Small-scale accountability journalism
A £100k boost to enable it announced and thoughts from addressing the Local News Commission
Good evening,
We’ll start the digest with some genuinely good news for independent local journalism (and freelancers) in the UK.
A £100,000 funding pot has been unveiled for the Tenacious Awards focused on Journalists - a partnership between Changing Ideas and the Public Interest News Foundation - is making grants of between £5,000 to £20,000 available to help ‘bring to light important stories which would otherwise not be reported and hope to trigger journalism which has the widest and deepest impact’.
Here’s the eligibility criteria…
Full details and how to apply.
It’s a timely shot-in-the-arm for independent local news provision - and chimes with some of what I spoke about during giving evidence last week to the Local News Commission in Manchester.
There’s great work done by both established and independent media on a local level up and down the country, the challenge is there’s plenty more tip-offs and stories that journalists can’t get to because there’s a capacity issue. Quite simply, the economics often don’t stack up to create the time and space for journalists to pursue those stories in the same volume as they used to.
One of the things we’ve been working to do on Blog Preston in recent months, inspired partly by the work we’ve been involved in with The Lead North, is dig deeper into stories - what I’ll broadly call accountability journalism.
As our audience has grown back to levels on Blog Preston we last saw during the Covid pandemic, we’re getting more and more tip-offs, and if you look at the superb work Luke has done recently on holding a social housing group to account or digging into an enormous row which has erupted between the senior leadership of a school, Ofsted and parents in one of the most disadvantaged areas of the city. It means the primary school now faces becoming an Academy after being branded as inadequate.
These might not be the sort of stories which make the front pages of national newspapers or lead broadcaster news bulletins but they absolutely become the talking point and focal point of a local community - and the powers that be who operate within that community (and for it). Small-scale accountability journalism is crucial.
But it can’t be the only thing in the news mix, I was addressing the Local News Commission alongside Sarah Lester of the Manchester Evening News and Joshi Hermann of Mill Media. Joshi, and a number of the commission members, made the point about it needing to be a mix of stories and content. I couldn’t agree more. It cannot just be inquest coverage after inquest coverage, there has to be light amongst the shade. With Blog Preston we covered the BBC Radio 2 In The Park festival with the same intensity and scrutiny as we would apply to doing accountability journalism - it’s as important for a city like Preston that we do.
Staying with the broad theme of local journalism in the UK and there’s some interesting sharing from Paul Rowland (a former colleague of mine) who has recently been at the ONA conference in the States.
Within Paul’s takes includes the upsurge in philanthropic support for journalism which is happening in the US. Which is fantastic to see. But is it actually solving the underlying challenges both the independent and established media face?
Addressing the Local News Commission had me think about the kinds of government support and intervention that could be genuinely helpful to the sector. That’s probably a whole post for another day. But it struck me that significant funding to help publishers - of all shapes and sizes to innovate - has probably never been more critical particularly in finding ways to unlock revenue.
The transition between print and digital is certainly not complete, because the technological advances and platform challenges keep coming (and will continue to do so). The likes of the Tenacious Awards are about content - which is fantastic - but where are the pots for independent media to bid into to help diversify their business models and take a leap on building a new revenue stream or scaling onto a platforms where revenues are still nascent.
And finally, it’s awards season at the moment, The Big Issue Changemakers awards flipped across my feed and includes a media and campaigns category.
Hope you’re having a good week, good luck for the rest of it and keep going.
Ed