Fragile, handle with care : (Un)sustainability of local media and (in)security of local journalists in times of newsroom succession and inter-generational handover of ownership

When the existence of an entire medium depends on a sole owner, such an arrangement can create a very fragile working environment, both in terms of the sustainability of the medium and the security of journalists in the newsroom. However, this is often the ownership arrangement in the case of local media owned by individual entrepreneurs (Hess and Waller, 2017). This type of individual owners, entrepreneurial owners (Deuze and Witschge, 2020) or pioneers (Hepp and Loosen, 2019), create a specific information ecology within these environment: on the positive side, they offer the continued survival of the local information infrastructure, and often also a guarantee the information’s independence; on the negative side, this form of ownership leaders to uncertainty in their long-term functionality, fragility in their existence and the possible intertwining of commercial and journalistic lines of production in one person (Deuze and Witschge, 2020). In these circumstances, both the entrepreneurs themselves and their colleagues in the newsroom may feel insecure or experience precarious working conditions (Örnebring, 2018). Moreover, these potential threats to the sustainability of the medium and the safety of journalists are even more acute in the specific circumstances of entrepreneurial succession and inter-generational handover of ownership. For example, Ruiz and Porter in the analysis for National Trust for Local News, based on a survey with 103 local publishers, came to the conclusion that one of the most important sustainability threats is that publishers don’t have a succession plan or struggle with finding new interested owners. More interestingly then, the circumstances of entrepreneurial ownership of local media are still generally rather unexplored, with authors looking more at the impact of globalised or chain ownership (Hess and Waller, 2017). Therefore, our aim is to focus on how local journalists perceive their job security and their medium sustainability with regard to entrepreneurial ownership, potential entrepreneurial succession and inter-generational handover of ownership. The paper is based on comparative qualitative data, stemming from 63 in-depth interviews collected between March and August 2024 with local journalists from U.S. (24), Canada (10), Czechia (17), and Estonia (12). Our findings show the fragility and vulnerability of local media organisations because of their entrepreneurial ownership. Interviewees respond to the potential ownership handover in two ways: (1) in some cases, owners also worked as journalists – in these cases, journalists mainly considered the possible conditions of the handover, its reasons and consequences. They acknowledged that with their departure, the news may no longer be published. (2) At other times, the owners may work separately, but journalists were implicitly or explicitly aware of the possible consequences of a change of ownership for their own job security: they considered potential newsroom succession one of the key stressors in their job. Perhaps most noteworthy, is that these two findings were consistent across local news environments, despite a range of national media systems.

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