Local media outlets face several challenges, ranging from economic instability to political influence. These pressures have profound implications, not only for the survival of these outlets but also for the vitality of democratic discourse within communities.
Failure to address these challenges is exacerbating the decline in news coverage, leading to the formation of ‘news deserts’ where citizens lack access to critical information about local issues, events, and developments. Safeguarding the integrity of local journalism is essential to ensure that citizens remain well-informed and engaged in matters that directly impact their lives and communities.
This seminar will gather various participants such as representatives of academia, media professionals, stakeholders relevant for policy development in order to discuss the results of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom’s research ‘Uncovering news deserts in Europe: Risks and opportunities for local and community media in the EU‘ as well as other studies on the local media information landscape.
Learn more about the Local Media for Democracy Project here.
The event will count will the participation of the speakers below
Phil M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy, Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research for the Sanford School. He also serves as a Docent at the University of Helsinki.
His current project, funded by the Democracy Fund, is the News Measures Research Project, which focuses on developing new approaches to assessing the health of local journalism ecosystems, in an effort to identify the community characteristics that impact the health of local journalism.
Agnes Gulyas is a Professor in Media and Communications at the School of Creative Arts and Industries, Canterbury Christ Church University (UK). Her research is in journalism studies and digital communication, focusing on local media and communication, journalistic practices, and online news. She edited The Routledge Companion to Local News and Journalism (Gulyas & Baines, 2020).
Eileen Culloty is an Assistant Professor in the Dublin City University (DCU) School of Communications and deputy director of the DCU Institute for Media, Democracy, and Society. Eileen coordinates the Ireland Hub of the European Digital Media Observatory and is co-chair of Media Literacy Ireland. She is also an member of the working group developing Ireland’s National Counter Disinformation Strategy.
Sandra Simonsen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media Studies and Journalism at Aarhus University, Denmark. She obtained her PhD. in Media Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2022, and served as a Visiting Assistant in Research in the Department of Sociology at Yale University from 2019-2020.
Her areas of interest include crisis and conflict and how they manifest in language. Utilising a combination of qualitative, quantitative, and digital text analytical methods, she has contributed to the field of Media Studies with publications on migration, climate change, war legitimation strategies and their potential to resonate with audiences, pandemic crisis, religious propaganda, blame attribution, and social identity. As a research consultant on media pluralism in Denmark, Simonsen contributes to the annual Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM), published by the Centre for Media Pluralism and Freedom.
Simona Bisiani is a Doctoral Researcher at the Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence at the University of Surrey (UK). She researches spatial variations in online local news provision in the UK through large-scale content analysis of local news articles, using Natural Language Processing and machine learning as primary methods. Her work involves leveraging digital trace data to comprehensively examine the quality and quantity of local media available to UK communities, to empirically test several hypotheses about the link between ownership consolidation, correlates of news consumption, local media, and democratic functioning. Outside her PhD, she is a Data Architect and Researcher at the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF), where she manages the UK Local News Map project. The project consists of leveraging open data through automated pipelines to maintain a database of local media outlets in the UK, providing a high-quality resource to both researchers and policymakers interested in the number and distribution of local news providers in the UK. Simona is also the Lead Researcher and Analyst for the State of Data Journalism Survey annually promoted by the European Journalism Centre.
Pedro Jerónimo is a Research Assistant at LabCom – Communication and Arts at University of Beira Interior in Covilhã (Portugal), where he leads ‘MediaTrust.Lab – Local Media Lab for Civic Trust and Literacy’ (2021-2025), a project focused on local disinformation and media literacy.
He holds a PhD in Information and Communication on Digital Platforms with a pioneering thesis about online news production at local newsrooms in Portugal. He’s also co-chair of IAMCR’ Media Production Analysis WG, founder of SOPCOM’ Local and Community Media WG; associated researcher at the Centre for Studies in Communication and Society (University of Minho, Portugal) and at the Online Journalism Observatory (University of Porto, Portugal) and invited researcher at the Digital Media Observatory (CEU Cardenal Herrera, Spain).
Pedro started his career as a local journalist and has participated in national and international projects. Moreover, he is an editorial member, reviewer, and editor of national and international scientific journals, indexed in the main databases, such as Digital Journalism or Journalism Practice (both from Taylor and Francis), and assessor of the European Fact-Checking Standard Network. He is a certified trainer by the Union of Portuguese Journalists and the National Scientific-Pedagogical Council of Continuous Education.