Is local journalism losing relevance, or just access?

The death of local journalism is a well-worn narrative. Across the UK, the US, and beyond, local titles are folding, consolidating, or becoming digital ghost towns. Print editions disappear. Newsrooms shrink. The number of reporters per square mile continues to decline. The surface-level conclusion is bleak but straightforward: people simply don’t care about local news anymore.

But this is a misreading of what’s actually happening. The issue is not that local journalism has lost its relevance. It’s that many people no longer have meaningful access to it, whether due to paywalls, platform design, geographic neglect, or the broader erosion of community information infrastructure.

To ask whether local journalism is still relevant is to ask the wrong question. The more urgent inquiry is whether local journalism is still reachable, visible, and funded in a way that allows it to play the role it once did, and could again.

The demand is there, but the supply is brittle

There is no shortage of appetite for local information. School closures, housing developments, NHS pressures, council tax rises, these are not abstract issues. They are immediate, consequential, and rooted in people’s daily lives. Surveys consistently show that people value local news more than national coverage when it comes to trust and utility.

What’s changed is the ability of local outlets to deliver that coverage. Decades of consolidation, cost-cutting, and digital restructuring have hollowed out the newsrooms that once kept a regular presence at local council meetings, magistrates’ courts, and planning committees. In many areas, stories go unreported not because they aren’t happening, but because there’s no one left to cover them.

This has nothing to do with reader apathy. It’s a matter of institutional fragility.

Visibility has migrated—but not always well

Local news consumption increasingly takes place on platforms not optimised for local discovery. Facebook, Google, and community apps filter information through engagement algorithms, not geographic or civic relevance. The stories that travel tend to be emotionally charged or incident-led, not slow, process-driven coverage of governance or infrastructure.

At the same time, local news websites are often slow, saturated with intrusive ads, and plagued by poor UX. For younger audiences in particular, the digital experience feels detached from the kind of seamless interaction they’re used to elsewhere.

None of this is a reflection on the importance of the content itself. It’s a structural issue: the channels by which local news used to be consumed, print editions, homepage visits, community events, have withered, while their replacements are still patchy, underfunded, or invisible.

The result is a perception gap: people assume nothing is being covered when, in fact, much of it is simply hard to find.

Paywalls and privilege

In principle, subscriptions offer a path to sustainability. But when applied to local journalism, they risk entrenching inequalities in access. Those who can afford to pay may remain informed. Those who can’t. or who don’t see the value upfront, drift further from civic life.

This dynamic undermines one of the foundational promises of local journalism: to provide a common informational baseline for a shared community. When local news becomes a premium product, its social function shifts, from a public service to a private asset.

This isn’t to argue against paywalls entirely. But it does mean publishers must balance commercial logic with editorial responsibility, and explore models, like tiered access, community sponsorships, or partnerships with public institutions, that reflect the civic role of local reporting.

Relevance isn’t lost, it’s underutilised

Local journalism still has immense relevance. It tracks power at its most proximate, mediates neighbourhood tensions, and helps people understand how wider trends like climate, inequality, and migration play out in their own backyards.

But it cannot demonstrate that relevance if it lacks the resources, visibility, and community connection to do so. The institutions may be fading, but the need for what they offered is more present than ever.

What’s required now is not nostalgia for what was, but reimagination of what could be: locally rooted journalism that is digitally agile, civically focused, and supported not just by market forces but by public will.

Don’t mistake invisibility for irrelevance

It’s easy to assume that if something isn’t being widely read, it’s no longer important. But in the case of local journalism, the inverse is often true: it’s not being widely read because it’s being under-supported, under-distributed, and overlooked by platform design and public policy alike.

Rebuilding that ecosystem means addressing access head-on. Not simply asking why people don’t read local news but asking what stands in their way. Technologically. Financially. Structurally.

Because if the headlines disappear, the issues don’t.