Fighting for funding: UK newspapers editors talk about the pressures on local newspapers in Britain today

Ex-local newspaper editor Peter Sands talks to fellow UK editors about cash problems and how newspapers are now full of stories other people want them to print

WHEN I WAS editing a British regional daily newspaper, The Northern Echo, it wasn’t unusual for advertisers to threaten to withdraw their “favours” because they were unhappy with something we had written. I once published photographs of a fight between an irate customer and a business owner, and the company pulled its advertising. The boycott lasted six weeks until it realised it had nowhere else to peddle its wares. I was working for the late Westminster Press, the owner of daily and weekly newspapers throughout the UK, and answered to an independent editorial director, so there was never any question that commercial interests would override press freedom.

It did strike me, even then, that it was a precarious arrangement. We relied on businesses and local authorities for our revenue, but I had reporters, and bosses, more than happy to bite the hand that fed them. If the arrangement was precarious 30 years ago, it now dangles over a cliff. Advertisers have other routes to market, and classified, situations vacant, property and auto ads – once the source of millions of pounds – have all but dried up.

With declined revenue it is inevitable that staffing and the number and coverage of stories – particularly those that require some journalistic legwork – has also declined.

So how is journalism to be paid for? Is the advertising model on which the industry was built broken? Maybe not yet but, as Neil Benson, former editorial director of Trinity Mirror Regionals and now a media consultant, says, “it has sustained life-changing injuries”. Alan Geere, who has edited titles around the globe, said: “I don’t think the model is broken, it’s just moved away from traditional print display and classified. Organisations and businesses still need to get their message out there. It’s up to us to find the appropriate medium.”

One area under pressure is the relationship newspapers have with councils. Local authorities are legally required to place public notices in newspapers – a guaranteed source of income – but some councils argue that is archaic. Others have their own publications, “Town Hall Pravdas”, to put their own spin on council affairs and compete for revenue.

While editing the Hexham Courant, Colin Tapping saw evidence that councils begrudged having to place notices in newspapers they did not see eye-to eye with.

On one occasion, Tapping discovered notices from the Northumberland County Council were to be published in another paper, the Northumberland Gazette. He said: “I informed the council it was breaching its statutory obligations. The Courant enjoys one of the highest readership penetrations in the UK [and] the Northumberland Gazette has an official penetration of 0% in the Courant’s circulation area.

“Investigations revealed the ban was ordered because the council was miffed by the Courant’s coverage of changes to the charging structure at leisure centres. It was clear the decision was to punish the Courant financially for its reporting. It amounted to censorship.”

Mike Sassi, editor of the Nottingham Post, is witnessing a shift back to covering more council stories.

It follows the creation of 150 journalism jobs by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, with reporters funded by the BBC but working for regional news organisations. Its aim is to help fill a gap in the reporting of local democracy issues.

Sassi explained: “Our local democracy reporter, Kit Sandeman, has started to go to council meetings that had been dropped. He works through agendas, builds old-style relationships with politicians and turns up stories that may never have come to light. One was a decision to hold discussions about a controversial reorganisation of district and borough councils – affecting bin collections, school teaching, public parks and road building – behind closed doors.

“Our experience of the council is that it’s usually a well-run, transparent organisation. However, a handful of politicians – perhaps politicians who had become unused to answering journalists’ questions – decided they were going to have some of their discussions in private. And no one was going to stop them.”

The bottom line is that journalism needs to find revenue that won’t impinge on its independence. The search for digital revenue is immensely challenging, paywalls are not effective locally, crowdfunding is limited and funding by government brings independence questions. And until that revenue is found, campaigning and investigative journalism – with some notable exceptions – is struggling to survive. That is exacerbated by the fact that many newspapers now need to grow their digital audience to make money – and when skateboarding cats deliver a bigger audience than a six-week investigation into town hall jiggery-pokery, can editors justify time for serious spadework?

Allan Prosser, editor of the Irish Examiner, has concerns.

“Council and court reporting, which often provides the ammunition for investigative reporting, has declined and this is often made worse by opaque and disconnected information systems in local government and legal processes which obstruct rather than aid data journalism and scrutiny by reporters,” he said.

“A less informed society where news is replaced by public relations, reactive commentary and agenda management by corporations and governments will become dangerously volatile and open to manipulation by special interests. Journalism is always imperfect but, as we have seen in the past decade, some of the alternatives threaten to be worse.”

Geere added: “The squeeze on staff numbers and the increasing reliance on technology has led to journalists in many newsrooms confined to ‘indoors play’. The result is that the community is not observed, let alone scrutinised, newspapers and their websites are full of ‘news other people want you to print’ and thousands of real people stories go untold.”

Meanwhile Benson said: “Obviously, the most extreme examples of coverage disappearing are where loss-making titles have been closed down and, in some cases, communities have been left without a traditional source of local news. The 1,000 or so local titles that continue to publish are long past the point where any potential gap in coverage could be filled by asking the remaining reporters to simply work a bit harder to produce more stories. Nowadays, editors have to make choices about what to cover.”

An editor of daily titles who does not want to be named believes there is still value in quality print journalism, particularly for the over-50s, but said: “Unfortunately, I don’t think that can easily happen within the financial strictures of the big groups. Maybe we have to wait for the total break-up of the current newspaper industry and the re-emergence of locally owned, modestly profitable titles.”

Hyperlocal titles may be one way forward but, as it stands, they are not the answer. Most are one-person operations that can’t cover the courts, tackle the wrong-doers or have the deep pockets needed to defend legal threats. Those living in the community they are writing about are also probably less likely to rock the boat.

The route ahead is unclear. One editor said: “I’m uncomfortable with any kind of institutional funding, from the BBC, government or the digital beasts. Sooner or later that will mean a loss of independence. I think we have to accept that digital revenues will never replace print revenues, and that the old-fashioned newspaper model is doomed.”

But Benson hits a more positive note. “There have been some encouraging signs that Google and Facebook recognise they will have to pay for the privilege of using that content. But while the £6m Facebook has pledged recently to support publishers in the UK is welcome, it is nowhere near adequate. An appropriate, sustainable levy to help publishers would be a start.” He hopes that some of the ideas in the Cairncross Review [a UK government review into the sustainability, production and distribution of high-quality journalism in these times of change] will produce some workable solutions. Government subsidy, however, must surely be a no-no from the point of view of an independent press, he added.

The last word goes to Prosser, who believes journalism will need a diverse range of sources of funds and backers. But that, he says, “is a thesis, not an article”.

Why Should We Care About Local Journalism?

Ethically, we have to commit ourselves to truth and then, practically, we have to – and this sounds very simple but I’m going to say it at every possible venue – we have to subscribe or buy newspapers. We have to subscribe and buy paid-for media who actually hire investigative reporters because investigative reporters are the human link between our daily lives and the thing that we call media. There is nothing else. There’s this immense internet with its almost infinite so-called information and then there are us human beings, but the only links really are the human beings whose jobs are to figure things out, and the only way for them to figure things out is for us to subscribe to newspapers. The idea that we should be getting our news for free makes much less sense than getting our auto repairs for free … If everyone picked up a newspaper on the way to work or we all subscribed to things we know are important, we would be in much better shape. The policy thing is that government – whether it is the EU or the United States or individual states – has to create the conditions where local media can flourish.

TIM SNYDER, a US historian and the author of The Road to Unfreedom, and On Tyranny