There is still hope for journalism and democracy in UK; with 2 new journalism initiatives aiming to revive local and regional journalism.

In straitened times for Britain’s newspapers, these ventures represent an attempt to promote the virtues of old-fashioned reporting by harnessing digital technology. And, most significantly, public service is at the heart of their ambitions.

The first is a project by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) to help local journalists reveal stories of vital public interest. The second is the BBC’s local news partnership, which, among other things, funds reporters to cover councils and other institutions.

The Bureau Local, the venture by the not-for-profit TBIJ, is in the process of creating network of journalists and technology experts across Britain, to discover and tell public interest stories. In a year, it has recruited 650 of them.

At its London office, it compiles and crunches data to feed to its far-flung membership that they can use in their localised investigations. It is a reciprocal relationship because the hub acts as both a receiver and a provider of data.

One recent investigative success makes the point. It began with a single story in Sunderland about the problems caused by the reduction in funding for domestic violence refuges. That prompted the question: could a similar squeeze be happening elsewhere?

The Bureau Local hub started to research data while about 20 reporters at various papers, such as the Yorkshire Post in Leeds, Lancashire Telegraph in Blackburn and the London titles published by Archant, contacted refuge managers. As Archant’s Emma Youle explains, although the managers were initially reluctant to speak, once they were made aware of the nationwide scope of the investigation and the data, they thought it important to help.

Details discovered by the reporters on the ground were also sent back to the bureau, enriching its dataset. And, of course, it was then able to update its data and transmit the new figures to the reporters.

In addition, as Youle told last week’s TBIJ event on the importance of local news, reporters were able to draw on what she called “the wealth of knowledge within newsrooms”. In her case, it meant a colleague who had worked on a domestic violence story some years before being able to help her get vital case studies.

The result was front page stories, lengthy features, interviews and spin-off stories in a variety of local and regional papers. But this is no isolated example. Since the TBIJ’s editor, Rachel Oldroyd, launched the local project in March 2017, there have been a series of investigations.

They include inquiries into overall council spending, the targeting of people through Facebook ads placed by political parties during last year’s election campaign, and the way in which the Home Office uses racial profiling to carry out immigration checks, which was stimulated by the media co-operative, Bristol Cable, and generated nine local stories plus a piece in the Guardian. According to Bureau Local staffer Maeve McClenaghan, stories start in a variety of different ways. “Sometimes we work behind the scenes to collect all the data, scrape it, clean it, crunch it, and then write reporting recipes allowing local journalists to dive in and find stories within it. Other times, as with our work on domestic violence, we take on the heavy lifting of the data but get our local reporters involved and collaborating at an early stage.

“We ask them to do certain tasks; they talk to each other and us; we explore the issue collaboratively; and then we all publish together. Other times, story ideas come from the network. They bring an idea or a dataset to us and we work with them and others to see where it leads.

“We know there are local journalists out there doing amazing work and we want to support and facilitate them however we can. And in areas where there is less coverage, we work with freelancers, hyperlocal blogs and other civic minded people to dig into stories and hold power to account.”

Oldroyd and her team argue that local journalists “are crucial in holding power to account”, and that mission is also the impetus behind the BBC’s controversial decision to fund 150 reporters to work for regional newspaper publishers.

So far, 50 have started work, while 30 more recruits are being trained. The rest will be hired in the coming months. Their major task is to cover top-tier councils and other public institutions, such as health trusts. They are needed because of dramatic cuts in newspaper staffing.

When the scheme was first mooted, I was appalled that the BBC, using £8m a year of licence fee payers’ money, was going to compensate for the job cuts instituted by privately owned, profit-seeking publishers.

But the agreement hammered out between the corporation and the employers’ trade body the News Media Association (NMA) is more nuanced than was first apparent. Although seconded to regional titles, the “local news reporters” – as they will be called in bylines – will work under the BBC’s direction.

They will earn £22,000 (£24,000 in London) and their stories, which will be separately branded, will be made available to all the media outlets that have signed up to the arrangement. They include hyperlocal startups that are regarded by the BBC as reputable news organisations.

As with the Bureau Local, newspapers will be able to draw on data produced by a BBC hub. It had already generated original journalism used across the industry. And the papers’ reporters are also receiving data training. That should help to improve numeracy skills, says David Holdsworth, controller of BBC English Regions.

The BBC will provide video and audio material produced by its staff for use on the members’ websites, including commercial radio stations. In other words, the main publishing chains will not be the only beneficiaries of this initiative.

It is also clear that the long-term antagonism between the BBC and NMA over supposed “borrowing” of material has been defused. One reason, I understand, is the role played in the negotiations by Ashley Highfield, the Johnston Press chief executive who once held a senior position at the BBC.

There is another powerful reason, however, for this change of heart on both sides: the threat posed by Silicon Valley. Through genuine cooperation across their differing platforms, there is a greater chance of competing with social media.

Together, the Bureau Local and the BBC’s local news partnership should be seen as a positive, pro-active response to a looming crisis in localised public service journalism. Throughout this millennium, it has been presumed, not least by me, that there was no hope of a turnaround.

The only future for local newspapers appeared to be one of long, slow decline. Clearly, it would be overstating things to suggest that these enterprises alone will save the industry. But they do open up a measure of hope that journalists, and the public we seek to serve, should applaud.