Local news is essential to a free society. And that’s one reason why this issue looks at what happens when there are no local journalists to hold people to account.
The spring 2019 Index on Censorship magazine looks at what happens when local newspapers disappear and decline. Who is there to hold politicians and lawmakers to account locally? In this issue successful journalists and writers Richard Littlejohn, Libby Purves, Andrew Morton and Julie Posetti describe how they began their careers in local news in the UK and Australia. The decline of local newspapers is a global phenomenon. Karoline Kan reports from China about how they are being squeezed out by Communist Party scrutiny; and Rituparna Chatterjee reports on the difficulties of satisfying the Indian appetite for local news. Jan Fox examines the USA’s news deserts. Mark Frary digs into the latest artificial intelligence being used by local newspaper editors. In the rest of the magazine Alessio Perrone looks at how Italy is stopping journalists reporting on refugees crossing the Mediterranean. We publish an original short story by historian and China expert Jeffrey Wasserstrom, plus an extract from the Slovak writer Michal Hvorecký’s latest novel Troll. Editorial
Worrying about a local newspaper closing or reporters being centralised is not just nostalgia, it’s being concerned that our democratic watchdogs are going missing, says Rachael Jolley in the spring 2019 issue of Index on Censorship magazine
Spring podcast with Karoline Kan, Ian Murray and Sinead Corr exploring the future of local news.
The spring 2019 edition of Index on Censorship magazine looks at local news in the UK and round the world and what happens to democracy when it disappears
Index on Censorship is pleased to announce that the online archive of 45 years of publications of Index on Censorship magazine, published by SAGE Publishing, will be free to read globally.
Thirty years after a fatwa was issued ordering Muslims to execute author Salman Rushdie over the publication of The Satanic Verses, Index publishes a collection of writing on the implications for free expression and censorship
Forty years ago the rule of the last shah of Iran came to an end after millions of Iranians, from all social classes, took to the streets in protest
Rachael Jolley, Sally Gimson and Tracey Bagshaw discuss the latest issue which takes a special look at why different societies stop people discussing the most significant events in life
“I found it empowering to be told I couldn’t talk about something,” said Gabby Edlin, founder of Bloody Good Period on the topic of period taboos at the launch of the winter Index on Censorship magazine
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.