Former Dominion Post reporter Talia Shadwell was one of the reporters in the British scheme that’s the model for a new one here which puts reporters into the regions where there aren’t enough of them. She tells Mediawatch it’s working well in the UK, but all parties will need to commit to it here.
Talia Shadwell on her patch in the London borough of Kensington. Photo: supplied
Last week RNZ and newspaper publishers unveiled a new scheme to put eight reporters into regional newsrooms: the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
It’s a pilot programme for 12 months in which reporters will work in places where there’s a shortage of them to cover local news.
The Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA) said recently that newsrooms in the regions have shed at least a quarter of their reporters in just the past five years.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service is based on a scheme of the same name in the UK, overseen by the BBC.
New Zealander Shadwell - a former Dominion Post police and crime reporter - spent two years as a Local Democracy Reporter.
But she wasn't in any remote regional outpost with patchy media coverage. She was working in the very heart of London.
"Almost a year ago, I watched Grenfell Tower burn from my computer screen in the Dominion Post newsroom in Wellington," she wrote in a recent piece about the scheme for Stuff.
"Now I am here covering the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council's day-to-day decisions, while the inquiry into the fire gets underway," she said.
She's now working at Mirror Online, the digital arm of the long-established paper The Daily Mirror.
Just last week a Local Democracy Reporting Service investigation found the local council had made huge and lucrative property deals while cutting costs to the tower's restoration before the disaster.
Is the area where much of the UK’s news publishing industry is actually based really a place where local politics is under-reported?
“When I started showing up to Westminster City Council meetings I don’t think I saw another reporter there for the first six months . . . in one of the biggest councils in the UK. That gives you a picture of how little coverage is being done even in London,” she told Mediawatch.
In the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster, residents were angry at the media for overlooking or ignoring their problems.
"The criticism didn’t just come from the community. It came from within the media itself. There was a lot of soul-searching afterwards," she said.
"I came onto the scene sometime after that, but it was talked about is a failure to keep an eye on local councils. There was a lot of trust that needed to be rebuilt,” she said.
“It makes people mindful that they’re being watched and listened to and things they say publicly may be reported,” she said.
“Sometimes I think I was mistaken for a member of the public or even the council. Occasionally comments would be made like: 'Thank God the Evening Standard is not here!' A few councillors would wince and wink in my direction. You would be surprised what they would say when they think nobody is listening,” she said.
“I hope that what we are doing will inspire imitation in other countries, perhaps even in New Zealand,” Talia Shadwell wrote a year ago.
Now it it is happening in New Zealand, but she says the key to the UK scheme's success has been the secure funding.
“Only offering one year could make it difficult to hire people if you’re asking someone to move somewhere for a year,“ she said.
“I think that is a big ask,“ she said.
