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Journalism Studies
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News in the community?

Luke Dickens, Nick Couldry & Aristea Fotopoulou
Published online: 19 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Luke Dickens, Nick Couldry & Aristea Fotopoulou (2014): News in the
community?, Journalism Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2014.890339

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 NEWS IN THE COMMUNITY?
Investigating emerging inter-local spaces
of news production/consumption

Luke Dickens, Nick Couldry, and Aristea Fotopoulou

This article examines the emergence of new, inter-local spaces of news production and
consumption, drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with community reporters trained
by a community reporter organisation based in the north of England. Practices of news
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production and content generation are focused on people’s own communities and they are
underpinned by an ethos of production, which is grounded in a critical consumption of news and
collective processes of skill acquisition. Through an analysis of motivations and practices, we
account for the values that sustain community reporter communities and discuss how such
practices, while emerging from the place of local community, also extend across wider
communities of interest. It is suggested that an evolving practice of skill sharing and mutual
recognition could potentially stimulate the regrowth of democratic values.

KEYWORDS community reporting; democracy; inter-local; locality; news production and

consumption; recognition

Introduction
New practices of news production/consumption (Bruns 2005) are emerging in the
digital age as the resources for, and entry barriers to, content production have changed
radically. While much work has been done on mainstream news institutions’ treatment of
user-generated content (Örnebring 2009; Wardle and Williams 2010), such work has
prioritised “former” audiences’ activities (Rosen 2006) directed back towards mainstream
journalism. But what if such activities are often directed elsewhere, for example within
people’s own communities or networked spaces that link up community reporters (CRs)
across multiple locations? This article will investigate such new spaces of news circulation,
drawing on interviews with CRs trained by, or networked with People’s Voice Media
(henceforth PVM), a CR organisation based in the north of England whose aim is to
become a “Reuters of the Community”.1
We are interested in how this new landscape of news production/consumption
works from the perspective of community-based actors seeking to forge an alternative
model of news, one in which community voice is more heavily weighted (see also
BESPOKE 2011). News production/consumption—indeed all media production/consump-
tion—has a material geography, much neglected in mainstream media studies.2 Yet
geography, at least urban geography, was at the heart of one of the earliest newspaper
studies (Park [1925] 1967), which understood the early US newspaper industry as a
response to changes in the lifeworld’s spatial configuration as people moved from villages
to cities: if “local news is the very stuff that democracy is made of” (Park [1925] 1967, 85),
then the local news element even in broader news production should not be neglected.
Journalism Studies, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2014.890339
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
 2 LUKE DICKENS ET AL.

Accordingly, it is important to understand better how community news producers/

consumers conceive their media-related practice. This article draws on interviews among
PVM’s network of reporters about their production and consumption practices. The
resulting picture does not resolve into either a centralised valorisation of “user-generated
content” or into a decentred hyperlocalism (Radcliffe 2012). Instead we encountered a
more complex relationship whereby local stories are produced and linked within an inter-
local exchange; yet it is often audiences’ feelings of not being recognised in national news
agendas that drives them to generate and consume news stories more locally.
We conducted our fieldwork during rapid, even destructive change in the distribu-
tion of local government resources and nationally funded income. The multi-billion pound
cuts announced in the 2010 emergency budget statements set in motion a restructuring
of local governance. In particular, the Localism Act (2011), reduced disability services,
employment services and housing benefits.3 Meanwhile, regional funding sources for civil
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society organisations like PVM were severely cut. Both PVM and its CRs were experiencing
acute financial pressure when we worked with them.
Independently, changes in the landscape of news production impacted negatively
on local democracy (Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre 2010), with rival news
providers emerging in potential response to these changes (see “Research Context”
below). Their diverse strategies of content production reflect a wider, unresolved debate
about what “news” is for, where and by whom it should be produced and consumed, and
whether our inherited philosophies of journalism can address current challenges and
opportunities. Will flows of significant information (“news stories”) be radically reconfi-
gured in the digital age (Rantanen 2009; Peters and Broersma 2012), generating a
differently structured “mediaspace” (Couldry and McCarthy 2004)? It helps here to
remember what Lefebvre saw as the dialectical nature of all spatial practices (Lefebvre
1991, 18): even if capitalism operates through an “abstract space” (for money and resource
transmission), new “social spaces” can still emerge through local action, for example a
space of CR practice (Jackson 1994). Throughout we must attend to the highly particular
processes by which “locality” is produced, both in news practice (Kirby 1989) and more
generally (Appadurai 1995). That means basing our inquiry in the values and practices of
actual CRs. We need to be sensitive both to changing production practices and the
grounding of those changes in a dissatisfaction with national media’s historic neglect of
many localities.
After reviewing relevant literature and a contextual note, we explore in sequence
the resources, news conceptions and networked spaces of community reporting, reflecting
finally on the potential democratic values they imply.

Community Reporting, Place and Media Literacy

The optimism surrounding new digital journalistic practices has been heavily
criticised. Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) urge critical awareness of peer-production trends
in business models of the digital economy and Web 2.0, advising against terms such as
“produsage” and “co-creation” and asserting that this business-generated “new digital
infrastructure has come to govern our mediascape as well as our social lives” (870).
Similarly, Rebillard and Touboul (2010) have challenged “Web 2.0” promissory narratives in
relation to journalism and participatory culture. Our study, however, concerns members of
a specific community, not anonymous users or “crowds”, exploring how they understand
 NEWS IN THE COMMUNITY? 3

their content-generation practices, which are certainly not solicited by corporate media,
and their own visions about what constitutes news and participation in news production.
Our article is not concerned with participation directly in mainstream journalism.
Such “participatory journalism” potentially enables citizens to be active in the collection
and dissemination of news (Bowman and Willis 2003). However, Wardle and Williams
(2010) note that although audience comments, footage, experiences and stories are
collected by the BBC, the structural roles of BBC news journalists have not been
challenged by these practices: “journalists have remained journalists and audiences have
remained audiences” (Wardle and Williams 2010, 792). Similarly, in an analysis of user-
generated tabloid content for The Sun, Örnebring argued these practices do not signify a
power shift between producer and consumer; indeed, users were encouraged to produce
content oriented to their personal and everyday life, rather than to have any direct
involvement in news selection.
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Unlike participatory journalism, citizen journalism seeks to transfer power and

responsibility from journalists to individuals or community groups. Indymedia, as a distinct,
radical model of journalistic practices (Platon and Deuze 2003), is the most cited example.
Other models, such as “hyperlocal” media, seek to address the decline of traditional news
media industries (Picard 2003; 2008) and to introduce a community orientation to news
media operations (Howley 2010). Hyperlocal media have been described as “a hybrid of
civic, community, statewide public affairs, and alternative newspaper movements
combined with the interactive and broadcast abilities accompanying Web 2.0” (Metzgar,
Kurpius, and Rowley 2011, 774). However, Metzgar, Kurpius, and Rowley (2011, 779), in
their analysis of US-based hyperlocal media, note a difference between civic journalism
and hyperlocal media: by providing local information, civic journalism enables citizens to
act in their own communities, whereas hyperlocal media operations and their editorial
choices are largely driven by market criteria.
The question of what “community” is served by such journalism is complex. John
Dewey wrote about the relationship between issues of concern and publics, arguing that
issues make publics. While this raises broader questions of visibility (Marres 2007), more
important here is how shared concerns are debated and resolved in everyday social
spaces, and not just the spaces prescribed for political deliberation or speech (Couldry
2010). Rodriguez (2011, 24) similarly has defined “citizens’ media” as “the media citizens
use to activate communication processes that shape their local communities”. Additionally,
in an ethnically diverse community in Los Angeles county, Chen et al. (2012) analysed the
relationship between local storytelling and civic engagement: when local stories are
missing from mainstream media, or existing publications fail to talk about the collective
problems of a specific community or neighbourhood, Web-based storytelling platforms
can enhance civic engagement and inter-group interaction. We too found that the
absence of a media platform to express shared local concerns was an impetus for
community reporting. Spaces of social co-operation and mutual recognition are potentially
created when news production operates within specific communities.
Such practices, and their underlying values, are critical to the emergence of a
different geographical configuration of news production and consumption. Rantanen
(2009), in her analysis of localisation and places in news, has noted how news-flow studies
have largely ignored questions of “where” and “when”, prioritising the analysis of news
content. Yet news plays a significant role in constructing our experiences of place:
“belonging has no meaning unless news offers readers a point of identification” (Rantanen
 4 LUKE DICKENS ET AL.

2009, 80). As we see later, it is local points of reference that for CRs create such
opportunities for identification, and news about such reference points emerges itself from
local practices of skill-building and mutual recognition.
What CRs bring to news generation has implications for debates on media literacy.
In their review for the UK regulator Ofcom, Livingstone, Van Couvering, and Thumim
(2008, 46) note the importance of content creation for media literacy, but identify two
research gaps: the relationships between amateur production and the creative industries;
and how “an experience of production encourages a critical understanding of media
products”. This article begins to address both gaps, while also linking to international
debates on how narrative exchange contributes to wider civic engagement (Bennett 2008;
Rheingold 2008).
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Research Context and Methodology

Empirically, this paper draws on personal accounts recorded through in-depth, semi-
structured interviews with 12 self-selecting CRs reached through an open call sent through
the PVM mailing list. The semi-structured interviews were conducted in February and
March 2013, and were part of an 18-month participatory action research study with PVM
whose full details are not relevant here (see www.storycircle.co.uk). The group consisted of
eight women and four men, aged between 20 and 63 years, and living in Salford, Greater
Manchester; Toxteth, Liverpool; Brighton on England’s south coast; and the Blaenau Gwent
region of South Wales. For each location, CRs were linked to a corresponding partner
agency: PVM in Salford, Toxteth TV in Toxteth, Three Valleys TV in Blaenau Gwent and the
Sussex Community Internet Project in Brighton. Our sample captured the heterogeneity of
individual CRs and their localities that are missed in hyperbolic narratives about “here
comes everybody” (Shirky 2007). All accounts have been anonymised.
PVM, a social enterprise based in Salford, aims “to support people to have a voice …
and describe their own reality” and “contribute to raising community and individual
aspiration”. A core part of this vision is PVM’s Community Reporter programme, which
prioritises the production of “community reporting” for community empowerment (Watton
2009), rather than individualised production by “citizen journalists” hoping to break into
the mainstream (Wilson 2012).
PVM operates a “social licensing” franchise model that enables other community
groups to purchase CR training packages, receive accreditation and participate in a
dedicated online network of reporters and content.4 While originating in the North West,
this network spread across other UK areas, and in early 2012 was formalised through a
national Institute of Community Reporters.5 To date, PVM has supported approximately
1000 people through their Community Reporter programme, bringing community
perspectives to bear on local housing policy, schooling and public space.6
PVM is one of many similar organisations focused on local news production/
consumption emerging within a rapidly restructuring media landscape. Several small,
“hyperlocal” groups have begun to develop their own training and support for local
people: for example, the Community Media Training School run by Citizenseye in
Leicester, or the Community Correspondents programme by South Leeds Life.7 At a
national level, several initiatives have developed platforms to draw together networks of
community-level reporters: notably, the Media Trust’s “Newsnet” service (now called
“Newswire”) or GlobalNet21’s “citizen zone”, as well as the UK government-endorsed Your
 NEWS IN THE COMMUNITY? 5

Square Mile.8 The United States has a more advanced hyperlocal sector (Kurpius, Metzgar,
and Rowley 2010; Metzgar, Kurpius, and Rowley 2011), while several services host
community-reported content internationally, including Global Voices and WeAreChange.9

The “Community Reporter”: Motivations, Relationships and Skills

Backgrounds and Motivations
While community media has a longer and broader history (Rodriguez 2001; Fuller
2006), the CRs embodied in the United Kingdom’s fast-changing digital news landscape
comprise a diverse range of people. Some have a relevant professional background
(community work, media education) while others have found CR training and practice
meaningful at a decisive point in their lives. It is important to have a sense of CRs’
underlying motivations to acquire skills and to get involved, if we are to understand where
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the potential transformation of locality through community reporting comes from.

Some saw the roots of their current CR practice well before recent debates about
“prosumers” (Bruns 2005). Maggie, a retired teacher with mobility problems, had organised
community projects for capturing local stories:
I think I’ve always been, without realising, a community reporter … I was doing other
sorts of community reporting without being recognised as a community reporter.
Being a CR then is not a given, but an emergent identity. It involves a need to
address the challenging material circumstances of people’s lives by giving an account of
what is happening around them. This need starts a positive process for those who might
otherwise have been locked into inactivity: meeting people and gaining more confidence;
employment and skill acquisition; and getting recognition for one’s skills and abilities.
Unsurprisingly, when asked what CR practice meant to them, interviewees often
replied in almost evangelical terms: “it’s a passion, not a penance” (Maggie); or “being a
community reporter means everything to me!” (Lynda, an unemployed middle-aged
woman). Similarly, Terry explained that:
I’m disabled … but it’s given me a whole new meaning in life, the whole community
media has.
Even where CRs and CR trainers had passed through media professions, they
contrasted mainstream journalism and community reporting. Carly, one of the media-
trained CRs we interviewed described the difference in ethical terms:
I’m trained in media anyway, and I’ve been teaching digital media production at all
different levels for years, the [CR] training for me was more about the community
reporter ethos.

For her, identifying as a CR results from the belief that news about local
communities should be produced in ways that relate explicitly to the specific communities
from which that news emerges. Is this the beginning of a practical response to the
challenges of today’s underfunded journalism environment?

Relationships
For our participants, membership in a community of shared news production values
helped reshape their wider experience of community and locality. Indeed, practices of
 6 LUKE DICKENS ET AL.

community reporting always involved entering into a wider “community of practice”

involving mutual recognition of each other’s everyday skills and abilities (Wenger 1998).
One key form of interaction between CRs, shaping how specific communities of reporters
established localised bonds, was the “meet-up”. Meet-ups facilitated mutual recognition
and information/skill exchange between CRs:
We discuss what we can, we look at various things that we’re doing, seeing if we can
leverage that, and … we look at what’s happening in the town and make sure that we’re
covering it. (Terry)

Some groups came together around specific interests or local issues (youth groups,
housing associations, disability groups), while others took a more general interest in their
neighbourhoods. In the everyday spaces of the “meet-up” (held in community centres,
church halls and freely available meeting rooms), CRs chatted, over tea and coffee, about
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local issues and their own media practices with other similarly inclined local people. In the
absence, generally, of significant material reward, these interactions fostered a clear but
necessary sense of solidarity:
it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, because I made so many friends. And I
mean beyond friends if that makes sense, people that are there for me, that have been
supportive, and if I’ve said I’ve got this problem or that problem, or I’ve got this idea, I’ve
got that idea, I only have to click my fingers and it’s there, the help is there. (Lynda,
emphasis added)
This community was for Lynda grounded in a practice of care for particular people
and places, enacted through a practice of active listening (Dreher 2010):
[T]o me through the eye of a camera is the way forward because what [reporters are]
seeing through the lens of a camera or through their own eyes can be shared … through
other people.
Such active listening, being grounded in a relationship of care for a local community,
goes beyond the position of the “prosumer” (the consumer who also sometimes produces
for him- or herself), implying a different relation to journalist practice and democratic
norms. As discussed next, training was an important way in which CRs developed such
shared practices.

Training and Skills

Local CR groups’ informal meet-ups often complemented explicit packages of
training offered by PVM through its Institute of Community Reporters initiative. This
training involved a combination of basic technical and social competencies, using
accessible technologies and software and encouraging in people the confidence to tell
their own stories about issues that affected them, rather than turn them into professional
journalists.
PVM training emphasises the experiential use of technologies such as flip-cams. For
many, it was an opportunity to learn basic editorial skills and shape media content into
recognisable stories:
 NEWS IN THE COMMUNITY? 7

I had a cine-camera, a DVD recorder thing, and I didn’t really know how to use it. I knew
how to point it, I knew how to record things, but I didn’t know how to get the film off it
on to a computer and play with it. And once I did that I got the bug. (Trevor)
The training emphasis remained on the quality of narrative exchange, not on
producing professional media outputs: “we’re not all trying to be Steven Spielbergs, but
everyone’s got their own way of putting stuff across” (Keith).
Others that undertook CR training saw it as a practice that addressed accessibility
and adult media literacy issues. As Sandra, a trainer, explained:
working with the housing group, especially with it being older people … people that
don’t normally have access to computers haven’t got the basic, basic skills, and part of
the training was assuming that they don’t have that, and they don’t.
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CR training can challenge digital divides and literacies (Livingstone and Helsper
2007) by helping CRs develop the technical and social skills of storytelling. The training
process was central in creating a culture of skill and knowledge sharing for CRs, and lies at
the heart of this distinctive space of news production/consumption.
PVM’s own accreditation of these skills involved a micro-culture of esteem and
recognition, which was ratified with a “Community Reporter” badge. As Gary Copitch, CEO
of PVM explained:
The Institute of Community Reporters is about individuals … We thought it’s about time
to give recognition to people … The badge gives people credibility.
CRs echoed this sense of validation in their own pursuit of meaningful stories:
I’ve got my badge now, so when I ask questions, I’m a community reporter, it backs me
up. It opens doors … it gives you a bit more confidence when you go up to somebody
and say, put the badge in their face, “I’ve got a badge!” (Sandra)

Yet the CR community of practice, while often closely focused on a bounded locality,
was also cut across by wider communities of interest that could transcend locality and
create a broader sense of belonging to something more significant (see subsequent
section, “The Networked Spaces of Community Reporting”). Thus for Carly, the practical
media training served to build solidarity within her local meet-up group and, simulta-
neously, with a national “movement”:
when I’m training … you’re part of something larger than just that project, it’s a
movement, and I think that gives it more credibility, and I think it makes you feel like
you’re more a part of something. You’re not just, “Oh I’ve just been trained on a flip
camera.”
As discussed next, practices of news production and consumption between CRs
created a space where positive stories about their communities could be voiced both
within and beyond their immediate localities. In this way, CRs gained some sense of
control and empowerment over their own issues across a range of scales.

A Distinct Mode of News Production/Consumption?

When interviewees spoke about the news media they consumed, they often noted
occasions where mainstream news did not provide them with points of identification.
 8 LUKE DICKENS ET AL.

Our CR sample were generally active and regular consumers of a variety of news (local/
national; radio, TV, internet, less so newspapers). Most reporters showed a strong sense of
dissatisfaction with mainstream news, primarily for its sensationalist focus on “all those
poor people shooting each other and ripping each other off and selling each other drugs
… looking for the juicy stuff that makes headlines and the front page” (Keith). This critical
stance towards mainstream news often pushed them towards local news:
I wouldn’t waste my money [on mainstream newspapers]. The Sun is always behind
anyway, it’s always late with the news and as I say, the newspapers are basically the same
as the TV, propaganda. (Lynda)
Dissatisfaction with the mainstream media was a key motivation for seeking new
types of news to consume and for producing news themselves on initially a local scale.
When CRs could not find points of identification in the mainstream news, they created
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their own opportunities for identification:

I was sick of being lied to by the mainstream media and I just wanted to do things that I
want to be involved in and that interest myself, which I know myself will interest other
people … don’t hate the media, be the media. (Lynda)
Lynda contrasted her discontent with mainstream news directly to her own
journalistic instinct for newstelling as “truth”:
I never leave home without my camera … [T]hat’s me now, more in your face. I’m not
frightened of interviewing anybody or poking my lens at anybody … I just cover the
truth.

Similarly, Sandra expressed a desire to go beyond the news she consumed by

making the news herself within a profoundly local context:
You realise a lot of things go on behind the scenes, which no one knows about, so it’s
not reported in the local paper, it’s not reported on the local radio, or any local media, it
just happens you overhear a conversation … I go hunting then!
This counter-media practice finds its initial focus around the notion of “positive
news” which needs careful unpacking.

“Positive News”
The need for “more positive” news to counter the relentless cycle of murders, wars,
scandal and government wrangling has been a commonplace of news debate in Britain
since the 1990s.10 CRs’ language appears to repeat this commonplace, but with the
difference that, from the perspective of particular communities (often significantly
disadvantaged), they want to correct what they see as specific misrepresentations:
people always think of the Toxteth riots, which was 1981; do you know what I mean? It’s
like, “Move on.” … [laughs] there’s been so many positive things …that have happened
in Toxteth over the last 30 years … it just changes people’s perceptions hopefully, that’s
what Community Reporters does of a place. (Safi)
Far from a naive celebration of the parochial that rejects any links to political
contention, when reporters explained to us what they meant by “positive” news, they
made clear links to significant and contentious issues:
 NEWS IN THE COMMUNITY? 9

I think [it is] stories that look at local issues, but also look to give people a voice about how
they could have solutions from within the community. For example we’ve done some
reports on the welfare reforms and how they impact on tenants and certain associations,
and how they impact on people with disabilities and stuff … coming from that is a voice
of people’s fear and anxiety, but there’s also through the consultation, people are
suggesting things that could be done to help in their situation, … in terms of what the
community could do to support the community. (Carly, emphasis added)

If what matters is linking local issues to local action, CRs can be positive agents of
news production, taking advantage of the new intersections between consumption and
production and escaping the stereotype of the “reactive” citizen that mainstream British
media generally present (Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2005).
PVM had a policy of avoiding explicit political references, within a wider strategy to
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elicit more positive news, but struggled at times to differentiate between the narrowly
partisan and the more constructive ways in which CRs might address the implications of
political decisions. However, Lynda noted:
The world isn’t just rosy coloured glasses, people need to see beyond the box and know
what’s happening beyond the box, you know give the glasses a wipe, it isn’t all like, local
garden fete, or you know somebody’s done this that’s good. There is bad things out
there that need bringing to light, you know, crime. Like the local council, they commit
crime every day, every week, every year, by pulling down property, stocks of housing.
The specific news values that underlie CRs’ understandings of stories are exam-
ined next.

What Constitutes a “News” Story?

Local practices of mutual recognition played an important role in how CRs produced
and consumed news:
I found what [we] were doing was looking for the stories, the unremarkable, remarkable
stories, if that makes sense … the more I got into it the more I understood that my
background as a sales engineer in sales for 20-odd years, although being business-to-
business, was not that different from reporting; ask questions, get answers, just being
nosey really … And as unremarkable as anybody can be to the naked eye, you don’t
know what’s going on behind that façade. (Trevor)

Indeed, what counted as a news story was guided by values of mutual recognition
between CRs:
there’s a story in everything, … you spend a lot of time … getting the trainee reporters
to see that … if it’s important to them, then it’s a story, it’s an issue … you see it almost
through their eyes … it makes you see things all around. (Becky, emphasis added)

stories dealt with a variety of themes: stories in terms of disability, human rights stories,
anything that affects people and harms them, we need to cover and report about, and
also even things like parking issues, you know? I think one of our biggest programmes
last year was one about parking issues. (Maggie)
 10 LUKE DICKENS ET AL.

This identification of local impact often cuts across different groups, helping bind
them through mutual recognition. For instance, stories about “wet leaves” on the
pavement impacting blind or partially sighted people related to wider issues faced by
the elderly as well. In addition to such bridging effects, stories also helped transcend scale.
As became evident from our interviews, community reporting as a news production
practice helped citizens to engage with concerns about the localised impact of national
cuts on housing, health and wellbeing from within their communities. In this way, the
practice repositions CRs’ sense of local belonging within a potentially national space of
comparison: “it’s not just Toxteth; it’s everywhere … where the community reporters
exist” (Sefi).
Community reporting brings a concern with local change to a new audience,
opening up community-level engagement with the implications of such changes, that is,
as “issues” of common concern which for John Dewey are an important part of the
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democratic process (Dewey 1954). Thus, one CR:

noticed that the church she went to as a child was for sale, which upset her so she went
off to find out where the congregation was now, why they’d left that building and she’s
making a film about that … normally she might just go home and tell her mum, now she
can make a film about it to try and engage the community. (Emma)

Making news changes the starting-point from which one consumes what others
produce, providing a new reference point for assessing the selection choices that may
underlie mainstream production. As Mark explained:
since I’ve done some community reporting, I look more closely to see if there’s any
hidden details, I look more deeply, thinking: has this been changed to make somewhere
look really good or really bad?
We now turn to the emerging inter-local geographies involved in CR.

The Networked Spaces of Community Reporting

Local News from the Inside
There is a strong link between CRs’ distinctive sense of what is news, whether as
consumers or producers, and their sense of being positioned within a local community.
The embedding of CRs in their own communities broadens the types and depth of story
that they can tell.
Because I’m from the borough I kind of know my audience, I know what the locals want,
what they’re about. It’s quite a wide range I’d say from elderly people down to children.
When you’re surrounded by the people I think you know what they want. (Hannah)
Hopefully, this meaning-context affects also how local audiences react to this new
type of local news. Certainly, some CRs reflected on this greater richness as an antidote to
the increasingly frantic “churnalism” (Davies 2007), in other words the recycling of stories
in mainstream news media, even where it respects citizen journalists:
I’m really here on the ground … community reporting is from people who are on the
ground, in other words are with the sources … Which I think is the big difference
between community reporting and citizen journalism … in citizen journalism … they’re
working in many cases with just what they’ve read in other newspapers, in the main
 NEWS IN THE COMMUNITY? 11

newspapers … We’re there, we see what’s going on around us, and we do know what’s
going on and we can tell the story. (Terry, emphasis added)
This is not just about stealing a lead on mainstream news, but connecting the
production and consumption of news through tacit understandings of the issues that
affect local people in their everyday lives.
Indeed, being a CR seems to change how locality is understood, and in the process
build a different material geography of news production/consumption. CRs feel that
“outsiders” lack a more balanced understanding of everyday life in their locality, leading to
misrepresentation. Misrepresentations of localities by incoming journalists can have lasting
material impacts on people’s lives (Champagne 1999), and CRs interviewed from Salford or
Toxteth routinely referred to the consequences of their localities’ negative media image.
It is from the position of being “not … an outsider coming in to [report] [but] an
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actual member of the community” (Mark, emphasis added) that CRs understand their
production/consumption. As Keith explains:
It means that we’re not laying there being fed all this crap by people like the BBC,
ITV, Sky, where they dive on the worst of an area. It’s like “Moss Side this” or whatever it
is, “Nottingham is the gun capital”; we’re the people who are actually living within it and
it will give us our own perspectives.
Some saw their community reporting as an active strategy for “trying to change
perceptions of what people think of an area … because it’s not all bad news” (Keith), both
externally and internally. For instance, PVM noted:
our main problem is not people’s perceptions outside, it’s people’s perceptions inside …
mainstream media are looking in all the time, even the local newspaper now … it is
about giving voice to people within the community. (emphasis added)

Safi’s account is given against the explicit background of the decline of local news
infrastructure (in Toxteth, the closure of The Post and The Mersey Mart):
Toxteth has got a reputation on it, and very much unfounded, but it’s … Toxteth
community reporters who can tell the positivity of what’s going on … it lets people know
the real deal. (Safi)
For CRs, the need to respond to misrepresentation of their locality was often
intensely linked to class position, with the strongest connection between locality and
negativity being in the working-class areas of Toxteth, Salford and the Welsh valleys. We
see in these sentiments the contemporary traces of a longer history of critical local
commentary outside the journalistic mainstream. Raymond Williams (1983) discussed the
campaigning style of William Cobbett in his “Rural Rides” during the nineteenth century—
an approach defined by “social and political argument combined with observation of how
people lived” (O’Connor 2006, 37)—and the continuity with working-class journalists in the
early twentieth century. Yet being a community insider need not be merely a hyperlocal
practice, and is imagined by Lynda and Terry to transcend particular locations:
I take my community reporting very serious, I like to go to different locations, … I get
involved in lots of aspects of my community really and in other cities, I go beyond my
own area. (Lynda)
 12 LUKE DICKENS ET AL.

I am disabled and I write from the disability point of view as well, and I’m involved over
at [town] with a group … when we think of community reporting, you’re not just
reporting from communities geographically, we’re reporting from communities of
interest. (Terry)

If “communities of interest” which are located in different parts of the United

Kingdom can emerge through the practice of CR, this suggests the beginnings of a
differently configured infrastructure for local news.

Emerging Inter-localities
So far the local focus of news production/consumption “from the inside” might
seem bound within a local, perhaps “hyperlocal”, model of news. Yet something distinctive
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was PVM’s role in establishing inter-connections between locally orientated CR groups.

These efforts to build a national infrastructure are best understood as ways to put local
practices into productive exchange with other localities, rather than simply aggregating
local voices on a national scale (citizen journalism), or focusing solely on local voices
(hyperlocal news). The local is not superseded, but becomes differently connected, within
a national space of comparison. Although building an effective online network platform
has proved challenging for PVM, we focus here on an emerging connection between
different localities which we term here “inter-local”.
Such an inter-local dialogic space emerges through the ways that CRs feel connected,
through shared training approaches, reporting practices and a wider ethos. As Hannah
suggested, “even without meeting them you can connect with them because we’re doing
the same thing for all the same reasons”. Moreover, Hannah felt that the dedicated CR
Web platform had “given us a platform by which all of us, all of these news groups and
website groups and bloggers all around the country, can get together”. Indeed, while
there are of course well-known social media platforms that enable mass narrative
exchange, use of those spaces may be less important than a dedicated Web space that
preserves a sense of community voice while also bringing it into contact with distant
others. Indeed, the Institute of Community Reporters website space was felt to facilitate
multiple connectivities and possibilities for community news production/consumption:
It means that I am connecting my community, and my community is of interest, with the
media, and by media now, I mean the whole internet, knowing what sites are available to
promote my community, my communities. (Terry)
These inter-connections could be both national and local without being limited to
either:
in the network then it is national, ’cause we’ ll read stuff from people down in say
London or Bristol or whatever and they’ll read our stuff … I don’t think there’d be that
much different between us apart from some silly accents! … Bypassing all of the big
media crap and all telling each of our own stories. (Keith)
Local communities of practice intersect with wider communities of interest, when
CRs can share experiences relating to local knowledge and local action. Lynda provided an
example:
There was an item a while back … that if you were on benefit … you could get a
discount [on your energy bills]. I live in Manchester, and I passed that information on to
 NEWS IN THE COMMUNITY? 13

Yorkshire, and several people contacted their suppliers and were absolutely over the
moon … because it’s out in the wilds, it’s in the countryside, where I contacted, they had
no idea that this was available, to help them with their winter fuel bills and stuff.
Similarly, Mark gave an example of inter-local exchange around his interests as a
youth worker, and how such understandings had further supported his own practices:
I’ve spoken to someone from the next-door city … to get some inside information about
what … the youth scene is like over in Manchester … since the council completely got
rid of their youth service … This person I knew who was involved as a community
reporter that had had some youth background work, so I spoke to them … it put into
contrast just how lucky we are in the area where we live, compared to just down the
road … it was useful as well in case the eventuality does come round that the same will
happen in the area where I live.
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In parallel with appreciating the value in sharing community-level news across

localities, Safi was convinced that sharing production techniques linked up people from
different localities, creating mutual recognition and an inter-local appreciation of com-
munity news:
they’re knowing us, we’re knowing them, whereas a few months ago, we weren’t aware
of each other, so hopefully … that skill-sharing can expand maybe. What might be good,
even getting somebody from a different locality, like someone from Manchester coming
to Liverpool, someone from Liverpool going to Manchester, various ways of sharing skills
with people.

While CR news reaching mass audiences was discussed only as a remote possibility,
reaching communities of interest in other locations was feasible. Keith talked about a film
he had produced about a local music venue:
it was the story of the very first Northern Soul café/bar, called the Twisted Wheel Club …
you just won’t understand how much of an influence it had on the whole scene of soul
up in the north … The film has had interest to be shown all over the world, we’re talking
from like Hollywood, Indonesia … lots of soul clubs all over the world, Australia,
wherever.
In the reflections of the CRs we interviewed, there emerged traces of something
more than a simple promotionalism: an ethics of listening and narrative exchange that was
not opposed to mainstream journalism but suggested a distinctive approach based in
mutual recognition (Honneth 2007). We end our discussion with Hazel’s emphatic sense of
what exchanging news means to her:
I love passing on news … about what’s happened in the community. And I love hearing
people’s opinions and I love the opportunity of being able to, not changing their minds,
but give them a different point of view for them to look at, you know, “Wow, wow I never
even thought of that” … I actually listen to what other people have to say. (Hazel)
To make this exchange between CRs a viable and sustained practice, the
development of a stronger digital infrastructure remains necessary. So far, the uneven
distribution of government funding has meant that this aspect of inter-local dialogue has
not been prioritised. While spaces of inter-local dialogue are emerging in offline meet-ups
and between communities of interest, online platforms which effectively accommodate
 14 LUKE DICKENS ET AL.

and strengthen these dialogic exchanges also need to be developed along the lines
suggested by PVM. The design of such platforms needs to take account of the locally
grounded dynamics of news production and consumption.

Conclusion
Participating in the production of news can enhance people’s sense of each other’s
perspectives on the world: not necessarily conflicting with the philosophy of large-scale
news production, such participation deserves to be considered as an alternative starting-
point for news production/consumption at a time of huge uncertainty for traditional
models of journalism. The CRs we interviewed are more than individual “prosumers”
(people who both produce and consume): they have an ethos of production that is
grounded in a critical consumption of news and an evolving practice of skill-sharing and
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mutual recognition. The collapse of local journalism bites deeply in disadvantaged

localities such as those from where our reporter sample often came: there the CR ethos
may be more than individual passion or self-expression and closer to the necessary
response to an absence of collective voice. This practice starts out very often from the
place of local community, but as we have shown, extends to wider communities of
interest, and generates an interest in inter-local news sharing between CR groups. Such a
practice contains at least the seeds of a different news infrastructure.
We recognise, however, that distribution is a key aspect in any new model of news
production/consumption. The network of reporters we interviewed largely relied on PVM’s
existing distribution platform—the Institute of Community Reporters website—which at
the point of writing was redesigning its interface, in consultation with us as part of our
action research. The website was being redesigned to incorporate functions that would
allow reporters to connect with one another, and audiences to provide comments or other
forms of feedback. For this reason, our detailed discussion is here limited to practices of
production and consumption, and only touches on new possibilities of distribution.
The embedding of such practices of news consumption/production in wider
communities of practice cannot be captured by generalised critiques of social media
(Van Dijck 2009), nor is it satisfactorily dismissed by claims that what is needed today is
more local news of the very same type whose economic model is now under threat
(Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre 2010). Admittedly, the economic model
for extending and sustaining community reporting is so far equally unclear, and some
forms of initial subsidy are clearly needed.
Debate about such new forms of news subsidy should be informed by an
understanding of the values that can emerge in CR communities: values of voice, listening
and recognition (Honneth 2007; Couldry 2010; Dreher 2010). Could such emergent values
themselves be the seeds of the “free social enquiry” that John Dewey (1954, 163–180)
once saw as necessary to stimulate the regrowth of democracy itself?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was produced thanks to the generosity and insights of staff and community
reporters at People’s Voice Media, Salford, UK. We would also like to thank Chris Peters
and the anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The research
from which this paper draws was part of a wider, multi-strand action research project led
 NEWS IN THE COMMUNITY? 15

by Goldsmiths, University of London (see http://www.storycircle.co.uk) within the

Framework for Innovation and Research in MediaCity consortium (see http://www.firm-
innovation.net).

FUNDING
This work was supported by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Research Sciences Council
[grant number EP/H003738/1].

NOTES
1. See http://peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk/.
Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 03:00 28 April 2014

2. For specific examples of this neglected geography, see Brooker-Gross (1983), Boyd-
Barrett and Rantanen (1998), Dencik (2013) and Rodgers, Barnett, and Cochrane (2009).
More generally, see Couldry (2000) and Adams (2009).
3. See http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/2010_june_budget.htm), the Localism Act (2011)
(http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/20/contents/enacted) and the Welfare Reform
Act (2012) (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/5/contents/enacted).
4. See http://www.communityreporter.co.uk.
5. See http://blog.peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk/2012/04/19/launch-of-the-institute-of-commu
nity-reporters/.
6. From http://peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk/case-studies.
7. See http://www.citizenseye.org/training-school/, http://www.southleedslife.com/commu
nityreporters/and the monthly Port Talbot Magnet (www.lnpt.org).
8. See http://www.mediatrust.org/get-support/community-newswire-1/, http://21st-century
network.com/blog/ and http://www.yoursquaremile.co.uk/.
9. See http://globalvoicesonline.org/.
10. Broadcaster, Martyn Lewis, initiated debate on the need for “good news” in 1993. See
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/not-my-idea-of-good-news-at-the-end-of-a-week
-of-horrifying-events-martyn-lewis-bbc-presenter-argues-for-a-change-in-news-values-
1457539.html and http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/profile-sweetie-among-cynics-
martyn-lewis-top-in-a-tough-profession-he-campaigns-for-good-news-and-writes-abo
ut-cats-so-why-are-the-claws-out-for-him-by-geraldine-bedell-2320494.html. See also
http://positivenews.org.uk/.

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