Abstract
It is interesting to observe the changing attitudes of the corporate media world to the Internet and digital media. In the mid-1990s, the consensus seemed to be that the Internet was a threat to people who were becoming trapped in its addictive web, and then that in contrast to newspapers, the stalwarts of Truth, the Internet is full of falsehood and lies. The trend was to contrast a conventionalised discursive style, that is, the journalism with a computer communication protocol, that is, ‘the Internet’. The high-tech world in nation states which would be incapacitated in the face of digitally networked capitalism, on one hand, and a global community of citizens, on the other, has not happened. Indeed, there are more nations than ever and more land and more people under than ever before under their sway.
Corporate media, in much of the world, responded to the emergent reality in what looks from the outside to have been a panic. A year after, News Corp announced that it would launch a ‘global online newspaper’; The Times boasted that its digital offering would be exactly the same as its paper offering.
Outside the corporate world, Indymedia launched to provide a global media hub for activists, before moving very quickly to localise. Autonomous, local Indymedias were to be the model for development – networked localism. So too a plethora of independent websites and blogs emerged, with greater or lesser focus on local, national and global issues.
Eventually and unsurprisingly, it didn’t take too long for most online ventures to nationalise, whether the almighty Google, News Corporation or Amazon. National markets, national jurisdictions and linguistic boundaries would dictate direction. Despite the technological potential, people in Bardolino had no massive hunger to know about local government meetings in eastern Kazakhstan.
In Nielsen’s collection, we see a keen focus on the often ignored local media environment. The volume is made up of nine chapters in three parts. While three parts seem somewhat arbitrary in relation to the subject matter as such, each chapter is a full account of a research project focusing on the local media ecology in a given locale or locales. Such a collection is certainly timely, not least because it neither champions the new digital environment nor derides it, but rather asks at its most general level, how digital media impact on local news ecologies.
The case studies are drawn from northern Europe and North America, often comparing responses to and development of local digital media ecologies. The methods employed to do this generate data that shine a light on relations of power in local media. This is particularly evident when considering relations between established media interests and new initiatives.
The data generated in the studies are generated through a range of methods including focus groups, interviews, circulation analyses, labour analysis and surveys of ‘the entire universe of news outlets’. Of particular interest is the use of ‘keystone media’ as an organising concept. Neilson’s contribution analyses Danish local news media through a variety of methods, but they are made sense of through the analytical framework of keystones. His findings present the slightly paradoxical situation in which local newspapers are among the least consulted news media for local issues, yet, they remain the most important provider within the media ecology of news about local politics. Although they may not have the audience they used to have, they remain key sources of information.
The implications of the concept of keystone are interesting to think through. How are we to understand its metaphorical sense? On one understanding of the concept, it is supportive of local informational environments in a positive way. However, once we consider the complexities of power, we might understand its structuring effects as potentially problematic, when we consider the overall political economy of local news media in the context not just of broader structures of ownership but also the whole constellation of relations from local government bureaucracy to international pension funds. For the main, this collection is animated by projects that attempt to do just this, albeit within delineations of the ‘local’.
Of course the question, which does keep coming back in the book, is where the boundaries might lie in researching local news ecologies. There are innumerable webs in which local news media find themselves enmeshed, but there must be delineations, and to discern them is a challenge.
Nevertheless, it is clear that there are local news ecologies, and the authors do well to discern and define them. Normative conceptions of democracy and journalism clearly guide the unfolding analysis, wherein they frame the analyses of local news media performance within the liberal paradigm of the fourth estate. Yet, with all the potential of digital media, we see throughout the volume that ‘digital media have certainly broadened the communication ecology’, but there remains a plethora of barriers to it achieving this latent potential. Among these, argue Firmstone and Coleman, are a lack of resources, lack of understanding of new forms of media and conservative preferences of audiences.
All these conspire to position traditional local publishers in the centre of local news, with hyper-local start-ups providing some expansion with the local ecology. However, this expansion is limited by a lack of demand, on one hand, and, as van Kerkhoven and Bakker show in their chapter, a lack of standards of journalism that can nurture relations of trust and engagement sufficient to challenge the traditional sources.
The question that the book keeps returning to is that of change towards something better or at least more adequate to democracy. However, the notion that ‘commercial logics remain the dominant lens though which’ journalists (in Seattle, for instance) engage their profession suggests that perhaps the information business and the normative understanding of liberal journalism are not quite in sync, or rather that they are paradigms not shared at every stage of the manufacture of news. This then leads us to ask whether our normative expectations of local news organisations are misplaced.
Indeed, there are key questions to be asked pursuant to the findings of this research. On one hand, might there be policy questions to be asked about local media? How have, for instance, the British Government’s Local Television Service recruits got on? Have these new local television services reinvigorated communities that no market-driven providers seem to be interested in? Ought there be an admission that if the market can’t provide for the needs of a democracy then other mechanisms need to be established? What does this experience tell us of the policy itself?
Indeed, while the book focuses largely on northern Europe and the United States, a broader international perspective may have drawn attention to initiatives outside the West and perhaps also outside of the liberal market paradigm. Community media policies were enacted throughout Latin America in the first decade of the 21st century, wherein ‘third sector’ providers were positively enabled in the local media ecologies in Venezuela, in Bolivia with its Ley General de Telecomunicaciones, Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación, in Uruguay, the Servicio Radiodifusión Comunitaria law, in Ecuador, Argentina and in many other places where neo-liberal hegemony is challenged.
The book closes on an encouraging chapter. Williams and his colleagues argue that hyperlocal news do indeed go some way to ‘plugging the gaps’ in news provision, as with van Kerkhoven and Bakker’s findings, in a limited sense. Where there are successful local initiatives, we must turn to longer term studies that follow their progression. Indeed, while the likes of Indymedia or helpmeinvestigate.com/, for example, have seen considerable success in some respects, the most significant problem they face is how to sustain themselves within a capitalist system. In the final analysis, market-dominated capitalism is the business model that determines the survival of a news organisation. There are many ‘hyperlocal’ magazines in wealthy localities, which succeed in large part because the local community constitutes a consumer group with significant disposable income who can buy from a plethora of local businesses. Those without resources are simply less able to sustain ongoing projects, as was the case with Indymedia and many others.
Nielsen’s volume presents scholars with an excellent basis not just to understand so many local news media projects but also for moving to consider what policy and political changes might be needed to ensure a sustainable reinvigoration of local news and perhaps local democracy. Whether these are regarded as necessary for the sustenance of the political and economic systems remains to be seen.