This year's Local Newspaper Week, on the theme of 'Your Voice', will focus on the importance of independent local journalism in sustaining democracy.

As part of the week-long event, which will take place from 10-16 May, editors are being encouraged to provide examples of hard-hitting investigative journalism, coverage of courts, councils and other public bodies, and influential campaigning work which their papers have undertaken.

The Newspaper Society, which organises the annual showcase, hopes it will remind politicians and other opinion-formers of the need to retain a thriving local media industry.

Its communications director Lynne Anderson said: "Local Newspaper Week is an annual event which highlights the importance of local media to the communities it serves.

"This year, the focus is upon local media's unique and vital role in providing scrutiny of public bodies and holding them to account on behalf of readers.

"Local media shines a spotlight on important issues and events that might otherwise go unnoticed because, unlike other media, it covers local courts, meetings of councils and other public bodies.

"The 'Your Voice' theme of this year's Local Newspaper Week aims to highlight this vital work which forms the foundations of democracy."

The move comes amid mounting concern in the industry over the impact of council-run publications.

In a House of Lords debate earlier this week, ministers again came under pressure to "stop passing the buck and take some decisions" on the issue.

One peer, Lord Luke, asked: "Does the minister believe that newspapers produced by councils should have to be clearly distinguishable from commercial newspapers so that the public are not misled as to the independence of the reporting?

"Is the minister concerned that if council-run papers replace their independent counterparts, it will lead to a less rigorous scrutiny of local officials at the price of democracy?"

Speaking for the government, Lord Davies said that while local authorities had a right to communicate effectively with their local communities, when they strayed into being supported by advertising which would otherwise be available to local media then "an element of unfair competition might come in."

He described local media as "a lynchpin of local democracy" and reassured the debate that "the government are fully seized of the financial and economic challenge to local and regional press."

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