Local media as a social glue for communities
Plus: Social listening to find the trends and discussions within niches + signature journalism driving subscriptions and audiences
Good evening,
And a happy Wednesday! Here’s this week’s digest of some interesting reads which have come across my timeline and feeds in recent days.
As always I hope you find these useful and food for thought. If there’s ever anything you think I should be featuring then feel free to drop me a line on ed@almaonline.co.uk and I’m happy to take a look.
Assessing the contribution of local journalism: the local newspaper as accidental social infrastructure - Rachel Matthews, British Academy - this is a lengthy read but it struck a chord with me, and something I’ve noticed time and again with what we do with Blog Preston and many other publications I’ve worked on locally all across the country. People really value that ability to find out about things they didn’t know about. There’s all kinds of benefits to this, as Rachel discusses, and with algorithms becoming intent on serving you more and more of what you like and engage with (Discover, TikTok, For You - the list goes on), how do you become exposed to things you just didn’t know? Rachel’s paper and research also speaks to that role local media has in being a crucial part of the fabric of the towns and cities in the UK. Whether that be a physical local newspaper, a swaggering big-city daily, a start-up independent news title, a long-read newsletter, or a combination of all, they have at their core that ability to connect and engage communities locally.
I was reminded of the tiny impacts local media has each and every day (i.e. not everyday are they forcing a politician out of office or exposing some big scandal - although you only need to look through the Regional Press Awards winners from 2025 to see it’s still happening in spades despite what many think), but we did a piece on Blog Preston a while ago about a film being made in the Ribble Valley near Preston. It’s this little line here…
After The Flower Bowl’s cinema manager saw the story via our newsletter, they got in touch with Martin to arrange the screening.
For Martin and his team, it’s validation of their efforts. For The Flower Bowl it’s another screening. But it’s that low-level social fabric and glue which keeps the wheels of local life turning.
Measuring, proving and showing that continuous impact is the challenge - as without local media, be that established, independent, and whatever format, then those wheels will turn slower or in some cases fall off completely…
How LADbible Uses NewsWhip to Find Niche Content - Benedict Nicholson - full disclosure, Jon Birchall quoted in here is one of the sharpest minds I’ve worked with over the years. Was a really interesting read on how LadBible are utilising the sophisticated thresholds in Newswhip to unearth trends, topics and stories to go after. Content distribution is splintering, but having written articles in many cases is still a central plank of any content business. But as I think LadBible allude to here, it’s now a case of being focused on five articles doing 10,000 views and engagements than one article doing 50,000 views.
Content worth paying for - Meg Carter, InPublishing - a good read as it profiles what the Belfast Telegraph have been doing on their digital transformation over the previous four or five years. What stood out to me in Eoin Brannigan’s quotes was their ‘signature journalism’. Ensuring they have something their brand, and readers, would expect. What is that thing which when people come to your homepage, or subscribe to your newsletter, they are expecting? And how do you deliver that consistently. I thought it was re-sharing my piece on accountability journalism which digs into this.
That’s all for this week’s digest, hopefully some good reads there to get you thinking and exploring.
A bit of self-promotion to finish if I may, we’ve given our Alma website a bit of an update and there’s dedicated pages about what Shirah, Luke and I have been up to in recent months. So have a read!
Have a great rest of the week.
Keep going.
Ed