Re-asserting the Value of Local “News Presence” for Small-town News Outlets in a Digital era

The importance of a small-town news outlet maintaining a physical presence in the locality it serves has long been a taken-for-granted assumption. This has been challenged in a digital era, where cost-cutting measures such as centralisation have left many traditional news outlets under-resourced. The digital environment allows people to engage with local news without being in place and for reporters to be able to produce news from “anywhere”. This article, however, aims to reassert the significance of “presence” to a local news outlet’s legitimacy. Through an examination of the news practices within five Australian sustainable local newspapers, we argue “news presence” involves a combination of continuous visibility and sensibility within and about a place. Visibility in a geographic region is gained via place-based journalistic, infrastructure or community-level investment. Local sensibility is a news outlet’s accumulated local knowledge and a tacit understanding of a place, its people, social connections, history and cultural identity. Ultimately, we argue news presence is important to reassert at a time when local news has experienced rapid centralisation of resources, taking journalism out of place, and there has been an emphasis on expanding digital reach as both a solution and policy lever to support local news sustainability.