The local media landscape has become more complicated as citizens increasingly get news from the local community in other ways than through traditional local news media. Simultaneously with the established media’s decreasing coverage of the local community due to economic reasons, new types of local media are growing in many countries (e.g. Kleis Nielsen, 2015); so called hyperlocal media are becoming new news platforms for the citizens (Williams et al., 2015). These alternative media are often semi-professional with a higher potential of interaction with the consumers. Users can to a higher extent be utilized to track, tip, rate and/or create print-ready articles and self-service advertising, i.e. various kinds of user-generated content. Thus, such media are more dependent on semi- and non-professional content. But, there are challenges with such content, for example quality, sustainability, ethics, motivation and democratic functions (e.g. Hermida, 2011; Jönsson and Örnebring, 2011). Using the Swedish national SOM survey, with a representative sample of the Swedish population, and a telephone survey to municipality representatives in all municipalities in Sweden, this paper examines the audience’s willingness to participate in the creation of local news; what content is contributed, who is contributing, and what channels are used for the contribution? What are the challenges and benefit in relation to established and new local news media? The results show that the shared content consists of comments, shorter texts and images, not complete articles or letters to the editor. It’s more common to participate if you are a man, are politically interested, between 30-49 years old, and living in a larger city. The results also show that the desire to contribute is higher in online media and social media like Facebook, than for analogue media such as newspapers. In general, however, the eagerness to participate is not as high independent of media form. Moreover, the results show that hyperlocal news media funded and driven by professional actors are more sustainable than those funded by non-professionals and semi-professionals. Hence, slogans like "today everyone is a journalist" is a qualified truth (e.g. McCullogh et al., 2016).