Local Media Survival Guide 2022: How Journalism Is Innovating to Find Sustainable Ways to Serve Local Communities Around the World and Fight Against Misinformation

"Local news media are defined by how they serve their community. It's 'local' journalism if it brings a geographically constrained audience together with the news that the audience needs, news that empowers people to tell their own stories to one another and to the world at large."

This guide, published by the International Press Institute (IPI), shares the experiences and lessons of local media practitioners around the globe. It explores how new digital start-ups and traditional media in transition in different circumstances understand and meet the challenges they face. By comparing and contrasting experiences from different parts of the world, the guide provides both lessons and warnings about the need to understand how different regional and national conditions impact success. Based on the findings, the report offers practical recommendations for news media leaders, media support organisations, and the IPI global network to bolster the work of local media organisations.

The guide is based on in-depth discussions with more than 35 journalists, editors, media leaders, and entrepreneurs who are transitioning legacy media and creating new local-media voices in the emerging and developing regions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. It also draws on readings of their comments and self-reflections in blogs, speeches, and articles.

As stated in the publication, "Across the world, journalists, editors, and publishers are working to build (or, in some cases, rebuild) a dynamic, responsible media that engages their communities in news and information that meets their local needs and wants. The media they're creating leverage the trust of localism to empower people within communities to tell their stories to one another, to give a voice to the rights of their community, and to fight the spread of mis and dis-information. It demands a new way of thinking built off a strong journalistic mission. Where once local news media brought the world home to their communities, now their reporting is empowering their communities to talk to one another - and to the world. It's inside-out reporting replacing the old outside-in."

There is also a high demand for local news - and for local news outlets that can share it - in local settings where there is often information scarcity. And although technology can offer increased opportunities to reach local audiences, these much-needed local news outlets face many challenges: "Local communities often lack the resources to support their own local media. Information pollution has generated distrust of all journalism. There's a growing authoritarianism bringing deliberate strategies of media capture. And in some countries, digital opportunities are constrained by potential readers' lack of access to mobile data or stable web connectivity. These challenges demand supportive interventions."

Strategies that can help local news outlets are discussed in this guide around a number of key themes focusing on: identifying one's local community, challenging authority, experimenting and innovating with content to find out what engages their audience, and applying different business models that have worked in settings with smaller, resource-constrained audiences. Strategies are discussed by drawing on the experiences of a wide range of news outlets (see list of case studies, below). They include, for example, Local Call, an online news site that provides human-rights-centred coverage of communities, including of the occupation of Palestine, in Hebrew, bringing an anti-occupation voice to Hebrew-language media. From Latin America, examples include: Ojoconmipisto.com (Watch Out For My Money), a native digital media outlet with the aim of monitoring public money in the municipalities of Guatemala; and El Surtidor, which was born in 2016 as a Facebook page and caters to communities in a region that lacked news information by using graphic elements to tell stories affecting the communities, from climate change to drug use to COVID-19. Reference is also made to Khabar Lahariya in India, which offers hyper-local watchdog journalism with a feminist lens. The digital rural network employs women journalists from socially and economically marginalised groups to report on issues that directly impact their communities. Another example highlighted is Scrolla, a South African news startup with channels on data-free messaging platforms that produces a blend of tabloid-style news and investigative pieces for mobile phones, with an emphasis on providing content to those with lower income and education levels.

Based on the discussion, the guide identifies five measures the global media community or its supporters could take to build a thriving local news environment:

• Embed a vision and sense of the mission that meets the audience/community's needs with an appropriate journalism focus.
• Level up access to information, training, network support, and funding essential to the construction of sustainable local media.
• Generate a global network to prepare local media to take on challenges, which will not only allow them to share, understand, and learn from one another's steps and stumbles but will also give them access to expertise, mentoring, and community support.
• Ensure that donors and the media support community (particularly in developing countries and regions) understand that the future is local.
• Leverage local trust to rebuild confidence in news media and lead the fight against misinformation and disinformation.

To clarify what has to be done, the report suggests a number of practical steps. These steps involve: developing skills and knowledge; helping local media know and understand their audience; exploring collaborations around the wider use of local content; creating a fund for local media; building a global network of local news media supporters, linking fact-checking experts with local media; creating opportunities to share experiences; and building a local new awards programme that recognises the sector.

The guide also features a section offering detailed case studies of some of the media outlets referred to in the discussions. Each case study includes information on the media outlet's background, their audience, and their value proposition, as well as information on how media products are distributed, the structure of the team, their business model, how they build trust and tackle misinformation, and how they see their future. Case studies on the following media outlets are offered:

• 263Chat - Zimbabwe
• ABO - Ukraine
• Citizen Matters - India
• Convoca - Peru
• Daily Dispatch - South Africa
• El Debate - Mexico
• El Pitazo -Venezuela
• El Surtidor - Paraguay
• Khabar Lahariya - India
• Kloop - Kyrgyzstan
• Limpopo Mirror - South Africa
• Local Call - Israel/Palestine
• Nyugat - Hungary
• Ojoconmipisto - Guatemala
• Radio Al Balad - Jordan
• Rayon - Ukraine
• Red/Acción - Argentina
• Scrolla - South Africa
• Suno India - India
• The Centrum Media - Pakistan
• The News Minute - India

Click here to access the online version of this guide.
Click here for the 83-page guide in PDF format.