Rebuilding Local Democracy With Local Reporters
Why A New Tech Startup is Building a Network of Local Democracy Reporters
Growing up in Manchester, the arrival of the local paper was a weekly ritual in our house. We would open up the Manchester Evening News, which covered everything from council decisions to planning applications that might affect our neighbourhood.
I didn't fully appreciate it then, but those newspapers were doing something vital, they were making democracy tangible and local.
Fast forward to today, local papers are dying, and that connection within a local community is fraying. All this impacts our democracy too.
When I stood as an independent candidate in Selby, I witnessed how desperately people wanted information about decisions affecting their daily lives. They wanted context, explanation, for someone to simply tell them what was happening in the rooms where their futures were being decided.
The Vanishing Local News Landscape
Every eleven days for an entire decade, a local newspaper in Britain fell silent. Between 2009 and 2019, more than 320 local titles disappeared (UK Parliament). Each closure left a community more vulnerable, more disconnected from the decisions shaping its future.
The numbers reveal a democratic emergency hiding in plain sight:
For every three journalists covering local issues in 2007, only one remains today (Press Gazette)
Regional publishers have lost 6,000 journalists in 15 years – a journalist's position eliminated nearly every day
In 2019, 63% of Local Authority Districts had no daily local paper covering their communities, up from 45% in 2007 (UK Parliament)
The revenue supporting local journalism has collapsed, with the three largest publishers (Reach, National World, and Newsquest) seeing combined income plummet from £2.4 billion in 2007 to £590 million in 2022 (Press Gazette)
This is a story of real communities where decisions now happen in darkness. Places where council meetings go unattended, where planning applications pass unscrutinised, where powerful interests operate without accountability.
Research shows that communities without local news experience lower voter turnout, fewer candidates running for local office, and reduced civic engagement (City, St George's).
Our Local Democracy Reporters
When we started Suffrago, we knew technology alone could never fill the vacuum left by vanishing local media. The Suffrago platform can gather opinions, analyse data, and connect citizens with representatives, but it can't replace the journalist sitting in the back of a planning meeting at 9pm, paying attention when nobody else will.
That's why a month ago, we embedded our first ten Local Democracy Reporters in communities across Britain. These reporters now work in Cornwall, Cambridge, Southampton, Buckinghamshire, Selby, Tower Hamlets, and Portsmouth. They are there to report on local issues, explain decisions nobody else scrutinises.
You can follow some of the reporters on Tiktok here:
Local Data, Local Stories: The Suffrago Approach
At the heart of Suffrago is what I see as a powerful combination: constituency-level data and the authentic voices of local people.
Our local democracy reporters' harness both giving them contextually rich, locally relevant stories that help people understand the places they call home.
Each constituency in Suffrago's system has its own dedicated portal, like our Stratford and Bow dashboard that displays vital statistics, 103,000 population, 38,000 households, a happiness score of 7.54/10 (higher than the UK average), median pre-tax earnings of £33,400, average property prices of £495,000, and detailed crime statistics. These numbers tell part of the story, but numbers alone rarely move people to action or understanding.
This is where our local democracy reporters enter the equation. They take this rich local data and weave it together with the statements people submit through Suffrago. They are also able to be physically on the ground in the local area, speaking to residents, speaking to local MPs.
Today our reporters are already creating short TikTok videos explaining local trends using visualisations from our constituency dashboards. They break down housing affordability challenges, local healthcare provision, or education outcomes alongside the sentiment captured through Suffrago's polling.
This is one aspect of our vision for Suffrago - we connect the dots between objective data, subjective experience, and democratic decisions. Our local democracy reporters are an important part of how we achieve it.
Building a New Kind of Democratic Infrastructure
If you're passionate about rebuilding local democratic infrastructure, we'd love to hear from you. Whether you're interested in joining us as a Local Democracy Reporter, or you know an area that desperately needs this kind of coverage, please email at andrew.gray@suffrago.org
Democracy works best when it's local, accountable, and informed. At Suffrago, we're committed to rebuilding these connections, one community at a time.
Andrew Gray is the CEO and co-founder of Suffrago, a political technology platform that helps connect citizen voices with contextual data to enable better decision-making.