The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) is an initiative in the United Kingdom funded by the

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. The scheme pays for the employment of journalists by local independent news outlets, in order to improve the coverage of issues relating to local democracy. Its core purpose is stated as being "to provide impartial coverage of the regular business and workings of local authorities in the UK, and other relevant democratic institutions such as mayoralties, combined authority areas, P&CCs,

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s, etc." The scheme launched in 2017. As of the 2021 contracting round, 165 Local Democracy Reporters (LDRs) were employed by eighteen participating organisations, ranging from large bodies including

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, Reach plc,

Newsquest Newsquest Media Group Ltd. is the second largest publisher of regional and local newspapers in the United Kingdom. It is owned by the American mass media holding company Gannett. It has 205 brands across the UK, publishing online and in print ...

and the ''

Evening Standard The ''Evening Standard'', formerly ''The Standard'' (1827–1904), also known as the ''London Evening Standard'', is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format. In October 2009, after be ...

'', to smaller outlets such as

Radio Exe Radio Exe (formerly Exeter FM) is an Independent Local Radio station based in Exeter, Devon, England. As of March 2023, the station broadcasts to a weekly audience of 39,000, according to RAJAR. Presenters Presenters include Matt Rogers, N ...

and Social Spider, a

community interest company A community interest company (CIC, colloquially pronounced "kick") is a type of company introduced by the United Kingdom government in 2005 under the Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community Enterprise) Act 2004, designed for social ente ...

which publishes three north London community newspapers. Stories written by LDRs are pooled and can be used at no cost by over a thousand participating news organisations, including the BBC. LDRS stories have featured on national BBC radio and television news programmes. In the first four years of the scheme almost a quarter of a million stories were filed, with a peak of 1,321 in a seven-day period in September 2021. The scheme has been replicated in New Zealand and Canada.

Bristol Mayor dispute

The scheme itself came into the news in June 2022, when the Mayor of Bristol,

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and his council's head of external communications, Saskia Konynenburg, challenged the line taken by LDRS reporter Alex Seabrook in questioning the mayor's return flight to Vancouver to speak about

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at a

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, and whether it was appropriate for a LDRS reporter, rather than “a journalist from a newspaper”, to be asking the question. Shortly afterwards it was reported that LDRS staff would not be allowed to attend the mayor's future press conferences, resulting in a boycott of those events by several local news outlets, as well as the BBC and ITV.

References

External links

* {{BBC BBC Journalism in the United Kingdom 2017 introductions