Local in Name Only? The Impact of Ownership and Newsroom Proximity on Local and Original News Coverage

Local news plays a crucial democratic role by representing communities and reporting on place-based issues. Yet structural shifts such as chain ownership and the consolidation of local newsrooms risk diluting this local focus and increasing reliance on duplicated content. This study presents the first national analysis of local news authenticity in the UK using 465,105 articles from 360 outlets (2020–2022). We operationalise authentic localness using measures of geographic fidelity, coverage distance, and content duplication, and model how these vary by ownership and newsroom proximity. Our results show that corporate ownership reduces geographic fidelity and content originality, while increasing coverage distance, and that newsroom distance compounds this. Our findings demonstrate that ownership consolidation and newsroom centralisation jointly disembed journalism from communities, transforming local news from place-based reporting into networked content production.