There was a time when someone was usually there to find out what was going on. Not watching in the sense we understand it today, through social media, smartphones and a constant stream of information, but watching with a purpose: to turn up, listen, question and try to establish what had actually happened. Usually, that person was a journalist.
They went where most of us couldn't, spoke to people we'd never meet, asked questions we wouldn't have had the opportunity to ask and tried to make sense of events we had not witnessed ourselves. Much of that work was unremarkable in the everyday sense. But perhaps that was precisely why it mattered. Journalism gave us someone whose job was simply to be there and find out.
Now local journalism is quietly disappearing. Research published in August 2026, looking at 27 local newspapers between 2019 and 2025, found that specifically local coverage had fallen from 66.5 per cent to 51.5 per cent. Researchers even used the term "zombie" newspapers – publications that still exist but contain increasingly little original local journalism. (Source: www.kcl.ac.uk)
Behind those figures is something much more human. When a local reporter disappears, we don't simply lose another newspaper article. We potentially lose someone asking why a service has changed, why a decision was made, why money was spent in a particular way or why something affecting a community wasn't properly explained. Most of us don't have the time to ask those questions ourselves. We are busy living our lives. That is why journalism has always mattered.
There is something rather strange about where we find ourselves today. We have more information available to us than ever before, yet we know less about what is happening in our own communities. We can know within minutes what a politician thousands of miles away has said, while knowing nothing about a decision being made a few streets from our homes.
Social media has filled some of that space and, at its best, can connect communities incredibly well. But information isn't always the same as understanding. A post tells us what somebody thinks happened. Journalism should establish what actually happened.
That distinction matters because decisions made locally affect real lives – our roads, housing, libraries, social care and the services people rely upon every day. This isn't about trying to save newspapers for nostalgic reasons. The newspaper itself isn't what matters. What matters is the person who turns up, listens and asks the question most of us weren't there to ask.
We often talk about democracy as something we participate in at election time. We vote and entrust other people to make decisions on our behalf. But democracy also relies on knowing what happens afterwards. And without really noticing what we are losing, some of the people who helped us do that are disappearing.
The journalist sitting quietly at the back of the room may have been more important than we realised. Not simply because they were there to report what happened, but because politics and power don't slip through the net when somebody is watching.
