Hyperlocal Media and the News Marketplace

When the BBC began life in the 1920s, the ‘7 o’clock rule’ applied: it could only broadcast news between 7pm and 1am. Why? Press interests in Britain and elsewhere ‘saw broadcasting as a directly competitive medium’ to newspapers (Schlesinger, 1978, p. 15). The restrictions to reduce the impact of broadcasting competition were relaxed a little by 1927, when the corporation was allowed both to broadcast news earlier and to produce its own bulletins rather than rely on the newspapers’ ‘approved’ agencies (Briggs, cited in Schlesinger, 1978, p. 16; Barnett, 2011, p. 22). Jump forward 86 years: the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport declared that ‘as news moves online, local newspapers with five or even four figure circulations have found themselves going head to head with one of the world’s biggest broadcasters’. Is it, he asked a room full of newspaper journalists at the 2014 Society of Editors conference, ‘healthy for a publicly funded broadcaster to compete with commercial newspapers?’ (Javid, 2014).