ABSTRACT
The traditional, but limited, academic treatment of the local press in Britain has tended to focus on it in its institutional, political form. The question which has been asked has tended to be how it fits into the local polity. Whether this interpretation has been functionalist and uncritical, 1 or has taken a radical perspective, 2 writers have at most called on the market only as a device to explain some characteristic of the political and institutional nature of the local press. Murphy, for instance, emphasized the role of the market in explaining why, and how, cost limitation and avoidance, combined with profit maximization, led to a limitation on the investigative function of the local press. 3 Whitaker pursued the same sort of argument. 4 Both the functionalist and the critical / radical approaches, in other words, have tended to accept that it is a parish-pump phenomenon, to be defined, explained and understood within the limits of this parochialism.
