ABOVE: The Leamington Spa Courier - a local newspaper first published in 1828!
TURBULENT TIMES FOR LOCAL JOURNALISM
Such an ordinary house, in such an ordinary suburban street.
The only clue to the horrors that happened within is the single police car parked outside, and a tell-tale police tape stretched across the front of the property and wound around a neighbour’s wheelie bin.
This awful tragedy, in which a four-year-old boy suffered a violent death, also provides clues to what look like potential flaws in the news ecosystem, which should be of concern.
The little boy died on June 10th, and there was an initial “breaking news” flurry in which it was reported that a woman had been arrested, and some pictures appeared in the media of the house where the child died in Maidenhead, Berkshire.
But it wasn’t until much later that the public knew who the boy was, or that the person charged with killing him is his mother.
When Akanksha Adivarekar first appeared in court in Reading charged with murder, an anonymity order was made preventing the identity of the child being published.
Astonishingly, it seems there were no journalists in court.
The court order was wrong. It would have been correct to protect the identity of a child still living, but there was no need when the boy, tragically, was dead.
When freelance journalist and media law specialist Charlie Moloney turned up at the opening of last week’s inquest into the boy’s death, he was handed a court order under Section 45 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act, telling him he couldn’t report the child’s name.
Moloney did not accept this was correct and, on behalf of all local media, he made an application to the Judge in writing and managed to get the ban lifted, by now many weeks after the alleged murder.
Well done to him for standing up for the rights of journalists to report. We now know the little boy who died was called Agustya Hegishte.
He has a name.
Moloney tells me he thinks that there were no journalists in court on that first appearance by the mother. Or if there were, they certainly didn’t challenge a mistaken court order.
Either way, this is a defect in the reporting around this case.
Some stories were written from police press releases. And while I can’t be totally sure that no journalist ever went to the first court hearing, it is often the case these days that under-resourced news operations don’t send people to court.
Charlie Moloney, as a freelance, had gone to the inquest on his own initiative in case there was anything he could provide to client newspapers.
None of the local news organisations had bothered to go, or felt they had the resources to go. Luckily, Moloney was there and had the presence of mind to challenge the authorities..
Why does all this matter?
It matters because the public in the area where this happened have a right to know what the facts of the case are, as far as can be legally reported. It also prevents speculation.
It matters because court proceedings are part of the fabric of society and if journalists don’t go to court, they are never witnessing the administration of justice on behalf of the public.
It matters because if the judiciary make court orders that are wrong-headed, only the presence of journalists will ensure there’s a challenge.
It matters because one of the principles of British criminal system is that justice is not only done, but seen to be done.
In this area of Berkshire the main purveyors of local journalism would be the Maidenhead Advertiser, the Reading Chronicle and/or its sister publication the Windsor Observer, the Bucks Free Press, and BBC Radio Berkshire.
There used to be a Reach plc publication - Berkshire LIVE - but it was shut down as part of a wider strategy in which thirteen news websites were closed down and 450 jobs were lost in local areas around the country.
There also used to be a news agency called Hyde News and Pictures, which closed recently because it couldn’t make money from news publications they traditionally supplied.
You can bet that ten years ago, when the mother accused of killing her son first appeared in court, there would have been three or four journalists sitting in the press seats. And they would also have attended the inquest.
This microscopic zoom-in on one incident in a provincial English town helps illustrate the wider point that local journalism is under pressure all over the UK.
Now let’s zoom out and see how tough life has been for local and regional newspapers, whose readers are now predominantly accessing them online.
There has been a long story of decline in revenues for these publications, and a 70% fall in advertising revenue in a decade. Making profits in such catastrophic circumstances is an enormous challenge and leads inevitably to cutbacks.
The local weekly newspaper where I grew up and used to live was called the Leamington Spa Courier, and happily it’s still healthy, as you can see from the picture above.
There used to be a massive pull-out section in the middle, containing advertising for houses for sale and rent, the job adverts, displays from all the car showrooms and various classified ads.
The advertising revenue just kept rolling in for The Courier and local newspapers around the country.
But the moment of one of man’s greatest leaps forward, became a big leap backwards in revenue terms for the local newspaper industry
Along came the internet – and all the estate agents set up their own websites and moved their house sales online, as did many other previously lucrative advertisers.
The next body-blow to local news came from the emerging Big Tech companies.
Publishers were thumped hard by the likes of Google and Facebook, which began to dominate the digital advertising market and take a massive slice of the revenue.
Then the tech bros got less interested in news and so drove less traffic to news publisher sites. The news operations were too vulnerable to the capriciousness of algorithms they couldn’t control.
Google now claims that news is not particularly valuable to them, but it does support news in other ways. It helps news websites via its ad tech, which allows publishers to display ads and earn a share of the revenue.
The most recent punch in the guts was the introduction of AI into search. So, when you Google something, it doesn’t immediately give you links to news sites that have information relevant to your question.
Instead, it gives you an AI overview which may well satisfy your curiosity, so you don’t bother to read publishers’ sites.
And of course, the problem isn’t confined to Britain. In the UK and the USA combined, 8,000 journalist jobs disappeared in 2023 and about 4,000 in 2024.
Compared to 20 years ago, there are now 3,000 fewer newspaper titles in the U.S. and there are more than 200 counties in the States which are identified as “news deserts” because they have no local news service at all.
In the same period, more than 300 newspaper titles have disappeared in the UK.
The London Evening Standard – a newspaper that once sold 800,000 copies every day, has recently become a weekly print edition with a website — in one of the world’s most important capitals.
Many local papers have been bought by large chains which have had to cut costs and centralise operations.
Recently, the South London Press closed down its operation after 160 years in business, leaving another chunk of the capital without regular local reporting.
So what do local and regional publishers need to do to keep audiences engaged and their businesses profitable?
For me, the wrong way is greater syndication, using too many stories which are from outside the area, too many advertorials, too much “churnalism” and annoying readers with clickbait that is undernourishing.
One of the most ludicrous recent clickbait stories was the Manchester Evening News headline on its website: “UK Ryanair Boeing 737 flight crashes at Greek Airport.”
It’s well known in journalism that people click like crazy on stories about plane crashes, and this could have had anyone with friends or family flying to Greece feeling instantly concerned.
Once you clicked, you discovered that the plane landed perfectly normally, but a wing tip grazed a fence as it was taxiing.
That was not a plane crash. It was not a story. And it was not responsible journalism.
During the current football transfer window, thousands of fans fall prey to click-bait when they eagerly swallow “transfer agreed” headlines about their club.
When they click, they discover that someone from the youth team they hadn’t heard of has gone out on loan to Huddersfield. They’re not about to sign Erling Haaland or Cole Palmer.
In the long run, audiences will abandon you if you don’t invest in the journalism, because that’s what they need you for. Local journalism is a service to the public. It’s how people who run councils, businesses, local hospitals, and transport are scrutinised and held to account.
It’s an agent of community cohesion, it’s a source of vital information for citizens, and strong local journalism makes democracy healthier too.
Two different parliamentary committees have expressed concerns about the societal problems than can ensue from a weakened local news infrastructure. But politicians haven’t so far done much about it.
Local news can also enhance local pride. For example, I didn’t know until I read the Courier for the first time in thirty years, that Jess Carter, the Lioness’s defender who helped win the Euros last month, also grew up in the Warwick and Leamington area. The story was about the plan to create a mural to celebrate her exploits.
I think the key to success for many publications will be to do everything they can to connect to their audiences and engage with them, to utilise AI in a sensible way to free up reporters to get out and about, and to work out how they can expand the use of video.
In my opinion, they also need to find more ways than they do already to draw in paid subscribers for deeper levels of content.
And why doesn’t every local news publication have it’s own podcast about the issues affecting the area?
At a conference in Salford recently about covering crime and the courts, it was explained that news publications owned by Newsquest in the North West are now sending reporters out more often to cover the courts – the very thing that seemed to be lacking in the Maidenhead murder case mentioned above.
They do it by using AI-assisted reporters to deliver large numbers of short, uncontentious and “easy” stories so more journalists can get out on the road. This is fine as long as everything that’s ever published has journalistic oversight, which in this system it does.
Their publications, such as the Bolton News, have an element of subscriber payment and a system they call “hard-gating” where they can decide that particular stories or features need to be paid for.
North West Regional Editor Richard Duggan made the point that if you need to have one journalist covering a major court trial solidly for three weeks, that is a lot of resource for a small paper and you may ask readers to subscribe to keep up with the trial.
For local news publications, advertising revenue has been so brittle over the last decade that I can see the attraction of going further down the road of subscription to help invest in the journalism, in the way many national and international newspapers have done.
People sometimes say to me that they wouldn’t pay for news — and I tell them that they used to. They went into a newsagents and paid hard cash for their papers of choice.
The problem for the local news media is the presence of the BBC, which covers a certain amount of local stories on its websites — and obviously does it for free.
The Director General of the BBC, Tim Davie, has pledged to give more support to local news publishers by expanding the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme, which the BBC pays for. It shares coverage of local democratic decision-making with local partner news sites so that the benefits are shared.
He wants to elevate the scheme to also cover health authorities, police and crime commissioners, and regional mayors.
Davie has also implied that the BBC might make local video and audio content available to local partners too — all part of a social contract for public benefit. But the detail has yet to be worked out.
Like all areas of journalism, local news is going through a metamorphosis in which practitioners have to find ways of funding their editorial objectives.
But I’m sure that in December, when the trial of Akanksha Adivarekar, accused of the murder of her four year old son Agustya Hegishte, is due to take place, there will be several journalists in court to report on the proceedings.
So that justice can be done, and be seen to be done.
I’m a former reporter (now retired), and I too have intervened to get a wrongly applied Section 45 order overturned (though not in anything as serious as a murder case). Everything you say about the value of court reporting is true, but I fear it’s too late to restore what was a fairly successful system. “Justice being seen to be done” (or rather the threat of it because it was pretty randomly applied) was part of the punishment. That is evidenced by the number of instances of criminals or their families pleading with reporters to keep their names out of the papers. Sometimes the plea was made in a visit to the newspaper offices, or in the courthouse itself, accompanied on occasion with threats or bribes. Such stories were not apocryphal; I think almost every local reporter had one or more such tales to tell.
Sadly for local accountability, in politics, education and health care as well as the law, the media landscape has changed. Local reporting - which, as Tony Roe says in these comments, involves getting out of the office - is expensive. Who’s going to pay for it? I can see no workable business model to provide even a bare minimum level of accurate, independent local news to communities. Certainly we’ll never see the number of reporters in local newsrooms that there were when I was on the now defunct Walsall Observer or Mike Henfield plied his trade at the gloriously named Kidderminster Shuttle. Similarly local radio has barely any local content compared
The die was cast around the turn of the millennium when regional and local newspapers failed to respond to the growth of the internet. Thousands of jobs and hundreds of newspaper titles were lost. Claims of the democratising power of the web and the fanciful slogan “we’re all journalists now” could never deliver their promise. Meanwhile, the fake news industry arose, with AI crowning its ugly head, and cast its dark shadow over concepts of true and false.
The suggestions you highlight, Pete, are sticking plasters on a gaping wound, and in the absence of a better metaphor, I’d say local news is fucked.
Great piece. The days in BBC local radio of being told to wander down to the Magistrates court on a Monday morning to see if anything had happened we hadn’t been told about are long gone. But badly missed. We would always come back with something. My mantra has always been journalists need to leave the building and talk to people.