Part of the subculture of hyperlocal, in terms of content, was not just the ground-breaking journalism which made national headlines, but parochial or ‘banal’ stories of traffic hold-ups, bad parking, broken street-lights (Harte et al, 2019: 3) and the
population of ‘newts’ in a community (Lavelle: 2018). Jerome Turner used pet related stories to make his point about how communities engage through lost pets:
Hyperlocal media is, for many residents, key to an everyday understanding of their neighbourhood, a network of local information and events sitting outside of corporate or mainstream media that can encourage unexpected forms of civic engagement (Turner, 2015: 48)
Harte et al (2019: 142) discovered higher social media engagement, on one site in their study, for a lost dog story than local government stories. Harte described banal
journalism as: ‘News that reinforces normative values of a society through a shared everyday cultural specificity’ (2018). A hyperlocal operator’s investment in generalised parochial reporting comes under the heading of indirect reciprocity – a one to many approach where there is an element of community building resulting from recipients
Call me old fashioned because hyperlocal also means
traditional reporting. I rang up the funeral directors and said, did you have a ticket imposed upon you? “No”. Rang up Thurrock Council, did your parking attendant issue a parking ticket? “No”. So my story on the Saturday morning was, Thurrock Council traffic warden victim of hate campaign […]
Call me old fashioned, but when something happens, we like to think, we like to check the facts. (I:2 08/08/2017)
Michael Casey:
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assuming a collective entity (Lewis et al, 2014: 234). This collective identity resonates with the ‘conscience collective’ of mechanical solidarity (Durkheim, 1893/1984;
Durkheim/Giddens, 1972; Aron ,1967: 21-33; Giddens, 1978: 25; Hughes et al 2003;
Jenks, 2005: 28). Harte et al note that an example of indirect reciprocity is: ‘using a network to relay information quickly and accurately’ (2016: 5). James Hatts of London SE1 related a perfect example of this to delegates at the Building the future of
community journalism conference (2018). He described how a temporary exclusion zone was set up by emergency services in the hyperlocal area after the London Bridge terror attacks in 2017. The zone, although necessary, was very disruptive for those living and working in the area with various streets cordoned off at different times throughout the investigation. To minimise the disruption to his readers James walked the perimeter on-a-daily basis Tweeting the extent of the zone and the diversions in place; in an example of both footwork journalism and indirect reciprocity.
David Jackman invested time in the community with a physical presence and also included ‘banal’ copy in his news mix: ‘I do all the things that I think a local paper should do but they don’t anymore like your WIs and coffee morning stuff. I still go to Council meetings’ (I:1 11/04/2016). Michael Casey was rewarded for covering a local talent show, in person, with video footage that would later prove a You Tube hit. When he posted the video on You Tube it was a generalised act of reciprocity, with no guarantee of return to himself. Four years later he enjoyed a significant reward when the video turned out to include a future X Factor winner:
He said it proved why ‘the immediacy of chasing unique views’ by legacy media, rather than investing in people and content is both ‘short term’ and destructive (I:2). Harte et al (2019: 132) found that professional local newspaper journalists were regarded as
Michael Casey: I have 6,000 films on YouTube, what’s the most viewed film on YouTube? It’s a girl called Louisa Johnston who won X Factor in 2015 and it’s her when we filmed her at a talent contest in 2011. So between 2011 and 2015 that film accumulated around 800 views and suddenly she stars on X-Factor, wins X-Factor and now it’s got 433,000 views. If that was [mainstream media group], “Hi, can I go to this evening, there’s a talent contest at the local theatre with a 13-year-old singing? How many unique views in it? Well, I don’t know.
Well, don’t go then.” They would have missed The Beatles then, wouldn’t they? (I:2 08/08/2017)
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‘distant and removed from communities’; as a result local people were especially grateful when hyperlocal operators turned up at events. Both Michael and Pat Gamble spoke of being welcomed when they attended local events, because organisers so rarely saw anyone from the media. Pat said: ‘I go along to the opening of something, you expect everybody to be there and they’ve all let them down. The [legacy paper] photographer’s not turned up, BBC haven’t got time and the TV channel couldn’t make it and I end up on my own’ (I:1). Pat was continually involved in acts of offline and online reciprocal
journalism (Lewis, et al, 2014: Harte et al, 2017) by getting out and about on his patch:
A reporter from the legacy provider acknowledged the ‘trust’ that existed between Pat and his community:
This compliment by a staff reporter, indicates the sustained reciprocity that Pat had generated with his continued presence in place (Hess and Wall, 2016: 197). The reporter also understands the value of trust and appears to concede that the legacy newspaper has lost that trust. This provides an example of retrieving and repurposing, Pat has gained the trust of the local community – a socially cohesive element which appears to have been lost in the parent culture (Cohen,1972:23; 1980, 83). Others spoke of a general appreciation of the ‘ultra-local’ coverage they provide, Paul Breeden said: ‘When you start, people realise they can easily find out about particular planning issues, actually, that affect their neighbourhood, they are really, really grateful’ (I:1 12/07/2016). Covering community stories that involve a physical presence clearly involves investment of time and resources, whereas what Michael Casey described as the ‘crime and road traffic’ content, popular with mainstream local media, is easily
sourced online and rewritten. Michael felt that legacy media was fixated on bad news, he Pat Gamble: If Trent Bridge is closed because someone’s going to jump off
it, I’ll be there. I walk or I get public transport or I drive in – we share a car – and I’ll be at things. And then […] you get local people coming to you rather than the [local legacy newspaper]. (I:1 12/05/2016)
Pat Gamble: That was the [legacy paper’s] concern that [I’ve] got this massive audience, and they have put a journalist into the area a couple of years ago. But he left, and the guy said to me “I still think you’d win, even if we built an office in your street. I still think you’d probably win now because you’ve got the trust.
(I:1)
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called it: ‘The hysteria surrounding crime and road traffic at the cost of your place in the community’ (I:2). Sean Kelly agreed that in local reporting there needed to be a balance between positive community news and crime. He said that crime was: ‘Incredibly popular in terms of the readership it will get’; but warned:
Hyperlocal operators have accused legacy providers of : ‘cherry picking the news’ in favour of negative news (Harte, 2015: 160). Indeed, traditional ‘news values’ which mainstream media applies at all stages of the news selection process, privileges ‘hard news’ content (Harcup and O’Neill, 2017). Harcup and O’Neill’s taxonomy of news (ibid:
1476) which investigated the content of 711 page leads across 10 national newspaper titles stated: ‘Bad news is the big winner’ in terms of coverage. In his history of popular journalism Matthew Engle (1996) found that for many years local and regional editors had been adopting the news values of the national tabloids. Independent operators therefore appeared to be trying to redress the imbalance, by retrieving ‘old fashioned’
news values. Harte et al ‘Found a strong tendency among many community sites to want to produce news that paints their local area in a positive light’ (2019:111). The
academics discovered that hyperlocal operators were very conscious of their area’s
‘reputational geography’ (Harte et al, 2019: 124), and this was especially true with those who did not have a journalism background.
There has been support in the academic community for a rebalancing of news coverage with Dickens, Couldry and Fotopoulou urging a: ‘need for “positive news” to counter the relentless cycle of murders, wars, scandal and government wrangling which has been commonplace in Britain since the 1990s’ (2014: 104). Emphasis on positive news (Harte et al, 2019: 116-119) acts as a counter-balance to the relentlessly bad news stories which have appeared in local mainstream media over the years. There has been some acknowledgement that local mainstream outlets have been over-reliant on bad news. In 2017 Newsquest Plc/Gannett chief executive Henry Faure Walker said in interview with The Guardian (Smith, 2017) that current editorial policy was: ‘Less about shock and horror on the front page.’ He went on: ‘My sense of talking to my editors is
Sean Kelly: The danger with it is if you put too much of it out, and I think […] local papers in general have fallen into this trap, if every week you’re leading with a crime story, then people think why am I living in this crime ridden hellhole? Whereas good news stories are a bit harder. So, if you have cut your
resources back, you will tend to do more crime stories and in the short term, it doesn’t damage your readership but in the long term, I think it does. (I:2 08/08/2017)
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that there is a shift away from car crash content. People seem more receptive to a slightly gentler approach than shouty red-top journalism’(ibid). Media commentator Roy Greenslade was scathing: ‘Really? A man who runs the best part of 200 titles, including dailies, has only just stumbled across that reality […] Faure Walker’s blinding insight is anything but blinding. In fact, it was blindingly obvious long before we were able to analyse the digital data’ (Greenslade, 2017). Yet aside from promoting a positive image of the community, Turner indicates (2015: 48) that hyperlocal’s primary objective is to provide a source of reliable, local information. This fits Hess and Waller’s definition of excessively local reporting (2015: 197).
On a wider cultural level, independent hyperlocal were also serving as a record of life in their communities. Michael Casey had a degree in history, so he was particularly proud of the archive he was creating. It also made him angry when he found instances, in a corporate run local legacy organisation (Sharman, 2017), of deleted online archives: ‘the big boys are running a “scorched earth” through their archive’ (I:2), he complained:
In her doctoral study on declining news coverage of Port Talbot, Rachel Howells also warned that the “record” once kept by local newspapers was being lost to future
researchers (2015: 299). There can be no more generous example of indirect reciprocal engagement than archiving, where generalised information is gifted forward to future generations and ‘the beneficiary of an act returns the favour not to the giver, but to another member of the social network’ (Lewis et al, 2014, 234). Of course, not all legacy newspapers have followed a ‘scorched earth policy’ with regards their archives, those like the KM Group had meticulously curated archives that enhance their communities.
Tim Luckhurst accessed the KM Group archive to write about the abdication of Edward VIII (2013; 39-47). Archives are culturally important, which is why in 2010 KM Group secured a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to digitise newspapers dating back 150
Michael Casey: Because my degree’s in history, and in my heart that’s where I am, I’d like to think that if I stopped those sites tomorrow, somebody would have a fair idea what life was like in
Thurrock between September 1st 2008 and August 8th 2017 and in Harlow July 1st 2013, etc. And that is the
responsibility… you set up a newspaper, that is one of your responsibilities… and if you don’t do that, then you’re
reneging on one of your key responsibilities and if you’re like them, where you’re wiping the archive online […] So you’re trying to click onto a story from 2009, and we’re not talking about 1879, we’re talking about 2009… [they’ve] just deleted it. (I:2 08/08/2017)
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years; providing 26,000 pages of Kent history (Luft, 2010). Nevertheless, Michael Casey’s argument provides another subcultural example of hyperlocal operators adopting aspects of the ‘parent culture’. Arguably, where local newspapers have been
‘hollowed out’ by centralisation, legacy media archives may not provide a complete picture even where they exist. It will therefore fall to hyperlocal provisions to supplement the record of early 21st century life in ultra local communities. A situation which The British Library had acknowledged stating on its website: ‘We have a special interest in archiving 'hyperlocal' news sites produced by local communities across the UK’ (British Library, 2018).