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More Jam Tomorrow · Wednesday · 39 min

Local Papers

"I think we're at the bottoming-out moment, where it's as bad as it gets and something new can be reborn from what remains." Local newspapers are dying. Hundreds of once-proud titles are now clickbait merchants with no original reporting. Jim Waterson, the editor of London Centric, and Rachel Matthews, a journalism specialist at Liverpool John Moores University and the former news editor of the Gloucestershire Echo, talk about what it was like to work on a traditional local paper, why they failed and whether new kinds of reporting can emerge from the wreckage. The presenter is Ros Taylor. I drew on a 2026 DCMS report on local news provision and local public service performance, a 2026 King's College London study on 'zombie' titles, Local news launches, closures and the state of play in 2025 by the Public Interest News Foundation and the 4 May 1995 edition of the Gloucestershire Echo, pages of which you can find at my Instagram and Substack. The editor of the Lymington Times speaks in a 1963 BBC documentary, The Life of a Local Newspaper, which includes clearly faked footage of a reporter attending a house fire. Rachel was a consultant for the Preserving the Local Newspaper Archive project funded by The National Archives. She co-runs the Oral History Society Special History Group on Press and Journalism, which seeks to preserve people's past and current experiences of local and regional print journalism through oral history interviews. You can support More Jam Tomorrow with a one-off tip at https://ko-fi.com/morejamtomorrow.

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show notes

"I think we're at the bottoming-out moment, where it's as bad as it gets and something new can be reborn from what remains."

Local newspapers are dying. Hundreds of once-proud titles are now clickbait merchants with no original reporting. Jim Waterson, the editor of London Centric, and Rachel Matthews, a journalism specialist at Liverpool John Moores University and the former news editor of the Gloucestershire Echo, talk about what it was like to work on a traditional local paper, why they failed and whether new kinds of reporting can emerge from the wreckage. The presenter is Ros Taylor.

I drew on a 2026 DCMS report on local news provision and local public service performance, a 2026 King's College London study on 'zombie' titles, Local news launches, closures and the state of play in 2025 by the Public Interest News Foundation and the 4 May 1995 edition of the Gloucestershire Echo, pages of which you can find at my Instagram and Substack. The editor of the Lymington Times speaks in a 1963 BBC documentary, The Life of a Local Newspaper, which includes clearly faked footage of a reporter attending a house fire.

Rachel was a consultant for the Preserving the Local Newspaper Archive project funded by The National Archives. She co-runs the Oral History Society Special History Group on Press and Journalism, which seeks to preserve people's past and current experiences of local and regional print journalism through oral history interviews.

You can support More Jam Tomorrow with a one-off tip at https://ko-fi.com/morejamtomorrow.

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