UK local news database

The following page presents what, to the best of my knowledge, are current local news print and digital titles, by both legacy and independent publishers, in existence in April 2023 in the United Kingdom.

The primary goal of this site to offer a current understanding of news deserts based on the geographic district of coverage of an outlet. The location associated to each news title relates to the office location or the title of the digital or print paper/site. A title has been associated to one, and sometimes several, Local Authority Districts (LADs), which are official administrative boundaries provided by the Office for National Statistics. Local Authority Districts are far from being a set list, as they are updated frequently by official bodies. The ones used here build on the most recently available ONS data, which goes back to December 2022. In this data, there are 375 LADs in the UK, and they vary in geographical size and demography. As of April 2023, 6 districts have been merged into 2: Copeland, Carlisle and Allerdale have become Cumberland, and Barrow-in-Furness, South Lakeland, and Eden have become Westomorland and Furness. This has been corrected in my data, however the visualisations struggle to reflect these updates, as they are built on outdated data.

The data here is used is the result of a long process of data sourcing and interpolating. A few key sources include an upcoming dataset from the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF), the data behind the 2021 report Who Owns the UK Media report by Media Reform Coalition, and the launches and closures of local news titles mapped by PressGazette. Particularly, PINF has been instrumental in helping me resonate around methodological decisions that had implications on the final dataset.

Looking at presence of titles within Local Authority Districts, by mapping the office location or title supposed area of coverage, is by no means the only way to map news deserts, and my work at University of Surrey focuses on tackling different ways to measure them. For example, one can look at circulation of titles, tackling the consumption aspect of the news ecosystem. Another way to assess consumption is to look at news media engagement, and that is something I will be doing in my PhD. But what to me, and many more of those who are in this field, is perhaps the most challenging, puzzling, and interesting aspect is that of news content: what is the actual area of coverage of a news title, based on its content? Is news content provided by local titles actually relevant to their local audiences? My PhD focuses on explaining news deserts by looking at them from different perspective, namely content, audience, and said area of coverage. I try to answer the following questions: who is talked about in the news, and who is not? Which local communities are neglected? Do neglected communities bear resemblance, by means of deomographic profiles and economic activity, or local media history?

The first step in this process is typically to define the local in local news, something that is far by having consensus in the literature. But, for the purpose of this page, local news are titles who appear to target a local community.

Titles, Publisher, and Newsroom offices

The map on the left shows the number of titles or the number of publishers in each Local Authority District based on the “area of coverage” of an outlet. Overall, there are 1152 digital and print local news titles in the UK. In this count, a paper which has a different name online to its print companion has been counted separately. This is a crucial methodological decision at this point, as several large news publishers, including National World and Reach PLC, offer online news sites which encompass the content of several print titles (usually, traditional papers in that area). For example, SussexWorld incorporates 15 different titles from East and West Sussex, including for example the Worthing Herald and the Bexhill and Battle Observer. A disclaimer, however, that such instances are not always easy to discover, and that thus lack of local domain knowledge and transparency on these sites on how they get their content or how they are structured might mean I have missed a few.

The titles are spread across 335 districts, meaning that 10% of LADs are news deserts. Furthermore, 83 LADs have only one title, making them vulnerable to becoming a news desert, and generally suffering from a lack of pluralism. Overall, the average number of titles per district is 3 (the median 2, and the standard deviation 3.4). Most districts then are covered by a handful of titles (64% have between 1 and 4 titles), and a few instead have a large number of news providers. At the top we find Cornwall, with 33 titles owned by 7 different publishers. It is followed by East Devon, with 17 titles and 6 publishers. Dorset is instead the LAD with the largest number of publishers. It has 9 unique providers, spread across 12 titles. Bristol is another case of high publisher to titles ratio, with 7 publishers for 9 titles. At the top, in terms of this ratio, we find East Riding of Yorkshire, which has 5 titles owned by 5 different publishers. Hackney, Isle of Wight, Mid Devon, and Mid Ulster also have high publishers / titles ratio. The worst instead is Watford, where Newsquest owns 12 out of 13 titles in the district.

Up to this point I have focused on the “area of coverage” of an outlet. Here below, the map on the right ignores the area of coverage and instead maps the location of newsrooms across the country. Out of 1152 titles, we know the office location of 558 titles. Some of these share the same address, as there are 362 overall newsrooms in the country. Whenever titles share offices, such as in the case of Ashfield Chad, Mansfield Chad, Worksop Guardian, and Sheffield Star, this is often because they are under the same owner (in this case National World). However, this is not the only case: in Milton Keynes, the Banbury Guardian (National World), and The Bucks Herald (Newsquest) share the same address.

Ownership

Media Reform Coalition (MRC)’s Who Owns the UK Media is a great, regularly published, report on ownership of media in the country, and the data behind it has been instrumental to the creation of this dataset. To that dataset, I have added independent local titles mapped by ICNN, as well as updated the dataset with closures and launches of new titles by PressGazette. This essentially enlarges and updates the latest MRC dataset, from 2021. The findings though echo what already appeared in their report: the local news market is very concentrated, with 47% of titles owner by just the three largest publishers, Newsquest (233 titles, 20% market share), Reach (178 titles, 15% of market share), and National World (137 titles, 12% market share). These are followed by a long tail of small publishers, oftentimes owning just a single title.

A more specific question, one that has been raised in the literature, is that of lack of pluralism in districts. So from the perspective of publishers, in how many “monopolies” is each publisher the sole news provider? From the second chart we see that National World, despite being the third largest publisher, has the highest number of monopolies (29 districts), closely followed by Reach (27) and Newsquest (20).

Where are these districts located? And overall, where are different publishers present? The first map here below helps understand the district presence of different publishers. By searching for the publisher of interest, you can see the percentage of titles owned in any given district by that publisher. The second map shows where the monopolies are, and who is the sole publisher within them.

Demography

As part of my research on news deserts, I am also looking into demographic factors and media presence correlates. As an initial test, I mapped the number of households in a LAD based on data from the recent 2021 Census (which is only for England and Wales, so I left Scotland and Northern Ireland out). As the trend line shows, there is a positive correlation between population size and local news availability. Nonetheless, there are variations worth noting. For example, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole is a district with nearly 174 thousand households, and there is only one local news provider there. Mid Devon and East Devon instead, despite much smaller populations, have a relatively much larger number of titles.

Data

Here is the data behind the charts.