I’ve been thinking a lot about community journalism recently. Mostly inspired by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s Rebooting the News podcast. I’ve never previously paid much attention to local media. When I lived in Cambridge (until just over a year ago) the free weekly never made it as far as the coffee table before ending up in the recycling. The only time it really entered my consciousness was when I started dating a journalist from The Cambridge Evening News.

Then I moved to South London (where I’d lived 6 years before) and I began to miss it. Don’t know why. Clearly I had never needed it before. Maybe for a sense of community that I’d taken for granted and couldn’t anymore. More likely its connected to the fact that I never felt so acute a sense of identity with Cambridge as I do South London. I guess then it makes sense that I should want to be more embedded here and engaged with the people around me.

But I’m not particularly inspired by any of the local rags. When I read about my local area, it’s more likely to be in The New York Times.

So I was intrigued to hear what local news pundits had to say about the matter at tonight’s “What now for local and regional media in the UK?” event at The Frontline Club.

It turns out, surprise surprise, that none of them seem to have any idea.

Probably not their fault. Many of the panelists either conducted or (quasi-successfully) tendered for the Labour government’s Independently Funded News Consortia (IFNC) initiative — a scheme to try to find ways to fund regional and local news not focused on London. Most seemed to think it was a promising way forward, an opportunity to test a new model. This morning, the new Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt, killed it.

Which turned the first half of the evening into an impromptu wake.

Yet there was constructive discussion to be had once they threw it open to the floor. Not that anyone in the audience had any better notion of where they’d be in five, or even two, year’s time. But some interesting ideas.

The most apposite (about 55 minutes into the video stream), was from a journalist from Brighton’s West Hill Whistler. Sweetly, she admitted no one read it, but that she quite enjoyed writing for it, nonetheless. She then echoed exactly my own feelings about local press in Cambridge: When it comes to buying a local paper, or a national paper, if you’re being asked to part with any money, most people will choose the national.

It turns out, that another member of the audience (of barely a dozen or so) was not only familiar with The Whistler, but sang its praises. For him, the news from most of the areas that Brighton’s main regional newspaper, The Argus, covers is as relevant to him as local news from Tehran.

And that’s surely the point.

Moreover, you don’t need to sell subscriptions to turn a profit. One of the panelists, Mark Reeves, editor of The Business Desk seemed to be having no problem generating revenue from advertising. Yes, its catchment is bigger than the West Hill area of Brighton. But with only a few thousand (admittedly sought after) readers, it can’t be that far from the potential readership of The Whistler.

But, I digress. I don’t care about business models any more than the journalist from The Whistler.

What I do care about is connecting with my community. But which community? It seems shortsighted to think that my community is just where I live.

When it comes to my day job, my community is geographically global but topically hyperlocal… in the sense that the number of people interested in the esoteric cutting edge of physics is probably dwarfed by the number of people who live in Southwark. And then there are the community of pinko politicos, or London science journalists, I follow on twitter. And on and on.

Is it meaningful to distinguish the community that lives around me from the many other communities that I call my own? Is hyperlocal a significant category or just another category?

I really don’t know. But I’m keen to find out!