The UK government has finally announced the recipients of its Local News Fund after delays and complications affected the scheme, recognising that it needs to do better in the second round of the fund.
The £12m scheme was announced earlier this year as a two-year stimulation fund to strengthen local journalism and address the decline of community news, broken down as:
- £6m in year one for local media and third parties developing industry-wide tools.
- £1m in year two specifically for reviving news deserts, with up to £5m more for digital innovation and sustainability.
We surveyed the local news sector at the time and, while some were sceptical about the impact the fund may have, it was largely a welcome pot of money. We heard a range of views on how it could genuinely make a difference and how it should be rolled out. Most did not want the government to run it directly, citing administrative barriers and small team limitations as key concerns.
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Those concerns turned out to be well placed.
Ian Murray, Minister of State in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, confirmed to JournalismUK that the scheme attracted more than 200 applications and, as such, the project ran into considerable delays to complete.
JournalismUK has seen documents from multiple sources showing that online forms were missing critical questions and had to be corrected, while payments to publishers were delayed by up to three weeks.
