What does local news use have to do with raising children? Four dimensions of the roles of local news from a study on English parents’ news use

Communication and journalism studies have historically engaged with local news, often through investigations of local journalism and its audiences. Against this backdrop, in this paper, we pay attention to the role of local news – defined as news about one’s locality and neighbourhood, although not solely gathered from local journalism alone – in the specific situational context of raising children. Locating our work at the intersections of news use scholarship and the sociology of parenting, we draw out four key dimensions of local news use from speaking to 30 parents in England, as part of a three-wave, longitudinal project exploring parental news use. First, we highlight the role of local news as an anchor, often serving as community connections for parents raising their children within specific local and regional contexts. Second, we highlight the role of local news as an escape, where overwhelming geo-political and other crises are sometimes bypassed or deflected, focusing instead on local news, as parents speak of more contained, localised anxieties and opportunities in relation to their children. Third, we highlight the role of local news as a lens, into national and global challenges of difficulty, where people’s hopes and anxieties about raising children in the wider world are seen through specific, local lenses. Finally, we talk of local news as a site of labour – where, keeping up with, processing, managing and acting on local news is part of parenting labour in contemporary societies. We conclude by identifying the potentials of these dimensions of situated, contextualised news use research within other relational contexts.