Every day we are presented with ‘local’ television news, ‘local’ radio programmes and ‘local’ websites, dedicated specifically for you and people from where you are from. But who decides what local is and how do they establish it?
In a recent Coventry Conversation, speakers from within the industry were invited to give students and professionals an insight into how they decide what is put into their programmes and newspapers when the audience is ‘local’.
Coventry Telegraph Editor, Darren Parkin, said that the newspaper thinks that “community is local” and that he feels it is important that the newspaper is “prominent in the community”. He described newspapers as a “collection of knowledge” and in order to gather this knowledge, reporters have to “listen to what people want”.
Steve Orchard, the CEO of Touch FM, said that “local is in the eye of the beholder” and that what one person may see as local, another person may not. He also said that he believed the main factors which people use local radio for in particular, was the weather and travel, as well as “news which is relevant to me”. There is also a sense of emotion in which journalists need to “engage with the audience, have a sense of emotion and a sense of place”.
CEO of Mercia and Orion, Phil Riley, echoed the views of Steve Orchard, in that local has different connotations to different people. Although the radio station recently moved out of its buildings within Coventry, Riley remained certain that the programmes “will remain local”. Riley explained why the company had to move out of its buildings in Coventry and make the move to nearby Birmingham, with the main factor echoing a common theme across the journalism industry at the moment – a lack of money.
Someone who doesn’t have to worry about money so much is the Managing Director of BBC Coventry and Warwickshire, Jeremy Pollock who added that “speech radio is very expensive to produced”, although as part of the BBC, the radio station gets a proportion of money to help with costs. He also described how the radio station has a “utility switch on”, where “people turn on the radio to hear the weather and travel and then switch off”, much like what Steve Orchard had previously been describing.
Neil Fowler, the Guardian Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, took a different approach to the topic, showing how local media directly affected him. He described ‘local’ as “a word which means different things to different people. For me, it is what affects me and my family directly.”
The founder and editor of Litchfield Live, Ross Hawkes, said: “I don’t think local newspapers are dying – they are evolving!” while Andrew Adamson, the General Manager of the Tenby Observer, said: “It is very easy for a journalist to sit at a computer waiting for the email which has news”. He said that he liked to encourage his reporters to go out and find the news for themselves, again echoing the views of Darren Parkin, that you need to get out into the communities to find the news for yourself.
All in all, the Conference was a huge success, leaving students pondering what local meant to them, and media professionals considering how they would be able to make their broadcast programmes or publications reflect more of a local angle.
