Ultra-processed news – why local journalism has gone weird – West Country Voices
If you’ve looked at a local news website lately, you may have got the feeling that something’s not quite right. Seeking stories about your own area, you click on an interesting headline and find yourself reading about a completely different place. You probably see a lot of content about motoring, shopping and so on, but with no mention of local businesses. And when you do hit on a report on something directly related to your community, it’s written in a slightly odd way that doesn’t quite make sense.
Something weird has happened to local news – and it led to me resigning from my job as a journalist here in Devon. So here’s the inside story.
Until recently I was employed by one of the UK’s biggest news publishers, which has hundreds of titles across the country. I was working across three local weekly print titles and their websites. We were very short-staffed, but I was keen to do my best to report on the events and issues I thought were important to our readers – both in print and online.
Although local papers have been in decline for many years – in inverse proportion to the growth of digital media – the news agenda was still more or less unchanged when I started this job six years ago. The aim was to provide accurate, well-written stories about local issues, reporting on breaking news (fires, accidents, crime etc), major planning applications, council services, politics, developments in health and education, business and employment, and so on. Alongside that were the traditional ‘local paper’ stories, of a more human-interest kind.
There was pressure to get big stories published on our websites as quickly as possible, but the news content of the print editions and the websites was pretty much the same.
Then, in the last couple of years, a dramatic change emerged, which escalated rapidly. Old-style news values were replaced by a single criterion for assessing the importance of a story: will it get a lot of online page views? Will it pull in high audience numbers to boost advertising revenue?
And this is how local journalism turned into ultra-processed news.
We’d always been expected to look out for stories that would ‘do well’ online; we’d been coached in SEO, the best words to use in headlines, and so on, to optimise the digital impact of a story. But now, the page-views potential was the number one news value. A whole lot of analytics was going on behind the scenes, with every story we published online being checked for the number of page views, how long people spent on the page, how they had ‘found’ the story and – crucially important – how many times it was shared on social media. Based on those criteria, a list was compiled of subjects that were ‘worthwhile’ (high numbers of page views) and ‘not worthwhile’ (low numbers of page views).
The ‘worthwhile’ news included crime and court stories, traffic news (including road accidents), weather and flood warnings, major planning applications, new shops/pubs opening or others closing down, and reviews of local cafes and restaurants. All fine so far – this sort of thing is interesting and useful to readers. But it’s important to note that the analytics didn’t take into account the accuracy of the story, how clearly it was written, where the information had come from or whether it was actually relevant to the local area. It was all about the numbers.
I was given a target of 260,000 page views per month, which seemed a very tall order. It also led to a very demotivating way of working.
Instead of the traditional daily news conference for discussing story ideas, we received daily emails from the company’s central Digital Optimisation Team. These suggested stories any of the newspapers around the country could adapt to their area. Some were related to digital trends or subjects known to be audience-grabbers. Others were based on national data, with an area-by-area breakdown of the figures. This would have been great if the local breakdown revealed something newsworthy, but usually it was exactly what you’d expect for this part of the country. Rather than reporting news, this was all about manufacturing it – with an SEO-optimised headline.
Journalists were also expected to trawl social media for posts that were getting a lot of engagement and use them as the basis for an article – especially if they had good photos or video.
As part of the overall drive to push up page views, stories began to appear on our newspapers’ websites that were not related to the area and had not been written by local journalists. Readers who clicked on stories warning about impending snow and storms would find that the forecast was for a completely different part of the country. A report of a violent crime would be shocking if it had happened in the local community – but often it hadn’t – it was only there to get the clicks. General articles about celebrities, food and drink, shopping, holidays, property and health were scattered across the news pages.
Of course, we still did plenty of genuinely newsworthy local stories – a good thing too, as we had three weekly print papers to fill. But the quality of the reporting didn’t seem to be a factor anymore, so long as the online figures were good. Unfortunately for me, most of my ‘best’ stories, which really mattered to local readers, didn’t get many page views.
Which leads me on to the stories that were considered ‘not worthwhile’, the ones that wouldn’t do so well online, but still constitute most of the traditional content of local newspapers. These include minor district and town council news, local politics, charity events and fundraising initiatives, theatre shows and museum exhibitions. There are the golden wedding anniversaries and 100th birthday celebrations, and local people’s achievements as authors, musicians or filmmakers. Community projects such as painting murals, and small environmental initiatives such as litter picks and beach cleans, also make the ‘not worthwhile’ list.
The idea was that all these stories would now be done by AI, so that we could focus on the ‘big win’ articles. We were told to send the ‘not worthwhile’ press releases or other information to one of our ‘AI-assisted reporters’, who would put it through the software and send the finished story to the newspaper’s website and print edition.
One big problem with this approach is that some press releases that look pretty boring – such as those from local councils, businesses or politicians – are not telling the full story. They may be deliberately misleading, putting PR spin on something the sender actually wants to hide. It takes an experienced journalist to read between the lines, do a bit of extra research and dig out the real facts. But that wasn’t the AI reporter’s job, so we were just reproducing the information in the press release. After a fashion.
Because the other problem was that the AI tool was making mistakes. Sometimes it changed the wording in a way that also changed the meaning, or simply didn’t make sense. In one case the AI added irrelevant details about a place with the same name in a completely different location. The construction of the story was often odd, too, with information presented in a strange order that made it harder to understand.
These stories may not be very exciting, but they are important to the people involved, and there’s something slightly dystopian about human interest articles being written by a computer.
So: does all this really matter?
Obviously, when compared with the dangerously misleading fake news put out by some major national and international media organisations, it’s not in the same league. But maybe that isn’t the point. People have always trusted their local news providers much more than the national media, and are probably not aware of how dramatically the local news agenda has changed. Readers still contact their local paper about the things that matter in their everyday lives, expecting journalists to investigate and report on issues of concern, and publicise their events and achievements. For many it’s a personal, grass-roots interaction. Engaging with your local news provider should be the equivalent of visiting your local farmers’ market or bakery, rather than a big supermarket chain or fast-food restaurant.
To extend that analogy: readers of local papers and news websites deserve to know where the content has come from and who has produced it. They should be able to check the ingredients and ask questions about their source. They should be offered information that is interesting and relevant to their lives – the equivalent of good nutrition.
Instead, they are being fed a diet of ultra-processed news. A production line of stories formulated and packaged to appeal to a mass market, offering the instant gratification of junk food – or generated by a processor that churns out cheap, synthetic, low-quality fare. Either way, this is something that benefits the manufacturer – not the consumer.
