Book reviews

After years of playing second fiddle to 'national' journalism, scholarly studies of local journalism have gained considerable momentum in the 21st century.Prompted by the decline of the corporate-owned newspaper, which has dominated local journalism, the field has been led by studies of those countries -the US, UK and Australia -where the advertising-led business model was most established and where the industry has been most impacted by the twin challenges of the shift to digital platforms and the recession which followed the 2008 financial crisis.Csaov's study arrives in this canon like a breath of fresh air, shedding light on those local journalists working on the edge -the titular 'margins' -of the journalism field in the Czech Republic.Her ambitious study draws on Bourdieu to develop a new theorisation of those working beyond the corporatised regional newspaper in what are mostly very small local news outlets.Despite their modest size and number, Csaov contends that they occupy a significant place in the Czech journalistic ecosystem as it has developed in the post-communist era.Her work is an attempt to address their under-recognition both within and without the Czech Republic.From a narrower, systemic point of view, Czech local newspapers are, as a group and atypically, almost invisible at the national level.In their view of local journalists, the national media show both prejudice and condescension.At a systems level, Czech local newspapers are understood as part of a post-socialist, post-transitive media system, itself treated a peripheral in the homogenising perspective of a predominantly Westernised academic study of journalism (p.4).In a tacit acknowledgement of the imprecision of the term 'local', which can hamper scholarship in this area, Csaov devotes space to defining clearly the shape, size and functions of these news organisations, which she categorises as agents in a journalistic field, influenced by its political context.The rigidity of the field under communism prescribed a role for the local paper.However, this gave way to an increasingly concentrated newspaper market dominated by national newspapers, which has pushed these local titles to the periphery.In 2009, there were some 60 such titles, which primarily follow a print-based format, although this figure fell to 30 by 2019.Of these, three were published fortnightly, 25 weekly and two bi-weekly.With an aggregate circulation of 190,000 printed copies a week in 2019 (p.107), four sold around 20,000 copies per issue but 10 sold up to 2,000 and further 12 up to 6,000.