The reinvention of the press in the digital age may begin with local journalism.

As the current pace of professional layoffs and the closure of newspapers, magazines and TV stations around the world continues, there is a similar trend forecasting that public information in the digital era will essentially be based on local journalism and, secondarily, on social platforms and the mainstream press.

The forecast is supported both by the crisis in the conventional press business model and by the evolution of the process of adapting our daily lives to the social, economic and political transformations generated by social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp.

The financial crisis of the conventional press is a fait accompli due to evidence that the contemporary media’s news agenda has lost profitability and no longer guarantees the financial health of journalistic companies. The digitalization of our daily lives is a process that has not yet been incorporated by the overwhelming majority of people, who remain conditioned by the agenda of the traditional press focused on the struggle for political and economic power on a national and global scale.

At the same time, large digital platforms, by exacerbating the effects of the news avalanche and information complexity, create an environment favourable to the multiplication of distortions such as fake news. As a result, our daily lives have become conditioned by permanent uncertainty about the information circulating on the internet.

The accumulated effect of the weakened mainstream press’ growing detachment from traditional audiences, the viral spread of misinformation and the proliferation of fake news, is causing a slow change in individual information habits. Ordinary people are putting aside complex issues in international and national politics and the economy to find out about everyday life problems in neighbourhoods, condominiums and small towns where direct knowledge facilitates the search for solutions.

Informative deserts

Research and experience with local journalism are multiplying in countries such as the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France. In the United States alone, approximately, 15 organizations are providing financial, editorial and administrative support to journalists who invested in producing local news after losing their jobs in the mainstream press. In Brazil, the migration of professionals to the community press motivated the emergence of the Atlas da Notícia (News Atlas — a data bank) project, which monitors the struggle of professionals and non-professionals to meet information needs in small cities in the interior of the country.

Entrepreneurs in local journalism, in different parts of the world, have already accumulated a reasonable amount of knowledge about how and which news generates more interactivity with the public. They have also found that the internet and social platforms are the fastest way to reach people. But the failure rate is still very high, giving rise to the phenomenon of information deserts, regions with just one or no local news outlets. The main cause of failures is the difficulty in obtaining revenues that make the project’s financial sustainability viable. This issue currently focuses the attention of most research on the so-called small press.

What researchers such as North Americans Victor Pickard, Robert McChesney, Damian Radcliffe and Simon Galperin discovered is that the solution to financial problems in local journalism lies in the social arena. People will support local information projects when they see how local news helps them solve everyday problems. This implies the abandonment of an information agenda dominated by the interests of national and international political and economic elites. Most researchers agree that when this objective is achieved, local journalism will have an irreplaceable position in the lives of communities and the development of regional social capital.

Information bubbles

There are also political factors that increase the importance of local journalism in preserving the democratic system. This is the case with the process of ideological polarization underway in most Western countries. This polarization is fueled by the worsening of socioeconomic inequality and the feeling of public insecurity caused by the increase in urban and rural violence.

When polarization occurs in an environment of informational uncertainty such as that caused by the proliferation of fake news, people tend to form bubbles or clusters, almost always on social networks. Political bubbles are mainly responsible for the radicalization of positions, as shown by Professor Cass Sunstein, from Harvard University (1).

The North American organization Democracy Fund states that local journalistic initiatives can act as an antidote against the formation of political bubbles and the increase in corruption in small cities. The organization states that these factors alone would be enough to justify the valorization of community news flows and would guarantee the strengthening of local democracy.

(1) See details in the book Going to Extremes, written by Professor Cass Sunstein and published by Oxford University Press in 2009