Local newspapers have been in decline for years, but the decline has been massively exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.  Can a new type of hyper-local journalism be the answer for local news and local democracy? And how will it be funded?

Rachael Jolley (@londoninsider), research fellow @sheffjournalism and former Editor-in-Chief of Index on Censorship, has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic.  This one, on local journalism, is the first in the series.

Intro excerpts...

Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley. Welcome to Pod Academy and  our series of three podcasts, exploring journalism during the pandemic.

In the first of the series, we talk about local journalism. it's economics and job losses, the hurdles and the technical challenges and find out about pink slime sites.

Our, first guest is Damian Radcliffe, professor of journalism at the University of Oregon. We started off by talking about how journalists have responded to the challenges of working during the pandemic.

Damian, what do you  think have been the biggest challenges for local journalists in the US and elsewhere during this period?

Damian Radcliffe: [00:00:21] Well, I think there's been a lot of different challenges that local news outlets have faced. Some of those are sort of long-term structural issues in terms of trust. It access to, to read as an audience is advertising revenues and so forth. And then we've also seen a whole bunch of pandemic-era, issues that have suddenly emerged, such as reporting safely and from a distance, the emergence of culture wars around mask wearing, which has been very pronounced, , here in the United States and massive uncertainty about the future of the profession as [00:01:00] a result of both.

Large-scale job losses that we have seen, you know, they're not unique to local journalism. We've seen that over the course of the last 10, 15 years, but have really, really accelerated over the course of the last nine to 10 months and a real reckoning about the sort of future of local journalism against a new civil rights movement and kind of racial backdrop, which is rightly making a lot of newsrooms ask if they are still fit for purpose.

Rachael Jolley: [00:01:28] Interestingly, we have seen quite a surge in readership for some local news sites. Why does that happen do you think?

Damian Radcliffe: [00:01:36] I think the biggest reason why we've seen that surge is that there was so much, and there continues to be so much, uncertainty about the implications of the pandemic and what it means for you and your family, for your work, for your community and so forth.

And you just can't get the level of granularity that you might need to make informed decisions about your life. And what you do day to day if [00:02:00] you're accessing national news. So in that environment, local news really comes into its own in terms of being able to take that bigger picture and being able to unpack it for audiences at a local level.

So I think that's been a key reason why we've seen, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, a lot of growth of, of interest in, in local journalism, because it's answering questions that other outlets are just not answering.

Rachael Jolley: [00:02:26] You've mentioned in some of the work that you've done, that local news sites such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times have seen a spike in readership. But that's not true of the readership of some more directly partisan sites. What do you think is happening here?

Damian Radcliffe: [00:02:43] It's a great question. I think to be honest part of it, we just don't know, but I wonder if some of the reasons for that are around trust and kind of going to sort of more neutral sources and kind of more non-partisan sour...