Local Journalism and Local Media offers a detailed and comprehensive account of recent and significant changes in local news production including the arrival of online editions, local blogs and fanzines and the seemingly unstoppable march of the citizen journalist. With contributions from academics, local journalists, government press officers, public relations specialists and press regulators. Local Journalism and Local Media examines local news media (including newspapers, radio, television and online) in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; analyses their economic organisation and ownership; explores the range of papers available from the new 'Metro style' free papers to the alternative local press; considers local journalists' changing relationship with their sources of news; and offers a number of case studies exploring the wide-ranging contents of the local press.Contributors consider developments in the education and training of journalists alongside shifts in journalists' working practices against a backcloth of changing patterns of media ownership, industrial relations, freedom of information legislation and developments in new technology which, in combination, make local media increasingly reliant on 'outsider' sources of news emerging from news agencies and press and public relations offices locally and nationally. Local Journalism and Local Media concludes that while local newspapers are highly successful businesses, the contribution of critical local journalism to local political communications and a flourishing local democracy is less evident than a decade ago.