I agree that council newspapers are a very real threat to local papers and should be either banned or forced to actually run as a business on the budgets they claim to cost and see how long they survive.
But a more interesting question emerged during the debate. What are the management companies going to do to improve the newspapers they already own.
Many complaints were levelled at the lack of cover of local politics in their local paper and the demise of the High Street office, both evidence of cost cutting to increase profits to the big companies.
The best point was made by John Randall a Conservative MP from Uxbridge
Bravo.In my borough of Hillingdon the demise of local papers has been going on for some time. .........One of the problems has been chronic lack of investment in local newspapers.
Large multinational or national companies have come along and diminished the number of journalists, and diminished their skills, to the point where the Gazette series, which is the one we have in the London borough of Hillingdon, has its offices in Chertsey, which to all intents and purposes is a million miles away.
The people one talks to - the reporters, of whom there are one or
two on the ground, operating with a laptop and a digital phone - tend not to understand the area, so people are not interested in what is in the newspaper. Advertisers like me do not think it is worth while to advertise, so things go down the pan.The local newspaper is a fundamental part of the whole. The internet will never replace it, because many people, including many of the more
vulnerable people, do not have the internet. The local newspaper is a very important thing, and we must do something, but it is no good just blaming one set of things.
Dear management, please wake up and realise the fundamental flaw with your business plans (if you actually have one). It is not so much due to changing tastes or new competition that revenues are dropping but largely down to creating a largely irrelevant product with your ridiculous cost cutting measures.
If council newspapers get the heave ho will the management dickheads put that extra revenue back into the papers. Will they fuck.
They will just carrying on bleeding the market dry until it's time to discard the husk the local paper now is and move on.
Nice post. Could you close the italics tag thought?
ReplyDeleteAnd could I learn to spell? Though, not thought.
ReplyDeleteThat statement by the MP on what's happened to the Uxbridge Gazette is a bit of a spine tingler. I know the paper (Trinity Mirror) and he's spot on - and it's the same story elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteThe Gazette and its sister papers across the Trinity South empire have no editors, just 'multimedia content managers' in charge of a geographical 'market' within which a reduced number of what used to be called reporters operate. These content providers are not attached to any newspaper, either. They don't have offices or allocated desks, and work remotely on laptops, taking pix with mobiles. They simply send stuff to Chertsey in Surrey where a multimedia production team slap it onto the web and print pages.
Haven't seen anything on the MP's speech in the Gazette of course... Hmmm, if he'd emailed it in as a press release someone in leafy Surrey might have dropped it in, word for unsubbed word, to a matching hole left for a page lead!
BLUNT: 'If council newspapers get the heave ho will the management dickheads put that extra revenue back into the papers. Will they fuck.
ReplyDeleteThey will just carrying on bleeding the market dry until it's time to discard the husk the local paper now is and move on.'
Love this blog, and you are right on the money with the above.
Roy Greenslade et al having been making a fuss about how the arrival of a council paper in Hammersmith and Fulham has been 'disastrous' for the Fulham Chronicle, which Trinity have just turned into a free.
Before we all get the Truth, Justice & Democracy banners out, two facts -
1. The Chronicle was hanging over the cliff long before the council paper arrived. Under Trinity ownership the paper lost its office and dedicated editor, reporting and photographic team. All years before the council launched a monthly, then, fortnightly, paper, and long before the recession. It is now run from an office miles away in Surrey.
2. Interestingly, the highly talented journalists producing the flagship h&fnews for the council are former Trinity employees with direct experience of the business's cutbacks (or 'rationalisations' as the big regional groups like to call it when they ratchet up the profits at the expense of the product and staff).
There's always more to these stories than the obvious intro.