 2014; Radcliffe, 2015; Ponsford, 2016). The problem was that the business models of increasingly corporate owned legacy local papers could no longer extract from the platform, the 30% profit margins of the early internet era to which they and their shareholders had become accustomed (Engel, 2009: 59; Fowler 2011; Tait, 2013: 5-17). It was their business models that no longer worked for print, not the medium itself which had been undermined; a sentiment that was echoed by Richard Sambrook when closing the C4CJ Building the future of community journalism conference (Abbott, 2017e). The most popular panel discussion at the conference was Why print is (far from) dead and two of the panellists were research participants Richard Coulter (Local Voice Network) and Richard Gurner (Caerphilly Observer) (Coulter et al, 2018). New forms of communication technology do not
extinguish old ones, rather the relative importance of the older platform changes forcing them to: ‘evolve and adapt’ (Küng, 2008: 83) and: ‘new technologies are layered on top of the old’ (Brock, 2013: 89). The evolution of the print platform and its adoption by independent hyperlocal operators is evidence of ‘retrieving and repurposing’ (Hebdige, 1979) of these technologies by a media subculture; in much the same way as punk zines used the photocopier (Worley, 2015) and alternative media utilised reprographic
technologies. As Chris Atton put it: ‘What offset litho was to the publishers of Oz and IT, the photocopier was to the punk movement of the late 1970s’ (2002: 38).
A combination of factors combined to undermine the print medium in local news production, and lead to the crisis from which a hyperlocal subculture emerged. The following section will examine those factors.
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