By T J Thomson and Sora Park and Jee Young Lee
When you consume local news, how often do you feel represented or represented well? How often is the coverage relevant and focused on topics you think need more coverage? How well does your local news outlet do at covering stories that matter using all the tools at its disposal?
Like most Australians, you probably get your local news mostly from TV, online news sites and social media. You also typically consume local news to know what is going on in your area, to understand things that might affect you, and because you have an interest in stories and information from your community. But you might have noticed a decline in both the quantity and quality of local news about your area, particularly in the coverage provided by traditional news outlets.
To better understand attitudes towards local news providers, we spent the last two years surveying thousands of regional Australians, analysing thousands of news stories, and conducting one-on-one interviews with more than 200 people from regional communities across the country.
“I’ve noticed that the local newspaper has changed. Back when I was little, it probably had 30 or 40 pages. Now, you’re lucky to get five or six [news pages],” one of our research participants told us. Another added, “We used to read the paper every single day. Every tradesman would have the paper at lunch, at smoko. You’d always be exposed to it. There’s been a big shift over the years since the local paper stopped. For my parents’ generation especially, it’s been a big blow. They used to get up and go down every day to buy the local paper. They’re just lost without their local paper. That’s what they used to read every day, six days a week. For them, it’s been really disjointing. Even things like deaths, funeral notices, marriages — those were all in the local paper.”
As this visualisation below shows, between 2019 and 2024, there were far more contractions (shown in red) than expansions (shown in green) of news outlets across Australia.
Contractions and expansions of news outlets (2019-2024)
Our research suggests that audience engagement is the key to ensuring the future sustainability of local news. Audience engagement entails listening closely to what audiences want while also providing clear and easy ways for audiences to participate in creating and shaping news, including in visual form, which is particularly important in the current news and information ecosystem.
We asked regional audience members to photograph topics in their local communities that they thought journalists weren’t covering or weren’t covering well. One of the key responses was that mainstream news media is more interested in covering sports or politics than the culture and arts of local communities. However, we found that regional audiences are keen to see more coverage of these cultural and artistic topics, which are often deeply tied to local identity, creativity and community pride.
One of the photos a participant shared with us is below.
Our research suggests that audiences want local news that is related to their everyday lived experiences, initiatives and achievements in their local community, and stories that highlight community resilience. They want both human-interest stories and practical local information (e.g., weather, events, local business updates). Yet many people in regional areas say they feel disconnected from the decision-making processes and news coverage that affects their everyday lives. In the words of one of our participants:
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“We still need to have [journalists] out and about asking the people. They used to have four pictures of local people and it was some sort of topic that was relatable to either national, state or international news and they would ask one question and then you’d get the actual answer from those four people. They’d do that every day. They need to go back out and connect with the community more.”
Regional news audiences report experiencing news fatigue and avoidance that is driven by negative reporting. Participants expressed a strong desire for more positive and constructive storytelling. As one of our participants put it, “If I was to open up a newspaper right now, there’ll be a lot of negativity. [I’d prefer] a focus on a community leader or [someone who has] done a lot for the community. Have a good news story, have a good news day.”
To be clear, this does not mean that people want to avoid all hard news, but they would like it to be accompanied by news coverage showing progress, solutions and success.
Given these dynamics, our research suggests three strategies to re-engage news audiences in an environment where there is a persistent low trust in news and an increasing level of news avoidance:
Encourage audiences to contribute relevant visuals. This might be as simple as creating an online form and linking it to the news website to allow audiences to share their own photos and videos with accompanying details, such as captions and attribution information.
Harness the local “brain trust.” This can be done by building structured mechanisms for audience contribution, such as a standing ‘audience board’, by broadening the authorship of local columns, by facilitating community reporting workshops, or by creating channels for tip-offs.
Invest in local news topics and formats that audiences feel represent the biggest gap. Audiences want broader inclusion of local information topics, news that represents all members of the community and visual stories that are closely tied to the local area. Hyperlocal reporting that focuses on specific neighbourhoods or sub-regions can help maintain the relevance of local news.
As our research shows, many regional audiences are already contributing stories, sharing information and engaging with local issues in meaningful ways. The motivation to do so, in part, derives from their perception of a news gap. Many people filter and share a curated version of important news to help others in the community understand what is going on. This curation activity is especially common among audiences from multicultural backgrounds. They know some people from their language community are unable to access quality news, and they feel a responsibility to fill this information gap. Particularly among young audience members, there is a strong desire to share their local knowledge, and a willingness to participate in the process of news production related to their local area.
That confirms a critical need for news organisations to adapt to audiences’ shifting news habits and needs. This includes finding new ways of reaching and engaging audiences, as well as new ways of producing news and telling stories.
(360info/NS)
This article is republished from 360info under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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