More and more folk are joining the debate about the future of local journalism in the UK. Interesting piece about it on Wordblog by Andrew Grant-Adamson. Also encouraging to see that there's going to be a nation-wide conference about the subject following the NUJ's lobby of Westminster.
Jeremy Dear says: "...any look at local media shouldn't just look at how to protect existing companies but how to help journalists, local communities and businesses develop alternatives that may be specialist, small-scale, may be trusts, co-operatively run or simply locally-owned companies."
I really agree with that. I think there are thousands of down-hearted journalists out there who would grab a chance to create new organisations and new ways of delivering quality local news. It's really important to me that these new companies are not-for-profit and have some kind of community control. Community Co-ops would be my own preference, but maybe Community Interest Companies could do the job in a more traditional way.
Why? Because in a capitalist world 'locally-owned companies' become 'globally-owned companies' scarily quickly. If any of these thousand flowers keep on blooming, they'll soon be plucked by Gannett or some other bugger.