Abstract
Taking an ecological approach, this multi-authored study of local news and the local mediation of such news focuses on the city of Leeds, in West Yorkshire. Seeing such news in terms of its overall ecology means looking not only at particular sites and sources of news, but also at the dialectical relations between media exposure and interpersonal communication. Adopting a mixed-method approach, the research was centred on news production and provision in one single week. As well as exhaustively analysing news output during this period, a social survey was conducted and eight focus groups were convened in order to examine the views of local media users and audiences. All these data were supplemented by interviews with different news producers about the news they had constructed and circulated during the course of the monitoring week. These included both mainstream news producers and alternative news providers. Finally, the research focused on two particular news stories which dominated the headlines during the chosen week and illuminated the overarching research questions concerning the local media ecology in the city. This is a very welcome study, not least because local news and local news ecologies are much neglected in communications research, despite some excellent exceptions, and because empirical data on how digital and social media have affected such news ecologies is needed to offset the many unexamined claims that are made about them. The book also takes a critical view of the assumed centrality of certain news media in order to question what news is and how media constitute it and so avoid seeing news stories as a taken-for-granted, stable and already known entity. All in all, it is impressive piece of work.