The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has published research it commissioned from Plum Consulting into recent dynamics of the press sector in the UK and globally. The research objectives were: (i) to assess the relationship between local news consumption and democratic engagement; and (ii) to review the different forms of government support, including subsidies, which the press industry receives in other jurisdictions.

The study found that the UK press sector has been significantly affected by the Covid-19 crisis that unfolded during the study. Plum says that there is no doubt that the Covid-19 crisis will have a “significant impact on future market structure, news provision and consumption – particularly for the local newspaper market”. The key findings set out below relate to the press sector’s performance before the Covid-19 crisis. Plum acknowledges that recent events will further exacerbate several of the negative trends observed.

The study summarises the key findings as follows:

• importance of journalism: local journalism has a key role to play in civil society; the decline of the local newspaper industry and resulting negative impacts on journalism reduce scrutiny of democratic functions; this situation is unlikely to change without intervention;
• correlations between news provision, news consumption and local democracy: local newspaper provision and consumption has a positive effect on local democratic participation over time; further erosion of local newspaper consumption is likely to damage this effect;
• shift to online: the shift to online consumption of news makes life harder for local newspapers as it impacts circulation and advertising revenue; newspapers have struggled to replace longstanding print-based advertising revenues with online incomes; online news is consumed in a different way to print news, as exhibited by a wider diversity of news sources which are accessible at low cost; news consumption from social media platforms provides easier access to a range of UK and international news providers and specialists, and there is an increased prevalence of low-quality news and disinformation, and online news;
• UK market: the UK local press market has an unequal distribution of titles and coverage; this irregular distribution is partly driven by easily identifiable factors such as urban status or proximity to a major urban area with the capacity to support a significant local advertising market; it results in areas with different susceptibilities to the further retreat of the local newspaper industry;
• market concentration: the UK regional and local newspaper market is concentrated; there are dominant suppliers and questions around the impact of increasing concentration and the resulting reduction in plurality;
• interventions in the UK: interventions have taken place in the UK market but the approach to these has been fragmented; this is also an issue seen in other jurisdictions;
• interventions in other jurisdictions: a diverse set of interventions have been seen and while inputs are defined, there has been limited evaluation of the projects supported; the scale of interventions is also small in terms of the industry, which makes it hard to assess the effectiveness of interventions and their suitability for the UK; and
• future interventions: interventions should be well designed for local journalism and newspapers to provide a key input to civic society and democracy; it is key to understand the nature of the problem to be addressed, options for intervention, the causal chain from inputs to expected outputs and outcomes and the mechanisms underpinning these, and evaluation mechanisms.

To access the research, click here.