Written evidence submitted by Bournemouth University

Fostering innovation in UK’s local journalism: findings and suggestions from a nation-wide solutions journalism campaign

Submission to the Sustainability of Local Journalism Enquiry, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, UK Parliament – March 2022

By Professor An Nguyen & Professor Daniel Jackson, Bournemouth University

Executive Summary

This submission focuses on how the government can support local news outlets to develop sustainable business models, through reflections on successes and failures of an ongoing campaign to introduce the innovative form of solutions journalism into more than 50 local newsrooms across the UK. The campaign is at the core of an action research project funded by the UK Research and Innovation. Based on the evidence so far, we will demonstrate how innovation is a “chicken and egg” conundrum for local newsrooms: as the cash cow is depleting, the financial and other resources needed for innovation are simply not there. Based on that, we will call on the government to set up a nation-wide local journalism innovation fund, with some suggestions on what problems it should address and how it might work.

Introduction

1. Local journalists play a vital role in informing local communities about things that matter to them; connecting people to each other in their geographical community; scrutinising those in power; representing communities to themselves and the larger public sphere; and advocating for communities on issues of public concern. Yet, it is well documented – and is the premise of this parliament enquiry – that local journalism in the UK is facing a challenging and uncertain time. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought this to a new level, and it remains difficult to predict how things will pan out for local journalism in the years ahead.
2. One thing for sure, however, is that the short- and long-term sustainability of the industry will depend substantially on its capacity to innovate and reform itself to engage local audiences for the good of their communities. In this submission, therefore, we will take an innovation perspective and use evidence from a solutions journalism trial to respond to one of questions of this enquiry: “How can the government support local news outlets to develop sustainable business models?

The Solutions Journalism for Pandemic Recovery Campaign

3. Journalism, due to its professional ideology as a fourth estate, has a long-established negativity bias, focusing excessively on “bad news” than good news. While this has been essential for democratic life, it often leaves people with a depressing, demotivated state and a pervasive sense of hopelessness. This has led to a strong public demand for more constructive forms of journalism that aim to neutralize the negativity bias. Of several branches of constructive journalism, solutions journalism (SOJO) has emerged as the most popular one. SOJO is a rigorous, evidence-based news reporting approach that focuses reporters’ attention on both societal problems and solutions to societal problems (i.e. how people respond to societal problems). An established body of evidence from both industry and academic research shows that SOJO can make concrete and material positive impact on affective and behavioural responses. This includes an increase in positive audience emotions (e.g. hope and optimism), engagement with the news, public knowledge and self-efficacy[1]. In sum, SOJO has both commercial and public service benefits, facilitating the “democratic promise” of journalism. However, while SOJO has been successfully integrated into newsrooms in the US and parts of Europe, it has not been mirrored in the UK, except for a few national news organisations (e.g. BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian).
4. In the context of the pandemic, with funding from UK Research and Innovation’s Covid-19 response scheme, we set forth to introduce SOJO into the UK local news industry through a large-scale research-informed Solutions Journalism for Pandemic Recovery campaign. Working with the New York-based Solutions Journalism Network and the Association of British Science Writers, we provided a series of practical training webinars and then one-to-one mentoring for local reporters and editors to produce, as part of their daily work, constructive news on initiatives and efforts to recover from the pandemic. The aim was to use SOJO to provide communities with the positive energy and practical insights they needed to deal with the pandemic’s impact in an informed, inspired and motivated manner. We chose local journalism for this initiative precisely because we anticipated that local newsrooms would need such professional support more than the well-resourced national news outlets. In total, more than 50 local journalists across four of the UK’s largest local media groups and beyond have been trained on the job, under the mentorship of 10 dedicated senior journalists with rich experience in producing SOJO for national news outlets. 

The campaign started under two favourable conditions.

5. On the industry’s side, there was a clear enthusiastic support from the executives of the participating news companies. Industry leaders have been taking actions to shift their strategic focus from maximising audience reach that can instantly monetised though advertising, to building loyal audience engagement through quality content that can be turned into subscription revenues[2]. We felt this through our discussion with several news executives: there was a palpable hope that SOJO could be an effective tool to serve this new “quality content” strategy. In fact, early planning meetings with the editorial director of a major local news firm included some discussion on whether, and how, to use the campaign’s output as premium content for paid subscribers.
6. On the audience’s side, our pre-campaign research – interviews with 59 members of local news audiences and a national survey with 2015 UK adults – shows an overwhelming demand for more positive news that could uplift the spirit of a pandemic-fatigued public. There was a clear appetite for solutions-focused news that inspires and empowers people to take action to deal with the social, economic and mental health aftermath of the pandemic[3]. This was further reinforced when some of the first stories in the campaign made immediate successes, attracting very high audience engagement and making to their respective news sites’ most read, commented or shared stories.
7. Soon after it started, however, the campaign veered off course as mentees started to struggle to fully participate. It quickly became clear that for many, integrating an innovation such as SOJO into the newsroom would be an uphill battle. The initial enthusiasm waned as editorial developers faced the reality that most of their newsrooms were not quite prepared for this initiative. We had to decide to abandon the campaign’s original target of two solutions story per month per reporter. In fact, most mentees ended their six months of mentoring with two or three solutions-oriented stories, and many of these, on rigorous vetting, did not strictly qualify as fully-fledged SOJO.

What, then, went wrong? Our field notes of the campaign and in-depth interviews with about 30 participating mentees, mentors and editors so far have revealed several key impediments to the integration of SOJO into the daily routines of local newsrooms:

8. Local reporters lack the time to invest in any kind of investigative or in-depth journalism, including solutions journalism. This is directly linked to long-term decline in the sector including huge staff layoffs[4]. Local newspapers are now expected to produce a similar product but with a fraction of the staff they previously enjoyed, with consequent effects on journalists’ workloads. Amongst those we spoke to, 6-15 stories a day was the norm. Dropouts were not uncommon. There were cases in which mentees spent their own time over weeks on doing a solutions story, only to give up in the end as they could not carry on under immense pressures. 
9. For the larger news organisations we worked with, metrics are built around and institutional incentives arranged to support the production of large volumes of content and page views. Journalists are, therefore, incentivised to produce stories that are quick to write and/or are likely to maximise page views. Our participating reporters told us that this has deleterious consequences for the quality of news, because they would have to prioritise certain soft news topics (such as crime and property) and other click bait and non-local content. That also means that promising news approaches such as solutions journalism have to take the back seat in newsroom operations.
10. Editors, who play a pivotal role in the success (or not) of embedding solutions journalism in the newsroom, themselves are under immense pressure for resources, eyeballs, clicks and profits. A small number – particularly those with a less commercial orientation – supported their journalists to produce solutions stories, but most left journalists to pursue this innovation on top of their existing workload. Some supportive editors had to make some “creative manoeuvres” within their own restraints to allocate time for their reporters to participate in the SOJO campaign. One, for example, allowed her reporter to have a separate SOJO day on his first day of return from annual leave, because she could continue with the temporary work pattern that was in place to cover his holiday absence.

The critical need for a public-funded innovation fund for local journalism

While the above observations are specific to our SOJO campaign, they reflect a general “chicken and egg” conundrum that the UK’s local news industry is facing.

11. On the one hand, to be socially and economically sustainable in the face of an endless flow of disruptive technology and business innovations, they need to be at the forefront of innovative practices. This in turn requires a resilient working environment where members are empowered to be confident, capable and venturesome in fostering new ideas, technologies, practices and/or products. It must create and promote incentives and facilitators for individuals to go outside the box to properly engage with the new.
12. On the other hand, the very problem that innovation aims to tackle – the decline of local journalism – is itself a tremendous barrier to innovation: it leads to a risk-averse attitude towards journalistic innovations that might not have an immediate business benefit but can sustain their socio-democratic, and thus commercial, values in the long term. The good will for innovation exists at all levels – from executives in the back office to journalists on the frontline – but there are no incentives for it in our local newsrooms, where reporters and editors alike simply do not have time and space to even contemplate new practices – let alone to properly try, implement and adopt them. In our case, even though we started on a relatively good footing and a substantially subsidised adoption cost (in the form of £60,000 external funding for training, mentoring and consultancy), the campaign did not end as fruitfully as planned due to the challenges described above. As one mentor commented:

I think the big picture issue is the broken business model of traditional media especially at a local level. SOJO is one of many ways that audiences could be served better, which would start to address the trust and revenue issues - but we are not at a point where legacy media are prepared to reimagine how journalism is done. They are firmly aboard a sinking ship. They are trying to patch the leaks, but it will keep sinking without more systemic change.

13. This “sinking ship” conundrum must be placed at the centre of news and democracy policymaking. It is critically important that we consider and treat local journalism – and by extension, local news – as a public good when it comes to public policy. This means recognising that the market mechanism cannot provide what society needs in sufficient quality or quantity. What is required, we argue, is a set of policy interventions to stimulate the trial and testing of new and emerging news practices that have the potential to foster a sustainable pluralistic local news provision for the public interest.
14. Such interventions might come in many forms and shapes – e.g. tax incentives, charity status for news organisations, online regulations to limit the impact of giant platforms on journalism, promotion of resource-sharing schemes such as the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporter project and Shared Data Unit. Here, we would stress the critical need for a public-funded permanent innovation fund for local journalism. Following the Cairncross Review, the government set up a £2m Future News Pilot Fund that did produce some very tangible outcomes, but that is far from enough. Nesta, the charity that administered this pilot fund on behalf of DCMS in 2019-2020, realised through its 178 applications that the seed for news innovation is everywhere but they could “only fund the tip of the iceberg.”[5] Similarly, an earlier Media Standards Trust report found that “the opportunities for innovation and experimentation are considerable” but incentivisation is needed “if it is to grow and become sustainable”[6].

In a hope for a much more nuanced approach than what is currently in place, we propose the following:

15. The innovation fund should provide a steady long-term investment rather than a one-off project, in ways similar to public funding available for academic research through UKRI. Such a fund could be paid for by a levy on the largest digital intermediaries and/or through existing culture, community and democracy development sources. Here, the Cairncross Review recommendation of establishing an Institute of Public Interest News based on shared revenues from the big search and social media platforms, which the UK government has rejected, should be revisited and re-examined as a vigorous option. The UK lacks a diverse funding landscape, especially when it comes to news and democracy, and the government would play a key role here.
16. Innovation funding for the legacy local news industry must support them to not simply maintain their business relevance and sustainability but to do so through experimentation with innovative, public-interest journalism practices. That would prioritise new business models as well as new news gathering, storytelling and delivery methods that counter both economic decline and democratic deficit. The good news is that, as our conversations with local news editors and executives show, there is at least a clear recognition of this dual purpose and a strong desire to do so.
17. Any innovation funding decision must ensure that the proposed innovation plan would be allowed a relatively autonomous space, where it can be tried and tested without being dictated by existing practices and short-term priorities. That does not always need to be completely separated from the environment into which it is intended to be introduced. Some schemes, for example, have been successful by embedding a dedicated person/team as an independent attachment to current operations. The person/team is paid by the fund but is formally employed by the news organisation to only experiment and implement the innovation at stake. This will help to effectively address the “chicken and egg” dilemma above.
18. In addition to supporting the legacy news industry to ensure their sustainability, an innovation fund should also create an ample playing field for the many potential players that are emerging in the huge digital transformation we are witnessing. That would include hyperlocal news ventures – those online news services targeting small geographical areas, such as a specific town or village – and the platforms that support them. Many of these are digital natives and are therefore not dictated by old methods, models and restraints. Their growth would mean improving the diversity of local news provision, especially in areas that are often ignored or underserved by the legacy media. It should be remembered that up until recent years, 57% of the UK population was still not served by any local newspaper[7] and, as of 2021, three companies controlled 70% of local news circulation in the UK.[8]
19. Finally, there must be follow-on funding to bring successful innovation beyond the organisations where it was originally experimented and implemented. It should promote and foster collaboration within and between the legacy news industry and the independent community media sector. Here, again, the role the proposed Institute of Public Interest Journalism might be a key.

Who we are

Dr An Nguyen is Professor of Journalism and Co-Director of the Centre for Science, Health and Data Communication Research at Bournemouth University. He has over 20 years of studying the diffusion and impact of digital news technologies, including the fear-driven defensive innovation culture and the “chicken and egg” dilemma of the legacy media in the face of the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He is the Principal Investigator of the UKRI-funded COJO for COVID Recovery Project that generates the core evidence of this submission. His other research interests include news consumption, development journalism, and news communication of science, health and data in the post-truth era.  

Staff profile: https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/anguyen

Dr Daniel Jackson is Professor of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. His research broadly explores the intersections of media, power and social change, including the construction of news, political communication, the mediation of sport and the dynamics of civic culture in online environments. He has edited five books and is co-editor of the election analysis reports, published within ten days of major electoral events. Daniel is former convenor of the Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group and is the Deputy Director for the Centre for Comparative Media and Politics Research at Bournemouth University.

Staff profile: https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/jacksond#overview