In Britain, a Team Effort to Help Local News Survive

LONDON — When Lucy Ashton quit The Sheffield Star in 2009 to have children and work in public relations, she had already seen other reporters steadily leaving the paper as circulation and advertising fell, and figured she’d never see jobs being added again.

Now she has returned, as part of a new initiative with a simple goal: to help news organizations cover local government.

One of her first stories back showed the value of the initiative. At a Sheffield City Council meeting, female members of the board discussed how they had been the target of online harassment. Some of the abuse wasn’t just online — one described how her home had been broken into by a harasser.

“That wasn’t on the agenda,” Ashton said. “Without a reporter at that meeting, we wouldn’t have got that.”

In an unusual effort to revive coverage of local government, smaller news publishers in Britain can get a share of the BBC’s license fee, the annual charge paid by every household with a television that has sustained the BBC as local newsroom budgets have shrunk.

The money, 8 million pounds a year (about $10.2 million), is used by local newspapers and news sites to pay the salaries of additional reporters, like Ashton.

Publications across Britain can apply for the reporting positions, and so far about 90 percent of the 144 places have been filled. The reporters, who are expected to be experienced journalists, receive additional training from the BBC and are paid a minimum of 22,000 pounds each, a salary broadly comparable to other reporting positions at Britain’s regional news organizations. The reporters are hired by the newspapers for an initial period of about two years.

Matt Hancock, a member of Parliament and former minister for the government department responsible for media and culture, said he hoped the program would restore some vigor to the way local government was being covered.

Fewer journalists were challenging statements by politicians, he said, and reporters who once covered public officials were now often working for them in public relations jobs.

“You think, hold on, is that really how to have a vibrant democracy?” Hancock said.

The Local News Partnership, which began this year, is one example of how the business model for local news reporting is stretching in ways that would have seemed unimaginable not long ago, including financing from nonprofit groups and revenue from government resources. And the tech giants are also putting up money: Google announced this year that it would spend $300 million on supporting authoritative journalism, and Facebook has given $6 million to a community news project in Britain.

The partnership with the BBC has already yielded some significant stories. Among them are these:

— A sting operation by Yorkshire police to uncover child exploitation found that local hotels usually failed to ask any questions when men accompanied by underage women checked in.

— A local council in Merseyside had to answer for a glaringly incomplete road resurfacing project that paved around a parked car instead of trying to move it.

— Residents of the Cotswolds discovered that their neighbor, Jake Dyson, heir to the Dyson vacuum cleaner company, had been granted approval to build a helipad at his 16th century home.

Stories like these are helping to remind readers about areas that aren’t always being covered, said Jeremy Clifford, editor-in-chief of Johnston Press, a chain of newspapers that includes The Sheffield Star.

“It’s a really important investment in the lifeblood, our way of life,” Clifford said.

In return for the financing, newspapers cannot use the new positions as an opportunity to cut newsroom staffs, and must assign the reporters to cover local government beats. The BBC and dozens of media organizations are allowed to republish the articles, creating a kind of wire service for local news.

For the BBC, the arrangement also serves as a counter to critics in Parliament who say that it can crowd out commercial companies. Some have even argued that the TV license fee should be scrapped. There are no strict bench marks to determine whether the project has been a success. But organizers at the BBC and the News Media Association said they would measure how the stories were shared, how often they were picked up by other news outlets and whether attendance at meetings was affected by the presence of a reporter.

Local politicians are starting to “warm up” to the idea of having reporters at their meetings again, said Daniel Ionescu, managing editor at The Lincolnite, a digital news website serving Lincolnshire that has hired two reporters through the partnership.

Some officials were taken aback to see reporters at their meetings, said Calvin Robinson, one of the reporters. Others put on a performance when they know that a reporter is in the room, said Daniel Jaines, the other Local News Partnership reporter at the website. “If there’s a reporter there, they’re a lot more shouty,” he said.

Still, the financial pressure on local outlets continues to grow in Britain, where 136 newspapers shut down from 2012 to early 2018. In November, Johnston Press, whose chain of papers includes Edinburgh’s The Scotsman, entered administration, a form of bankruptcy. Facing 220 million pounds in debt, the company said its lenders would buy it out.

The partnership with the BBC will be no more than a Band-Aid over a gaping wound, said Roy Greenslade, a former editor and honorary visiting professor of journalism at City, University of London. “These companies are gradually going out of business because their business model is wrecked, totally and utterly wrecked.” Ionescu said he had seen the traffic to his site driven by Facebook slow, and advertising money increasingly spent on platforms like Google and Facebook rather than local online publishers.

He isn’t sure there is much more that can be done to stave off the growing power of huge technology companies.

“I don’t see what more they could do in order to tackle the advertising gap or the revenue gap,” Ionescu said. “The publishers who create everything, they just get the scraps.”