In the last decade, data journalism has established itself as a thriving field. Recently, COVID-19 has boosted the demand for data-driven reporting to make sense of the pandemic, increasing the importance of studying the evolution of this rapidly evolving and technology-bounded practice. However, the number of efforts to map and systematically measure the data journalism industry are few. This paper analyses the findings of The State of the Data Journalism Survey 2021, currently the most extensive study on the characteristics surrounding the workforce producing and contributing to the data journalism industry. The outcome is an understanding of an expanding workforce with a geographically uneven distribution, which is still homogeneous in terms of tools and educational paths. Self-taught, resourceful, and multi-skilled, data journalists often work in isolation but share pressures of limited resources, time limitations, and access to quality data. The pandemic appears to have directly increased those struggles, although data journalists agree that the field’s reputation has ultimately benefited from it.

Local journalism is fundamental for a thriving democracy, yet the UK faces a decline in the number of print and digital local news outlets. Large-scale mappings of the surviving outlets offer invaluable insights to policymakers designing interventions to strengthen the sector. Due to the lack of a comprehensive national directory of UK print and digital local news outlets, researchers have resorted to datasets such as circulation auditors’ databases, which have been noted to be incomplete and outdated. A lack of understanding of the magnitude of these data limitations hinders researchers from selecting optimal datasets. This study evaluates four commonly used local news databases, uncovering significant variations in their currentness and comprehensiveness. Thereafter, statistical analyses demonstrate the significant effect of each dataset’s shortcomings on findings in local news research. To address this issue, triangulation and manual verification are employed to create a more comprehensive and robust dataset. This procedure generates a new national dataset of print and digital local news outlets that can be used in future research, alongside a framework for leveraging public data to build an independent research dataset. This work paves the way for more rigorous research in data-driven local news provision studies. Concluding remarks stress the importance of setting definitions and establishing clear data pipelines in an increasingly diversified and dynamic sector.

This study introduces a novel computational framework for defining local news outlets through their geographic coverage patterns. This approach addresses the growing disconnect between legacy spatial markers (e.g., newsroom location or circulation cut-offs) and the geographic dimension of news coverage in an era of media consolidation and digital transformation. We develop a four-step pipeline consisting of data sampling, geoparsing, feature engineering, and clustering analysis. Our approach employs large language models for toponym disambiguation and develops eight spatial metrics across four dimensions: spatial extent, administrative reach, spatial heterogeneity, and distance decay. We test this pipeline on a sample of more than 465,000 articles from 360 UK digital local news outlets. Clustering analysis of more than 1.3 million locations reveals six distinct outlet types—ranging from hyperlocal and metropolitan to national outlets—reflecting different scales and structures of news provision in the UK’s evolving media landscape. The method offers a scalable, open-source approach for mapping local news coverage, with implications for media geography and policy, ownership studies, and the computational humanities.

Towards Efficient and Accessible Geoparsing of UK Local Media: A Benchmark Dataset and LLM-based Approach

The strategic restructuring of UK corporate-owned local newspapers through regional hubs has enabled content homogenisation across titles and centralised editorial operations away from communities, raising concerns about democratic commitment and place-based relevance in local news coverage. This study adapts an established framework for assessing journalistic performance — encompassing locality, originality, and coverage of critical information needs — to provide the first longitudinal evidence of how these dimensions evolve under organisational restructuring at Reach plc, the UK's largest publisher. Using a panel of 27 newspapers across seven regional hubs observed monthly in 2019, 2022, and 2025, we find that: (1) local CIN content is declining while homogenisation intensifies; (2) homogenisation is applied primarily to lifestyle and geographically generic coverage, crowding out — rather than diluting — local CIN content; and (3) content shared within regional hubs remains markedly more local and CIN-aligned than group-wide content, which instead is largely lifestyle-oriented and non-geographic. Notably, regional hubs, once the main organising principle for content sharing, are losing influence to group-wide homogenisation — a trend coinciding with the creation of a national Content Hub and AI-assisted editorial tools. The findings point towards a downward trajectory in corporate-owned local journalism's commitment to place and substantive coverage, with implications for community representation, democratic accountability, and media plurality policy, and contribute to a UK-specific theorisation of 'zombie' papers.