The minutia of daily life revealed in the pages of local press is impressive in its mundane simplicity. Nevertheless, the importance of local news media is clear as one can begin to measure a personal sense of belonging to their surrounds based their association with the stories being printed. Local media are most likely to feature items of familiarity and instant recognition for readers: names of people they know and places that they’ve been to. You might find a majority of the content banal and uninteresting, but what about the salacious gossip about the mayor, vandals defacing property near your home, or petty crime only two streets away?
Local crimes are heinously too close for comfort, yet full of intrigue. On the front page of The Herald or The Bugle, they provide an opportunity to break the monotony of daily life which is rarely missed. Indeed, it only takes news of a nearby shooting, knifing, robbery or car accident in the vicinity (fairly regular occurrences in New York, anyway) to recall how attached we remain to the physical spaces of our immediate environs. Local press is therefore as effective as national press in provoking emotional responses.
It also comes to act as a repository for banal activist behavior (local protests, village meetings and counteroffensives) and collective sentiment at a highly localized level. The voices of local residents are emphasized through storytelling in newspapers, alongside interviews and photos, designed to reflect this tiny microcosm back on itself. It creates, displays, and reinforces a sense of “community”. For these reasons, apart from any personal interest in my own town or city, I always read local news in the field. This daily practice allows the ethnographer to situate themselves promptly in local affairs and to glean amazing insight into the public mindset. What are people talking about, reading about, writing about; and what community events or social happenings are they attending?
Knowing what we know about the quality of some small-town journalism, we might think that the gossip-mongering stories are written for the lowest common denominator, but local journalists have their fingers on the pulse of the world, albeit a tiny, self-contained and self-obsessed one.
I’ve lived in the UK for about 8 years, but I still feel like a visitor here, and the local press never ceases to make me laugh (perhaps precisely because I feel like an outsider). British newspapers (or at least East Kentish local papers, which I am addressing herein) include a disproportionate amount of “gardening features” and other green-thumb specials like reviews of flower shows, crops-of-the-week, home gardening tips, and even discount offers on manure in the classifieds section (only 50p per bag? Is that a bargain?). Other common features are op-eds, reviews of musicians and events (The Slimy Eels played an impressive set to a sold out crowd of 3 farmers and a golden retriever at The Pauper’s Arms on Friday night…); pandering feature spreads regaling the achievements of local businessmen and aspiring entrepreneurs; spicy scandals involving public officials; and full pages devoted to the local celebrities and success stories like X-Factor finalists, alongside photo albums from children’s school parties, cats stuck in trees and all the other essentials of an eternally slow news cycle.
In short, local papers in East Kent are so depressingly mundane that they cheer up the reader by putting the rest of the world into perspective. Who needs all the dire prophesizing of international politics, war and famine across the globe when people have been letting their dogs defecate on a nearby beach? Now there’s something to fight for. And, joking aside,
why not? Banal activism is an important binding force in dispersed local communities, especially those as lacking in social glue as the Kentish coastline near my university where even the flagship community social center is struggling to stay open. Local news, rather than reflecting this general malaise that affects a large proportion of the wind-beaten, underemployed native population of this part of Kent masks it with the cheeriness (sweetness and light) of garden parties and charity bake sales. Still, divergent moral systems and disjunctures between generations can be read throughout the pages and, especially, through reader comments.
Even in light of the instant globality of the Internet,
local newspapers and websites are immensely popular because few walks of life fully escape their relevancy. Their self-serving view of the world puts into great relief popular impressions of overarching categories like politics, economics and “the nation”. The shared experience of newspaper readers allows for the creation of a sense of “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) and is therefore significant in solidifying nationhood by uniting readers/citizens through common symbols. It follows that this symbolic community transcends the immediate locality of the home, street and village to reach millions of strangers united by common citizenship. Local press in Kent fits this role by highlighting British “culture”, celebrity, celebrations, and everyday British activities, from gardening to pub quizzes to fish and chips.
However, at the same time, focusing heavily on the uniqueness of local life can also challenge the taken-for-granted logic of the nation itself (not least of all with the conservative majority in this area of Kent listing the failures of the state and extolling the benefits of taking power and control of neighborhood services away from “distant bureaucrats” and
returning it “to the people”). In this way, local expectations can sometimes be at odds with more unifying national aspirations.
I have learned a lot of things about my Kentish neighbors from comparing popular newspapers with everyday observances over the years. For example, the Kentish are fed up. They’re fed up with foreigners and immigrants and asylum seekers. They’re fed up with taxes and politicians and liberal do-gooders. They’re especially fed up with Eastern European lorry drivers and the French. They’re fed up with terrorism and security and the police. They’re fed up with stingy laws to prevent people from doing things and costly laws that protect human rights. They’re fed up with poverty and lazy good-for-nothing free-loaders. They’re severely fed up with Brussels. I would say that they are fed up with being fed up, except I think that – as in many semi-rural locales – it gives their lives a sense of purpose, honor and determination. This is probably the same impression that any review of local papers can possibly present of a European town these days. But then, according to these letters to the editor of a local East Kentish paper, Britain should do its best to back out of Europe before it is too late:
