When did you last buy one then?
We all love the idea of a local newspaper, and sometimes some of us buy it too. But life has been pretty hard for the Borough Times over the past few years, and somebody has to be blamed. As long as it is not the publishers themselves.
Enter then, the Weekly Demon: the council owned newspaper, the well funded, taxpayer subsidised title. In some boroughs it is just a plain old monthly propaganda rag, but in others, like East End Life or H&F News in East and West London it is close to being a proper newspaper. (Interesting that both are in the capital where the local press is crowded out by the London-based nationals).
With taxpayer millions behind them, it is easy for nearby struggling privately owned local newspapers to blame the council rag for their problems. And, after a surprisingly successful lobbying campaign publishers like Trinity Mirror have persuaded the new Blue-Orange government to sort of agree.
No, they won’t be banned, but Eric Pickles has just promised to fearlessly tighten the rules so they will be able “stop unfair competition, ensure a tougher value for money test, and prevent municipal literature passing itself off as independent journalism”. And maybe some titles will go — although councillors love a bit of propaganda, which means (perversly) the better, more independent titles are the one that might fall foul of the rules.
Anyway, the easy part is to agree that council owned newspapers are a bad idea. A council owned title is always going to struggle to fearlessly interrogate what the council is up to. But if the Pickles plan actually bites, it won’t solve most of the problems faced by the local press.
For years local newspapers were run unashamedly for profit, generating margins in some cases of in excess of 30 per cent. Investment in journalism was reduced in the good times (for those who remember the 1990s); endless mergers created the four mega chains of today as titles were bought and sold for profit. None of this helped sales, which have gradually declined.
The situation is serious now. Advertising, on which so many local titles now rely, remains subdued. Locality, which was once the principle defining feature of community, is no longer so relevant in the era of Facebook, Twitter and virtual community.
Meanwhile, Mr Pickles was even threatening to take away more government advertising, showing that ministers can whack local newspapers too. A half-hearted clamp down on council owned titles — while necessary — doesn’t solve the economic and quality problems that local media face.
[...] for years of failings caused by cutbacks at those titles which will be very hard to reverse. Dan Sabbagh at Beehive City hits the nail on the head. The easy part is to agree that council owned newspapers are a bad idea. A council owned title is [...]
Spot on. In my own part of south-east London, the local media shot itself in the knees many years ago. There’s only freesheets here, both based far out of the editorial area and struggling to cover a huge patch.
When the local council turned its relatively benign paper – Greenwich Time – into a propaganda weekly, they cried foul – and rightly so – but the sad truth is that they stopped scrutinising that council properly years ago. I’ve every sympathy for the local journalists around here, some of which are excellent, but their bosses dug their papers’ graves years ago.
I suspect a year on from now, we’ll find very little has changed.