The government’s new Local Media Strategy is welcome. After years of drift, DCMS has finally acknowledged that local news and community radio are not optional extras in public life. They are part of the civic information infrastructure on which trust, accountability, belonging and democratic participation depend. The announcement brings a new Local News Fund worth up to £12 million over two years, a doubling of community radio funding to £1 million a year over the next three years, and a stated intention to address “news deserts” where communities no longer have a dedicated local outlet.
That shift matters. It matters because the decline of local journalism has not just been a media market story. It has been a story about weakened scrutiny, diminished civic participation, poorer visibility of local institutions, and the erosion of the everyday channels through which communities recognise themselves.
Parliament’s own Culture, Media and Sport Committee has already warned that the decline of local journalism reduces scrutiny of local government and public services, weakens participation in civic life, and hits deprived communities hardest. Ofcom has similarly argued that trusted local news supports democracy, helps hold power to account, and acts as a bulwark against misinformation and disinformation while helping to build a shared sense of identity.
So the direction of travel is right. The problem is that the policy still appears to be framed through the assumptions of the old media settlement. It offers support, but it does so through a centrally managed competitive process. It speaks the language of innovation, but the early public endorsement has come from the Society of Editors and the News Media Association, two bodies rooted in the established news industry.
That does not invalidate the policy, but it does expose its limits. DCMS has kept these negotiations within a relatively small circle of well established news providers, and wider stakeholder engagement appears to have been limited.
That matters because the UK already knows what happens when support mechanisms are built around incumbent capacity. The DCMS Committee found that government and industry support for local journalism has tended to benefit larger corporate publishers disproportionately, often at the expense of new titles and smaller operators. It went further, warning that the largest publishers take a disproportionate share of available support, which may be stifling the innovation the sector badly needs.
The risk is obvious. Public money intended to renew local media can easily become a stabilisation fund for incumbent operators, especially where those operators already possess the staff, legal capacity, bidding experience and political access needed to win centrally administered competitions.
From the perspective of Decentered Media and Better Media, that is not a minor technical issue. It goes to the heart of what kind of media system is now being built.
Foundational media principles start from a different premise. They assume that communication is part of the social and civic foundations of everyday life, not simply a market product to be optimised through scale. They ask whether media systems strengthen trust, belonging, participation, self-determination, local identity and sustainable forms of community capacity.
Those principles are embedded in Decentered Media’s long-standing social value model, which places trust and belonging at the centre of media development, and links decentralisation, participation, needs and self-determination to community development practices that are self-determined, local, sustainable and empowering.
Viewed through that lens, the government’s package is only a partial response. It recognises the symptoms of decline, but it does not yet show that it has fully grasped the institutional redesign that is needed. A foundational media approach would ask not only how existing publishers can survive, but how civic information systems can be rebuilt as mixed, plural and locally accountable ecologies.
It would ask how communities, public service bodies, cultural organisations, social enterprises, co-operatives, community benefit societies, charitable publishers and independent start-ups can all play a role in creating trusted local information networks. It would ask how value is distributed, not hoarded. It would ask how entry barriers are lowered, not merely how incumbent decline is slowed.
This is where the government’s own wider policy language begins to look inconsistent. DCMS now promotes the Civil Society Covenant as a new principles-based foundation for resetting the relationship between government and civil society. It describes civil society as a trusted and independent partner, and points to broad engagement with more than 1,200 organisations in developing that framework.
Yet, that same civic society compact approach does not appear to have shaped the Local Media Strategy in any comparable way. Why has the rebuilding of trust in media not been treated as a core civic society partnership question? Why has local media renewal not been co-produced in the same way as other social and democratic challenges?
The omission is serious because the renewal of local news is likely to fail if it is treated as a closed conversation between government, regulators and legacy operators. Local media is not sustained by publishers alone. It depends on a wider civic ecosystem.
Local authorities, NHS bodies, universities, colleges, voluntary organisations, cultural institutions, anchor organisations, neighbourhood forums, community broadcasters, independent producers and local businesses all have a direct stake in renewing trusted and accountable local information systems.
The government itself has now recognised this logic in its pilot Regional Media Forum in the West of England, which is intended to improve relationships between journalists and local councils, emergency services, health services and the courts. That is a useful step. But why is this still a pilot, and why is it framed as an administrative improvement rather than as the beginning of a wider civic co-production model?
The deeper question is where the innovators and new entrants are now supposed to come from. The strategy says that some funding could support the creation of brand new, independent, community-owned titles in news desert areas. That is welcome. But new entrants rarely emerge from nowhere. They emerge from local support networks, access to civic partners, collaborative development environments, fair procurement, shared tools, modest risk capital, and governance models that recognise public purpose rather than extractive return.
Decentered Media’s work has argued for years that resilient civic and community media require decentralised decision-making, pluralistic ownership, collaborative incubation, community shares, co-operative models and locally led development rather than one-size-fits-all responses delivered from the centre.
This is why the strategy’s current emphasis on central allocation and bureaucratic approval should be treated with caution. Officials who distribute scarce funds quickly become powerful gatekeepers. Their choices shape who is legible, who counts as credible, and who can enter the market. That tends to privilege those who already know how to speak the language of officialdom. It also encourages conformity. If local renewal depends on meeting central criteria, there is a danger that independent, place-based and experimental solutions will be filtered out before they have a chance to prove their value.
That would be a mistake. Local civic media infrastructure will not be rebuilt by subsidy alone. It will be rebuilt by creating the conditions in which many different local forms can emerge, combine and endure. Some places may need community-owned digital titles. Some may need mixed radio and online services. Some may need co-operative newsroom models tied to local cultural institutions. Some may need public interest publishing attached to neighbourhood development, youth work, adult learning or local economic regeneration.
The point is not to impose a uniform answer. The point is to make room for local solutions that are independent, accountable and rooted in the places they serve.
So what can be done locally, even if national policy remains cautious? Local authorities and combined authorities can review how they place advertising, notices and public information so that independent local outlets are not locked out. Public service institutions can treat local media as part of civic infrastructure rather than as an optional communications add-on.
Universities and colleges can support training, incubation and research partnerships. Local philanthropic and social investors can explore community shares, co-operative development and mission-led finance. Cultural and voluntary organisations can become partners in a broader ecology of public interest information. None of this requires waiting for permission from London. It requires local leadership, local imagination and local confidence.
The government deserves credit for moving the issue back onto the national agenda. But if this is where the story ends, the opportunity will be wasted. A healthy local media future will not be secured by protecting incumbents and hoping that a little digital modernisation solves a deeper civic problem. It will be secured by thinking beyond incumbency, beyond central gatekeeping, and beyond the assumption that the future must resemble the past.
If the UK is serious about rebuilding trust, social cohesion, cultural engagement and economic redevelopment, then it needs a decentralised and distributed media policy equal to that task.
That means asking a harder set of questions. Why has the government not applied its own civic society compact logic to the rebuilding of local media trust? Where are the innovators and new entrants who will build the civic media infrastructure of the future? And what would happen if local places were trusted to develop independent solutions of their own?
Endnotes
[1] DCMS, Future of News Is Local, Says Culture Secretary, as She Launches the First Action Plan to Back Local News in a Generation.
[2] House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Sustainability of Local Journalism.
[3] Ofcom, Review of Local Media in the UK.
[4] DCMS, Civil Society Covenant: Programme.
[5] Decentered Media, Social Value Communication Model, identifying trust, belonging, decentralisation, participation, needs, self-determination and empowering community development as core principles.
[6] Rob Watson, When the Goal Is Not to Scale, arguing for decentralised decision-making, pluralistic ownership, collaborative incubation and community-led models rather than one-size-fits-all centralised systems.