In today’s Guardian, (and here with footnotes) George Monbiot asks: “I can think of only two local newspapers that consistently hold power to account: the West Highland Free Press and the Salford Star. Are any others worth saving? If so, please let me know.” His observation …. “Most local papers exist to amplify the voices [...]
Posts under ‘The media’
Why bringing politicians and the public closer to each other is important
Here’s Peter Levine on the study of deliberation: “The other main source of evidence in Neblo et al is a field experiment, in which people were offered the chance to deliberate with real Members of Congress. They were more likely to accept if they had negative attitudes toward elected leaders and the debates in Washington. [...]
An idea
Following the Daily Mail’s crusade against council employees using Facebook, Sunny, here, (in the comments) thinks it’s time for everyone to write to their local authority to find out how long council employees are spending on the Daily Mail website. This is what FoI requests are for, isn’t it?
News…. on a computer?
Apologies to anyone who thinks that a blog about local democracy has been hijacked and turned into one about how the internet effects newspapers. In defence of this focus, I’d argue that the way that local issues are reported (and how the internet changes this) is one of the big issues that will shape local [...]
A few links to be going on with
Just a few interesting things I’ve seen over the past few days that impact further on this councils v local newspapers issue. The first is that – when councils decide to factor in ad-revenue into their communications budgets, it adds a significant amount of uncertainty – because ad revenue can go down as well as [...]
Football phone-ins v consultation exercises
Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point. Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and [...]
Local newspapers v council newspapers redux
My recent sojourn in the west of Ireland has made me look at this whole newspapers v councils issue in a new light. Roy Greenslade, it seems to me, is thinking inside a very English box. On the Guardian blog, he accuses Darlington councillor Nick Wallis of disingenuity in his dealings with a local journalist [...]
Pravda Press
Having posted yesterday on the question of local council-produced newspapers, I’ve just seen a piece in London’s Evening Standard by Andrew Gilligan. “In the past few years, a total of nine London boroughs have ditched low-key, factual publicity material and started high-frequency, in-your-face tabloids, full of good news – even if, as we shall see, [...]
Transparency v Objectivity
As local newspapers retreat from providing anything like a good quality of news coverage, local authorities are wondering what their response should be. On the one hand, there’s the model that Birmingham City Council have taken – providing a much more user-friendly information gateway that is designed to provide resources to citizen-journalists and bloggers. Other [...]
Detoxifying big decisions
Last week, David Cameron offered a fairly populist ‘bonfire of the quangos’ proposal, with the implication that politicians would take back many of the toxic decisions that they had farmed out to overpaid bureaucrats. In the FT the other day, Philip Stephens questions the emphasis: “…broadcasting policy accounts for only about 5 per cent of Ofcom’s workload. [...]
