The hollowing out of local newspapers: A longitudinal study of journalistic performance decline and content homogenisation at a major UK publisher

The strategic restructuring of UK corporate-owned local newspapers through regional hubs has enabled content homogenisation across titles and centralised editorial operations away from communities, raising concerns about democratic commitment and place-based relevance in local news coverage. This study adapts an established framework for assessing journalistic performance — encompassing locality, originality, and coverage of critical information needs — to provide the first longitudinal evidence of how these dimensions evolve under organisational restructuring at Reach plc, the UK’s largest publisher. Using a panel of 27 newspapers across seven regional hubs observed monthly in 2019, 2022, and 2025, we find that: (1) local CIN content is declining while homogenisation intensifies; (2) homogenisation is applied primarily to lifestyle and geographically generic coverage, crowding out — rather than diluting — local CIN content; and (3) content shared within regional hubs remains markedly more local and CIN-aligned than group-wide content, which instead is largely lifestyle-oriented and non-geographic. Notably, regional hubs, once the main organising principle for content sharing, are losing influence to group-wide homogenisation — a trend coinciding with the creation of a national Content Hub and AI-assisted editorial tools. The findings point towards a downward trajectory in corporate-owned local journalism’s commitment to place and substantive coverage, with implications for community representation, democratic accountability, and media plurality policy, and contribute to a UK-specific theorisation of ‘zombie’ papers.