Media Reform as Civic Renewal

UK media reform is being shaped by Ofcom’s Review of Broadcast Regulation and the BBC Charter Renewal process. This blog frames reform as civic renewal, treating community media as essential civic infrastructure. It draws on participatory practice, cultural democracy, and ecological cultural vitality to question attendance-led metrics, address statistical invisibility, and propose proportionate evidence that avoids surveillance while building local capability and trust.

Media reform is often approached as a question of institutional design. It becomes a debate about funding models, regulatory categories, governance structures, and the terms on which large organisations compete and collaborate. Those questions are real. They are also incomplete if they are detached from the everyday civic conditions that make media trustworthy, usable, and participatory.

Two active policy processes bring this into sharp focus. Ofcom’s call for input on its Review of Broadcast Regulation asks what regulation should look like in a digital environment, including where legacy rules may now be outdated or misaligned with how people find and use content.¹ The Government’s BBC Charter Review Green Paper invites views on the BBC’s future purpose, accountability, governance, and funding, and it sets out a public consultation timetable running from 16 December 2025 to 10 March 2026.²

It is easy for these processes to pull attention upwards. They draw us towards questions that sit at the national level. They encourage a focus on institutional settlement. They can also unintentionally narrow the reform conversation to what can be changed from the centre. The risk is that civic participation becomes a downstream concern. It becomes something that may follow if the right institutional levers are pulled.

A foundational, civic, practical, and non-ideological view takes a different starting point. It starts with function. It asks what media must enable in civic life, especially in local settings where people’s relationships, identities, and conflicts are lived rather than abstracted. It then asks what capabilities, norms, and infrastructures are needed to sustain those functions over time.

What the live policy context is already telling us

Ofcom’s recent public service media work argues that trusted and accurate news and content that reflects the nations and regions is significant for democratic life, and that distribution shifts are changing whether people can find such content easily.³ That framing is not a technical aside. It is a civic statement. It implies that discoverability, trust, and participation are not merely audience preferences. They are conditions for democratic functioning.

Charter renewal raises comparable issues in a different register. When the Green Paper asks about the BBC’s future role, accountability, and legitimacy, it is also asking what kinds of civic goods the BBC should secure, and how those goods should be protected in a fragmented information environment.² The Charter question is not only “what should the BBC be”. It is also “what should civic life be able to rely on”.

This is where a bottom-up perspective becomes more than an ethical preference. It becomes a practical policy necessity. If public service goals rely on trust and shared meaning, then reforms that address only institutions and not civic capacity will underperform. They may improve compliance. They may improve market clarity. They may still fail to strengthen democratic participation in everyday life.

Why community media should be treated as civic infrastructure

Community media is often treated as discretionary cultural provision. It is funded as a “project”. It is evaluated through outputs. It is expected to be grateful for short-term support. This positioning makes it structurally vulnerable. It also misdescribes what community media does when it is at its best.

Community media functions as civic infrastructure. It provides spaces and routines for local sense-making. It helps people find reliable local information. Community media makes room for plural perspectives. Community media supports the slow work of building civic trust through repeated interaction. Community media can also help people develop communicative competence, including the practical skills of listening, contributing, moderating, and disagreeing without civic breakdown.

The British Academy’s work on social and cultural infrastructure provides a useful policy parallel. This framework treats social and cultural assets as part of the fabric that holds places together, and it asks how such infrastructure can be understood and measured in ways that reflect lived realities rather than convenient proxies.⁴ If we accept that framing, then the question becomes direct. Why would we treat local civic communication as optional, when so many other policy areas treat local infrastructure as essential?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a question about the state’s theory of local democracy. If local democratic participation is a public good, then the communicative infrastructures that make it possible should not be structurally precarious.

What participatory and community arts can teach media reform

Participatory and community arts have long worked in the overlap between culture and democracy. François Matarasso’s framework is relevant because it insists that participatory practice is both artistic and democratic, and that it is shaped by intention, ethics, consent, power, and commitments aligned with cultural democracy.⁵ This matters for media reform because the same questions apply to participatory media, but they are often treated as secondary.

If participation is treated as a democratic practice, then reform needs to ask questions that go beyond reach and volume. What is the intention of participation in media? Is it to extract stories? Is it to recruit volunteers? Is it to deliver institutional messages more cheaply? Or is it to build civic capacity and shared meaning through practice?

Ethics also becomes a structural question, not an optional layer. How are risks handled when people speak publicly? How is consent maintained over time, especially when content persists and circulates in ways participants cannot fully predict? What happens when someone’s circumstances change and public participation becomes costly or unsafe?

Power is the unavoidable centre. Who chooses the agenda? Who has editorial control? Who decides what is published? Who moderates conflict? Who controls budgets and infrastructure? In participatory settings, these questions cannot be left implicit. If they are left implicit, inequality fills the space.

For reformers who want a non-ideological orientation, this is a strength rather than a problem. It shifts attention away from slogans and towards observable practice. It asks what people actually do. It asks how meaning is negotiated. It asks whether participation increases capability and agency in real situations.

The ecological view and the problem of statistical invisibility

One reason civic participation is often sidelined in media reform is that it is difficult to measure well. Much participation is informal. It is relational. It happens in ordinary settings. It is not captured by ticketing systems or broadcast logs. It often does not show up in standard surveys.

The Centre for Cultural Value and The Audience Agency have responded to a similar challenge through an ecological perspective on cultural vitality, aiming to capture how culture is created and sustained in everyday community life, including outside formal institutions.⁶ The policy lesson is relevant to community media. If we only count attendance and outputs, we will miss much of what sustains civic life. We will also distort what we fund because measurement regimes shape practice.

Community media is particularly exposed to “statistical invisibility”. Listening can be participatory when it supports orientation, companionship, and shared interpretation. Hosting can be participatory when it builds a safe space for others to speak. Facilitation can be participatory when it reduces barriers and supports fair turn-taking. Governance can be participatory when it teaches accountability and collective decision-making. These forms of participation often produce little that is easily counted. They can still be the core civic value of the work.

This creates a hard question for reform. How can policy recognise everyday civic participation without forcing it into metrics that miss the point, or into data collection that introduces risk and burden.

Evidence is necessary, and it must not become surveillance

Evidence is necessary because civic infrastructure that cannot be described and defended will be treated as discretionary and will be cut first, but evidence must be balanced so that it does not turn participation into surveillance or a participation tax.

• A practical approach combines proportionate quantitative indicators with qualitative narratives and lived experience. The quantitative side should be small, stable, and ethically defensible. It should prioritise patterns over individuals. It should use what practice already generates where possible. It should avoid collecting personal data that is not necessary for purpose.
• The qualitative side should be systematic rather than decorative. It should document how participation worked, how consent was maintained, how conflict was handled, and how capability was built over time. It should include accounts of what did not work because honest learning is part of civic maintenance.

This approach also aligns with a grounded, experience-led view shaped by Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism. It treats meaning-making as something that happens through interaction, in real settings, over time. It treats identity as something enacted and negotiated, not something assumed. It makes evaluation a record of lived practice rather than a performance for external consumption.

Why a membership and practice network is needed

If community media is to contribute to civic renewal in a durable way, it needs movement infrastructure. It needs a membership and practice network that can hold shared standards while respecting local variation. It needs shared ethical guidance that is usable, not aspirational. It needs peer learning that strengthens practice without professionalising away local ownership. It needs governance literacy because civic infrastructure fails when governance is weak, unclear, or dependent on a small number of exhausted individuals.

It also needs collective advocacy. No single local initiative can consistently influence national settlement processes such as Ofcom’s regulatory review or Charter renewal. A network can represent practice-based evidence with credibility. It can also support member organisations to engage constructively with policy without being absorbed by institutional agendas.

The risks are real. A network can be captured if it becomes a gatekeeper for resources. A network can be instrumentalised if it becomes primarily a delivery mechanism for external objectives. A network can also drift into abstraction if it prioritises statements over practical support. This is why the governance design of any network matters as much as its purpose. Independence, transparency, member control, and clear ethical commitments are not administrative detail. They are the conditions for civic legitimacy.

Questions for reformers working across Ofcom’s review and Charter renewal

• What would it mean for Ofcom’s broadcast regulation review to treat civic participation as an explicit outcome, rather than as an indirect benefit that may follow from market or compliance reform.¹
• If public service media is justified partly through its contribution to democratic participation, what kinds of local communicative capacity should be treated as part of that settlement, rather than as a separate, optional community sector concern.³
• How should Charter renewal define accountability to the public in a way that includes participatory civic practice, and not only central governance arrangements and complaints processes.²
• How should “trust” be operationalised in reform debates, so it is treated as a relational and experiential outcome, not only a reputational variable.
• How can a bottom-up approach to media reform support plural local meaning-making, including disagreement, without collapsing into factionalism or into risk-averse consensus.
• What kinds of participation build civic capability, and what kinds of participation merely extract attention, stories, or volunteer labour.
• How should intention be stated and tested in participatory media, so that participation does not become a performative label that masks predetermined agendas.
• What does meaningful consent look like when participation is ongoing and public, and what duties should apply when consent becomes contested or is withdrawn in practice.
• How should power be surfaced and governed in participatory media, including editorial control, agenda-setting, moderation, and the allocation of resources.
• How can policy recognise statistical invisibility in everyday civic participation, and how can it avoid building evidence regimes that reward visibility over inclusion.
• What would a proportionate evidence settlement look like for community media as civic infrastructure, where quantitative indicators establish stability and reach, and qualitative narratives evidence lived civic function, without creating surveillance or administrative burden.
• How can ecological approaches to cultural vitality inform media reform, so that informal and everyday civic communication is visible and valued without being bureaucratised.⁶
• What would a membership and practice network need to provide to be genuinely useful to practitioners, credible to policy stakeholders, and resilient against capture and instrumentalisation.
• What should organisations such as Belong Foundation, DEMOS, PINF, Impress, and Locality seek to convene in this moment, and what should they avoid convening, if the aim is bottom-up capacity rather than a new layer of centralised coordination.
• What does success look like after five or ten years if media reform is treated as civic renewal, and how would communities themselves recognise that success in lived experience rather than in institutional reporting.

Endnotes

1. Ofcom: Call for input, Review of broadcast regulation (accessed 18 December 2025).
2. UK Government: Britain’s Story: The Next Chapter, BBC Royal Charter Review Green Paper and public consultation (consultation dates stated on page; accessed 18 December 2025).
3. Ofcom: Transmission Critical, The future of Public Service Media (PDF; accessed 18 December 2025).
4. The British Academy: Measuring Social and Cultural Infrastructure (accessed 18 December 2025).
5. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian: A Restless Art, How Participation Won, and why it Matters, François Matarasso (publication page; accessed 18 December 2025).
6. Centre for Cultural Value: Developing a Cultural Indicator Suite, Interim Report (July 2025) (PDF; accessed 18 December 2025).