Journalism is about to go through a momentous change. Ofcom, the communications regulator, has awarded the first 19 licences in the government's plan to roll out local television across the UK. The imaginatively named local digital television programme services, L-DTPS, are set to have a huge impact.

For the first time in a generation there will be a new network broadcasting to a local audience. News and journalism are at the heart of it.

The stations have been given plenty of help to make sure they succeed. They have a prominent position on digital terrestrial television (DTT), broadcasting on Freeview Channel 8, snuggling right between BBC Three and BBC Four.

Transmission costs are minimal; the BBC licence fee will provide £25m to pay for the set-up and the initial fees. There will also be help with content - the BBC guaranteeing to buy a set number of stories each week.

There is little doubt the stations could prove a massive boost to a local and regional media industry, sadly in decline. There will be new jobs for journalists and the chance to create digital operations with multi-skilled teams, working across all platforms. Newsrooms that can challenge authority and help restore a strong media are so desperately needed in any democracy. It is vital that councils, the police and National Health Service are placed under scrutiny. These new stations can help do just that.

There are many distinguished doubters. For instance, Professor Roy Greenslade commented just after the plans were announced by the then culture secretary: "Jeremy Hunt's vision of ultra-local television is hopelessly idealistic. Clearly, he means well because he wants it to enhance democracy. But do the public want it? Are any mainstream media owners, in broadcasting or newspapers, clamouring to launch it? ...and how will it be funded?"

He was writing in the London Evening Standard. Ironically, its owners have won the L-DTPS licence for London.

The regional newspaper groups are now putting a great deal of effort into video. Many of the major groups are partners or part of the consortiums that have won the local TV licences. Trinity Mirror with Made TV, which have four of the licences in Leeds, Tyne and Wear, Cardiff and Bristol. Johnston Press with Solent TV. Local World with Nottingham TV, while Archant owns Mustard TV in Norfolk.

They are also putting video at the heart of redesigned websites. Amongst the most interesting is what the new company Local World is doing. It was launched in January 2013, when it was created as a joint venture, bringing together more than 100 regional and local titles including the Nottingham Post and Cambridge News from the Daily Mail and General Trust’s Northcliffe Media and Iliffe News and Media.

Speaking at the Westminster Media Forum in May 2013, its chief executive, Steve Auckland, outlined how digital was the future of the company. Mark Sweney reported for the Guardian: "Auckland said that following a relaunch of its local newspaper websites the aim is to see the amount of online content rise from 5,000 to 100,000 pieces uploaded a day, and for daily user numbers to grow from 600,000 to 2 million… The goal is that by some point in 2015 declining print revenues, currently dropping by 6% year on year, will be compensated for by growing digital income."

Johnston Press is another company pushing ahead. In January 2013, Ashley Highfield, its CEO, announced plans to launch a series of ‘mini ultra-local TV stations’ for some of the small communities it serves. He commented: "We are going to create a lot more video content, a massive amount more in the next couple of years, really local video content. All of our journalists are being issued with smartphones, our websites will be full of really local good quality videos and I would like to see us create mini ultra-local TV stations for some of the smaller communities that aren’t served and shouldn’t be served by the BBC."

With newspapers reviving and going digital, the new local TV stations, the BBC, Sky and ITV, not to mention the network of hyperlocal bloggers and websites, it can be argued that we are on the cusp of a golden age of local journalism.

Why did it take so long?

This post was adapted from a chapter in What Do We Mean by Local?, edited by John Mair with Richard Lance Keeble and Neil Fowler (Abramis, 2013).

Following my piece about the continuing strengths of mainstream media, here are my top ten facts about the growing success of social media and mobile and the continuing popularity of good old-fashioned TV - all drawn from recent Ofcom data:

1. Sixty-one per cent of 15- to 34-year-olds access social networking sites on the internet at home.

2. Facebook accounts for almost half - 45% - of the total time spent using the mobile internet.

3. A fifth of the time that 16-24s spend on social networking is on mobile devices.

4. The same top ten sites are popular across all age groups, differing only in order.

5. A fifth of men's mobile phone use is internet-based communication - emailing, social networking and instant messaging - but the figure is only half of that - 11% - for women.

6. Social networking on a computer is carried out by a quarter of UK adults daily.  

7. On average, UK adults watch 212 minutes of video content a day across all devices and a further 91 minutes of audio content. Eighty minutes per day are spent on text communications - including text messaging, social networking, instant messaging and emailing.

8. Over half of internet users say they have a social networking profile (54%) compared to 44% in 2009. Half of those with a profile (51%) now use it daily, compared to 41% in 2009.

9. The growth in social networking site profiles since 2009 is greatest among adults aged 35-44 (58% now versus 40% then) and 55-64s (27% now versus 11% then).

10. Eleven per cent of internet users over 65 years old have a social networking site profile - up from 3% in 2007 - compared to 54% of the overall population, up from 22% in 2007.

1-4 from Ofcom Communications Market Report 2010
5-7 from Digital Day
8-10 from UK Adults' Media Literacy Report.

Damian Radcliffe (@mrdamian76) is Manager, Nations and Communities, at Ofcom. He is writing here in a personal capacity.

Mary Beth Christie (below), head of product management at FT.com, questioned the very term 'paywall': if you book a holiday or buy a pint of milk, she asked, is the product 'behind a paywall'? Well, yes, if you want to call it that. But we don't - so why don't we just talk about paying for newspapers' content, just like everything else?

Usually, when producers try to talk people into appearing in observational documentaries, they say that after a while 'you won't even know we're here'. And, of course, the producer hopes that more than anyone, because it means being able to film people behaving naturally. 

In my experience, hanging around for ages helps achieve this, but the most important factor is whether the people being filmed are doing something they find more interesting or dramatic than being filmed. 

Which brings me to last night's Inside John Lewis documentary on BBC2, the second in a three-part series. I'm afraid there were times when I felt - perhaps because the series is three hours long - we were looking at moments where being filmed was more interesting to the participants than what they were supposed to be doing. (As when the new recruit in Wales turns to camera, having criticised the John Lewis wine he was tasting, and jokily says something nice about it instead "for the documentary".)

And there was a bigger problem. This was the story of a rather eccentric business adapting itself to practices that are common in more 'normal' retailers. A pity, really, both for John Lewis and for the programme-makers. 

So it would not be surprising if these three hours have less to offer than BBC2's previous, entertaining record of life inside John Lewis, the 50-minute Modern Times film called The Partners, shown in 1995.  

But, hey, what do I know? The audience loved it: 2.8 million last night (thrashing Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares USA on Channel 4: 1.7 million), and 3 million viewers in the first week. As they say at John Lewis, the customer is always right.  

Knowledge is getting flatter - which means that our audiences get the idea that, on the web, they can increasingly get straight to the thing they want to know.

All that leafing through books, papers, searching library indexes or watching programmes ... forget it. Search and personalisation is the way to go.

Former audiences are changing in other ways too - and it's not a bad idea to keep an eye on how they're behaving. It might not be what you want or expect - but you're going to have to live with it.

Some thoughts from those nice people at Pew:

New News Audience

It's worth keeping an eye on these stats each month. The ABCe figures - the ones that measure the performance of newspaper websites.

Unfortunately, you'll have to do it second hand - or pay up. But you'll usually find the headlines here on the editorsweblog or here on the Guardian Media.

Unlike the traditional ABCs that have told a story of not so gentle decline for four decades, the ABCe figures tell a story, mostly, of remarkable growth.

Guardian.co.uk, for example, broke 30 million unique users in September - close to 33 million, an annual increase of over a third. The Telegraph and Mail also passed 30 million ... the Mail up two thirds on the year. A few - Times Online - actually lost ground, but the overall numbers are surging upwards.

Of course, this is a double-edged sword - the increase may be impressive ... but it's for content that's free and can only increase the drift from paper advertising to the web.

There's another side, too, to the latest numbers.

Most of the increase in traffic to UK newspaper sites over the past year hasn't come from UK readers; it's come from abroad. Total uniques for UK newspaper websites increased 13 million between August and September - but only 2.4 million of those were readers in the UK.

An illustration that the web really doesn't know the boundaries we once assumed for our news output.   

Vast attention is being given to the role of social networking technology in the current events in Iran. Here's an assessment by my BBC Monitoring colleague Shuvra Mahmud of what he calls the "netwar" that has been sparked by the elections.

The slightly older technology of satellite TV has also been in the news, with the jamming by Iran of BBC Persian TV.

I'm struck by an omission in all this: conventional terrestrial radio broadcasts. As far as we at BBC Monitoring can tell, the BBC's shortwave radio transmissions in Persian are not being jammed. Welcome news for listeners, but perhaps a worry for us. If the Iranian authorities really are as concerned about the BBC's "provocations" as they say they are, why aren't they attempting to jam our radio broadcasts in the same way they've moved to block access to BBC websites and television?

The Shah blamed the BBC's Persian radio service for his downfall. As the Radio 4 Document programme found out earlier this year, some British government officials agreed with him. Today, our radio broadcasts are passing largely unnoticed.

It used to be said that radio could come into its own in a crisis, as it was quicker, more nimble than TV. But has it lost that edge? Who in the Iranian 'net generation' wants to wait for those twice-daily BBC Persian shortwave broadcasts when they can get instant access to newer forms of media?