With the demise local newspapers, many small news outlets like The Bellman have emerged across the country.
The Scottish Beacon is a project aiming at bringing some cohesion to our efforts.
JUN 18, 2024
By Eve Livingston | Photos by Iain McLellan
On 7 June, over 80 people from across Scotland and beyond gathered in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket Community Project to mark the UK’s first ever Indie News Week. The event was hosted by The Scottish Beacon – an awarding winning collective of 24 independent, community-based news outlets.
They came from a variety of backgrounds and organisations: freelance journalists mingled with independent publishers and trade unionists shared a stage with community activists and researchers. But each was there with a common purpose: to celebrate independent local and community-based news and to explore how to safeguard its future.
Indie News Week is an initiative by the Public Interest News Foundation designed to celebrate and highlight independent news outlets within their communities and beyond. Under the banner of ‘No News Is Bad News’, 45 publishers across the UK took part in local events between 3rd and 9th June.
Scottish Beacon founder Rhiannon Davies and PINF’s Head of Advocacy Hani Barghouthi opened Friday’s event by telling attendees about the campaign, with Bargouthi noting that recent years had been difficult for independent publishers like those in the Scottish Beacon, but that they continue to “offer a truly invaluable service to the communities they serve.”
It was a sentiment echoed by keynote speaker Richard Leonard MSP, who used his remarks to explore the relationship between media ownership and local power, noting that many large companies who dominate Scotland’s local news landscape “are answerable first and foremost to shareholders and not to communities.”
“In my view this reflects a quite concerning concentration of power,” he said. “This unequal distribution of wealth, ownership and power is not an accident or natural order and it can be challenged. Many people in this room today are challenging it”
Leonard went on to call for the Scottish Government to establish a support fund to help democratise media ownership: “these are local assets and they should be located in the communities they serve,” he said.
Community publishers themselves made similar points throughout the day, including in a panel discussion on the value of local news for Scotland’s communities. Scottish Beacon members Phyllis Stephen of the Edinburgh Reporter, Julian Calvert from Lochside Press, and Amanda Eleftheriades-Sherry from Clydesider magazine discussed their routes into starting up independent publications as well as the challenges and barriers they faced. The panel was chaired by Jill Keegan of The Scottish Community Alliance.
Each highlighted the need for increased government support, both financial and to level the playing field with large corporations: “The magazine could fill itself several times over; the challenge is bringing in the money to keep it going,” said Eleftheriades-Sherry, while Calvert noted the huge influence of tech giants and that it was “impossible to keep up when they keep changing the rules.” Stephen highlighted the specific issue of independent publications being blocked from statutory advertising and called on the government to “think positively about publications like ours having access to that.”
If you are interested and would like to read more, then visit The Scottish Beacon