The UK local and regional media landscape consists of: a local newspaper market characterized by several large recent mergers, the concentration of ownership of the majority of titles among a small number of large publishers, and a relatively long tail of smaller and independent publishers; an independent community and hyperlocal news market that is fragile but becoming increasingly professionalized; regional television provided solely by the BBC and ITV, with a tier of local TV stations underneath that has experienced a series of mergers and extremely low audience engagement since the programme was launched; and a local radio market that balances the BBC’s dominance in public provision with a commercial sector characterized by three large players and a large number of small and independent broadcasters. While concentration in the local press is problematic and local television – particularly local television news provision – is effectively a duopoly, the local radio sector has a range of different providers, even if the market is dominated by a few companies.
The Local Press
The UK has over 1,000 daily and weekly local newspapers, including those that no longer publish in print form but which developed out of legacy print titles (not including independent community and hyperlocal titles, discussed below). The sector has been subjected to intense economic pressure in the twenty-first century, as classified advertising revenue moved online and as audiences for news increasingly moved online, diminishing print revenue that has only partially been replaced by rising digital revenues. The shock to the local news business model has been such that government inquiries have been launched to try to solve the problem of local public interest news sustainability after the closure of over 300 local newspapers between 2010 and 2019 (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2019a).
Apart from the significant closures, the larger local news publishers have embarked on a series of acquisitions of, and mergers with, smaller publishers. Research by the Media Reform Coalition has shown that, as of 2019, five publishers (Newsquest, JPI Media, Reach Plc, Tindle Newspapers and Archant) were responsible for 80 per cent of all titles, with the remaining 20 per cent made up by a long tail of 57 smaller publishers, ranging from significant publishers with limited regional scope to single-title independent publishers (Media Reform Coalition, 2019, p.8). The heavy consolidation among the largest publishers has also been found to have led to a situation where increasingly large portions of the United Kingdom are now essentially local newspaper monopolies, with a single publisher providing all local print news (and their online versions) in those areas (Ramsay & Moore, 2016).
Table 6 includes the number of titles as calculated by the Media Reform Coalition (2019, p.8), with revenue figures calculated for the present report from the most recent available company accounts. The revenue list is not fully complete due to the fact that the remaining unnamed 48 publishers are not obliged to publish annual revenue figures since they satisfy the definition of a ‘Small Company’ in UK company law. Some publishers (those towards the bottom of the table, such as Newbury News Ltd) qualify as small companies but publish revenue figures by choice. The complexity of local newspaper companies varies significantly – Reach Plc consists of over 200 linked corporate entities and Newsquest has almost 50 subsidiaries in the UK. The revenue figures for these two companies in Table 6 are aggregates of the revenues of their subsidiaries engaged in local news publishing (not including their printing arms). The combined revenue of the top four publishers represents 79.8 per cent of the total available revenue figures in Table 6, though this high value would certainly be diluted if revenue information was available for the remaining 48 publishers.
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Local Broadcast: Television
There are two tiers of regional and local television in the UK: the regional services provided by the BBC and the different Channel 3 licensees who comprise the ITV network; and a range of small local television stations launched after 2012 based largely in urban areas. Outside England, in the nations of the UK, the BBC provides localized versions of its flagship BBC One and BBC Two channels in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, including programming in Irish and Ulster Scots for the latter. The BBC launched a dedicated channel for Scotland (BBC Scotland) in 2019, which runs alongside the Gaelic-language BBC Alba service. While at the time of writing there are not yet any annual figures for BBC Scotland expenditure, the Corporation spent £9 million on BBC Alba in 2018 (BBC, 2019a, p.43). The BBC also provides significant funding to the Welsh free-to-air channel S4C, spending £22 million on the service annually (BBC, 2019a, p.61). English regional services are also provided across 12 areas. Each of the regional and national subdivisions also receive dedicated online coverage. Channel 3 (ITV and STV) consists of 15 regional licence-holders providing a mix of shared national and unique local programming in each area (there is also a single licence-holder for the national breakfast-time service. In practice, ITV Broadcast Ltd owns all 11 licences in England and Wales, while UTV Limited holds the Northern Ireland licence and STV Central and STV North own the Scottish licences. The remaining licence, for the Channel Islands, is owned by Channel Television Ltd.
News programming across these regional services is a duopoly: The BBC provides all news coverage to its regional services, while all Channel 3/ITV licence holders have their news programming supplied by Independent Television News (ITN). The size of this market is difficult to determine. The BBC reports show that £261 million was spent on local TV content across the nations and regions in 2018, but does not disaggregate spending on news programming within this figure, or make clear whether this figure includes news content costs at all. ITN does not break down its revenue figures to show programming spending.
A network of Local Television stations (Local Digital Television Programme Services, or L-DTPS, in legislation) was created by the UK government in 2012, and currently extends to 26 licence-holders located largely in urban areas in the UK (Ofcom, 2020a)[1]. This tier of broadcasters reaches very low audiences and concerns about financial viability have prevented a further expansion of the scheme and concerns about poor quality and the reduction of their obligations to supply news, mean that local television stations do not play a substantial role in the UK’s media landscape (BBC, 2018b). Ownership of the stations has merged, with ‘That’s TV’ group and ‘Made In’ group each owning several stations. Aside from ESTV (which owns the local TV licence for London), none of the owners reached the UK’s thresholds for revenue reporting, and so very little data on the size of the market is available. ESTV’s revenues for 2018 were £3.1 million.
Local Broadcast: Radio
As with national radio, local radio in the UK is split into public services supplied by the BBC, and a commercial sector dominated by Global Radio and Bauer Media. However, local radio in both analogue and digital form does include greater plurality than the national picture, and a significant amount of smaller and independent producers, though levels of concentration vary by region.
The BBC provides analogue and digital radio services across England and to the other nations of the UK, with £200 million spent in total in this sector in 2018 (BBC, 2019a, pp.38-47). English local BBC radio consists of 40 stations, including coverage of the Channel Islands (£124 million in 2018). Northern Ireland is covered by BBC Radio Ulster and BBC Radio Foyle, while Scotland and Wales receive national coverage in both English (BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio Wales) and in Gaelic and Welsh, respectively (BBC Radio Nan Gàidheal and BBC Radio Cymru).
According to telecommunications authority Ofcom’s list of analogue radio licences, commercial analogue radio in the UK consists of 283 stations across the UK provided by a total of 57 broadcasters, of which 40 are small and independent providers (Ofcom, 2020b). Research by the Media Reform Coalition has calculated that Global Radio (80 stations) and Bauer Media (50 stations) own 46 per cent of all analogue local commercial stations – strong market positions, but considerably less than they enjoy in the national market (Media Reform Coalition, 2019, p.20). Global Radio and Bauer Media are more dominant in the local digital radio market, however, with these companies owning 67 per cent of 370 local digital stations: 138 stations owned by Global Radio and 112 by Bauer Media. 62 companies (including 32 independents) own the remaining 120 stations (ukdigitalradio.com, n.d.). Concentration varies across regions, however, with Global and Bauer owning 87 per cent of local digital stations in Northern Ireland and 85 per cent in the North of England, but just 43 per cent in Greater London and 36 per cent in Wales (Media Reform Coalition, 2019, p.21).
As noted in section E1, market concentration in terms of revenue is difficult to determine in the UK radio sector at both the national and local level due to the lack of revenue figures for smaller broadcasters and difficulties in disaggregating local and national revenues for the larger publishers, particularly Global Radio and Bauer Media. Ofcom estimates UK local commercial radio revenues for 2018 to be £129 million, though this does not distinguish between analogue and digital services. Commercial sponsorship figures as reported by Ofcom, as discussed in section E1, do not disaggregate national or local portions of the £107 million total (Ofcom, 2019f, slide 10).
An additional tier of radio broadcasting is supplied by community radio stations. Ofcom records 296 community stations across the country (Ofcom 2020c). Most are very small enterprises run largely on voluntary labour, with a combined sector income of approximately £12 million in 2018 and a median income per station of approximately £30,000 (Ofcom 2019, slide 14).
The local radio news market consists of the same duopoly as national radio: the BBC provides news across its outlets, while commercial radio stations broadcast news produced by Sky News Radio. As with the national market, since Sky Plc does not report the portion of its expenditure on, or revenue derived from, radio operations. BBC funding figures for news provision also do not specify how much of the £355 million total is allocated to radio. The most that can be said is that the local radio news market is concentrated in the sense that it is almost entirely provided by two organizations.
Community and Hyperlocal News Media
The Independent Community News Network (ICNN), a support network for the sector, reports more than 300 community and hyperlocal news sites in the UK (Centre for Community Journalism, n.d.). It is, however, difficult to confirm the size of the market since there is such variation in types of hyperlocal entity, and not all are profit-seeking enterprises. Previous estimates have put the number of hyperlocals in the UK at 550 (Ramsay & Moore, 2016, p.40). A 2016 survey of hyperlocals found that one-third made money, but only one in ten reported generating more than £500 per month in revenue (Williams, 2016). While this is a valuable addition to local news pluralism in the UK, the sector remains small and financially precarious. It therefore only very partially offsets the concentration in the local newspaper sector.
[1] The Ofcom list of publishers includes the licence-holders for Grimsby and York, both of which have ceased broadcasting.
