In 2019, When the Goal is Not to Scale outlined a strategy for resilient local, civic, and community media, advocating for a model rooted in social value, decentralisation, and civic engagement. The report argued that community media should be understood as social infrastructure, embedded in the wider social economy rather than functioning purely as a market-driven or public service alternative.
Fast-forward five years, and while the global media landscape has undergone significant upheavals—not least due to the impact of the pandemic—many of the underlying structural challenges remain. The social value of media is still a fragmented concept, and despite the emergence of self-governed, co-produced media platforms, structural support and investment remain weak and uneven.
The Pandemic’s Impact on Community Media
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the essential role of community media in providing reliable, locally relevant information and fostering social connections when other institutions were struggling to respond. However, despite the clear demonstration of community media’s importance, funding and policy changes have not followed suit. Instead, there has been a shift towards short-term funding for crisis responses, rather than sustained investment in long-term community-led media models.
While digital news platforms with self-governance and co-production principles have begun to emerge, they remain largely unsupported by long-term investment frameworks. Much of the available funding from non-state bodies is directed towards specific social causes rather than creating platforms that serve broad, diverse local populations.
The Structural Weakness of Local Media Investment
One of the critical barriers to progress is the lack of strategic investment in community media as a public good. Media initiatives often receive funding for individual projects or targeted social objectives, such as tackling misinformation or increasing political engagement among marginalised groups. While these are valuable initiatives, the broader challenge is the absence of infrastructure investment that would allow community media to flourish as a long-term civic asset.
Traditional media funding models still favour centralised, corporate-led initiatives, meaning that cooperative and participatory media projects struggle to attract long-term financial stability. Without sustained backing, many of these projects remain small-scale, experimental, and vulnerable to financial instability, limiting their ability to scale impactfully across different communities.
The Failure to Develop Advanced Media Leadership and Journalism Training
One of the most significant gaps in the UK media landscape remains the lack of advanced media and journalism courses designed to build capacity, structural leadership, and long-term sustainability in community media. The UK academic community is weak in this area, with most media education programmes structured around a skills agenda that prioritises training for transactional roles in media industries rather than fostering insight, leadership, and experience-based expertise.
Media leadership today is often seen through the lens of running and servicing a modern supermarket—highly structured, efficiency-driven, and reliant on data-driven technologies, generic marketing approaches, and standardisation. While this model might serve commercial and public service broadcasting effectively, it stifles independent innovation and disregards the pluralistic, community-rooted media models that prioritise diversity, civic engagement, and public discourse.
Just as the over-powerful supermarket sector has reshaped local economies by prioritising standardisation over local innovation, the prevailing corporate-led media approach threatens to erase independent, local, and participatory media practices in favour of a homogenised, efficiency-driven model. This approach strips away the capacity for communities to own, control, and benefit from their media ecosystems, leading to a concentration of power in the hands of a few large-scale operators.
The Preston Model and the Call for a Social Model of Media
The 2019 report advocated for a social model of media, drawing inspiration from the Preston Model, an approach to community wealth-building that ensures economic benefits are retained and reinvested locally rather than extracted by distant corporate interests. The same principle should apply to media—ensuring that media production, ownership, and revenues remain embedded in local communities, fostering civic participation, accountability, and economic sustainability.
However, media policy and investment structures continue to be designed for corporate efficiency rather than for local resilience. Without a fundamental shift towards cooperative, community-based media ownership and leadership, the capacity for local media to challenge dominant commercial and state-controlled narratives remains limited.
Recommendations for a New Model of Social Value Media
The 2019 report outlined a clear vision for sustainable community media. Five years on, these recommendations remain urgent:
- Reframe community media as social infrastructure that extends beyond news, embedding it within broader civic and cultural initiatives.
- Develop long-term funding mechanisms that prioritise infrastructure over short-term project grants, enabling sustainability and stability.
- Promote cooperative and self-governance models that strengthen local ownership, ensuring media platforms remain community-led.
- Integrate community media into local government planning through place-based devolution, linking media with local development initiatives.
- Encourage investment from non-state bodies that supports community media as a public good rather than a targeted intervention.
- Broaden the definition of media impact beyond audience size, incorporating social cohesion, civic participation, and public discourse into evaluation frameworks.
- Establish advanced media and journalism education programmes that focus on leadership, civic engagement, and innovation, rather than just industry-driven skills training.
Reframing the Debate on Community Media
The conversation around local media needs to shift. If we continue to see community media as merely a news alternative, we are missing the broader social and civic role it can play. A renewed policy focus on social value media, embedded in local governance and economic planning, backed by sustainable funding mechanisms, is essential if we are to move beyond the piecemeal, fragile approaches of the past five years.
The question is: will policymakers and funders recognise the need for structural change, or will community media remain an underfunded, underappreciated element of the UK’s media landscape?