Reporting the courts in the UK during the financial crisis In local journalism

Williams-Jones, Richard 2021. Reporting the courts in the UK during the financial crisis In local journalism. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Local journalism in the UK is in crisis. Local newspapers have experienced years of declining circulations and staff cuts, leading to questions about how effectively these institutions can continue to perform normative functions of journalism, such as its fourth estate role and its contribution to the health of the public sphere. One central way in which local journalism fulfils such functions is by reporting on the courts. This thesis brings to bear two different research frameworks to investigate the evolution and current state of court reporting in the UK’s local press, with a particular focus on the newswork of journalists who report on the courts. A historiography is used to examine the development of court reporting in the UK, to trace the origins and evolution of the practices of covering the courts. Then, an analysis of 22 semi-structured interviews with local newspaper reporters who cover the courts beat, agency court reporters who supply the local press, as well as broadcast journalists involved in both local and national court coverage, is conducted. This will give insights as to how court reporting is practised in contemporary journalism, amid a range of financial and other industrial pressures facing legacy media institutions such as newspapers. Operationalising these two frameworks helps to establish how the daily newswork of court journalists has developed amid during the recent, turbulent period in journalism in the UK, especially local journalism. It finds that local court reporters consider their work to be a central feature of local journalism, undermining narratives of a decline in the perceived quality of local media. Yet it is now heavily reliant on those journalists who work for major local press companies. It is those legacy institutions which have faced particularly acute financial challenges, meaning court reporting faces a potentially precarious future. The courts ‘beat’ will be shown to be one that is now rather different to other journalism jobs, with reporters based outside the office, a relative rarity in pre-pandemic modern local newspaper journalism, and able to produce exclusive stories for their employers and readers. Indeed, the prestige of daily local newspaper court reporters has if anything been enhanced by the decline in the number of agencies and other reporters covering court cases. Counter-intuitively, two widespread tranches of closures of local courts in England and Wales have also helped preserve the role of the local newspaper court reporter, because it has become easier for those journalists to report on larger numbers of cases from centralised court locations, rather than having to travel to a range of courts in different towns to try to cover stories of public interest. The more central the local press becomes to the provision of court reporting, challenges facing the local news business could affect the ability of court reporters to perform these functions in future. The conclusion of this thesis includes a series of recommendations which could help to maintain and even enhance this coverage of the courts, including the potential use of some public funding to help guarantee the future of court reporting at the local level, even as newspaper publishers continue to face the financial crisis which has affected local journalism.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) K Law > K Law (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 January 2022
Last Modified:	10 Jan 2023 02:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/146486

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