June 2008’s Carnival of Journalism asked whether journalism gets better the more local it is. Paul Bradshaw’s contribution — that online, all journalism is potentially local — prompted the objection that the question itself was wrong.
The case rests on where the news value of local comes from. Geographical proximity mattered because news was scarce and its sources were limited by distance, which in practice meant the local daily paper. Radio, television and then the internet removed the scarcity, and a news value built on it does not survive the change intact.
The proposed replacement was cultural proximity: coverage weighted towards people who share a language, an appearance and a set of preoccupations with the audience, rather than a postcode. The test case was Vancouver, a city with several large and distinct ethnic communities, where diversity rather than homogeneity is the norm, and where local therefore has to mean demographics, culture and values as well as geography.
The example given was a video piece by Anupreet Sandhu Bhamra, a student at the UBC School of Journalism, on changing attitudes to the elderly among Canada’s Asian community. It was reported in Vancouver, but it resonated nationally and across demographics — nobody had to live in the city, or in Canada, to be interested. Filing that under local news understates what it is.
The question worth asking, on this argument, is not whether local is better but what local means once distance has stopped rationing information.