Abstract
This is a story of hope, but it doesn’t start very hopefully, so bear with me.
Seven years ago, I moved to a small town. I thought: the best way to find out about this town would be to buy the local paper. You might not be surprised to hear that I was wrong about that. The local paper told me nothing I didn’t already know. There was very little in it that even referred to the town whose name appeared on the masthead. I didn’t buy it again.
A couple of weeks ago, I was suckered in again. A splash headline caught my eye as I left the Co-op with my shopping, so I picked up a copy and returned to the checkout. Idiot. When I got home, I discovered that the “splash” (really just a large crossref to a story inside) was a thin story with very few new facts. I searched through the rest of the paper: not one story, not even on the sports page, concerned my town. On the plus side, it did have three pages of puzzles (presumably bought in).
I won’t embarrass the paper by naming it (I doubt it’s unusual), though would-be investigative journalists might find a clue in the fact that it was the paper where Sir Bernard Ingham began his career. Of course, it’s easy for old journalists to get all sentimental about local papers. Many of us began our careers on them. My first paper, in a Devon market town, had an editor, a deputy editor, a chief reporter and another senior reporter, two trainee reporters, two photographers, and two subs (not to mention its own advertising department and composing room).
As a result, the paper was packed with genuinely local stuff: mags’ court reports, district council planning committee meetings, local town councils (biggest concern: not missing the last bus home from Ashburton), and, of course, local gossip. When we had a spare moment, we wrote up wedding reports and went through the files for the 25 years, 50 years and 100 years ago column. We also went out to every golden wedding, though I never had to cover a funeral, as my dad did 35 years earlier.
My own golden wedding isn’t far off, but it’s unlikely that we will get a visit from a local reporter (“what’s the secret of a happy marriage?”) because I doubt there is one. There’s no money in local journalism now, is there?
Twelve years ago, I was crossing Putney Bridge, heading for Fulham’s game against Newcastle United, and I was with Peter Sands, former Northern Echo editor, the man who has probably trained more people currently in the industry that anyone else – and a lifelong Toon fan. We’d exhausted the football discussion and moved on to journalism, and specifically local journalism. We came to the conclusion that the existing corporate model, of hundreds of titles concentrated under a handful of big companies, was bust. The problem was that those companies continued to expect big profits from a business that was increasingly incapable of providing them.
Our pre-match solution was that local titles should be run by local people who concentrated on what mattered to their readers and who didn’t expect massive profits.
BJR readers will know that this is what has happened in many areas. We have documented the extraordinary rise of the hyperlocal. Cardiff University’s Independent Community News Network has identified 250 news outlets it defines as hyperlocal, standing up for local democracy while at the same time challenging the corporate ad-driven model. And some of those hyperlocals are doing very well indeed. The biggest of these publications are no longer kitchen table hobbies – their founders are making real money. So there is hope for local and regional journalism. Even in what might be described as “mainstream regional media”, all is not lost.
Last year, I was invited to join the judges for the Regional Press Awards. It’s traditional to describe these judging jobs as a thankless task, but that’s not true: you receive a lot of thanks, and even a free lunch (if you can arrange to be in London on the right day). I actually found it a cheering task. And this year, when I was asked again, it was more cheering. This is where even more hope comes in.
In this year’s round of judging, I was handed campaigns and crime/ investigative journalist of the year. It meant a lot of reading, but wow! Conventional wisdom is that reporters in the regional media have no time to spend on stories now, that all they can do is rewrite press releases. That wasn’t what I saw in the award entries I read. You’ll have to wait until the awards lunch to find out who won, but there is terrific work being done in regional newsrooms. Even the entries that didn’t make the shortlist were outstanding. It was commented several times during the judging process that entries were “good enough for the nationals”, but that could come across as patronising.
Some were written by younger reporters, at least one of whom had already moved on. Others were from more experienced journalists. We’ve all come across them: the men or women who could have moved to the nationals but decided to become the wise heads of the newsroom, the experienced colleagues to whom newer journalists can turn for advice. Extraordinarily, there was an excellent campaign entry from two freelancers who didn’t even have the clout of a big title behind them when they started working together.
So there is always hope. Going back to Putney Bridge in 2012, I had told Pete before the match that my team, Fulham, were going through a patch where one half of each game was good and the other terrible. At halftime, Newcastle were leading 1-0. Pete texted me from the other end of the ground: “Was that Fulham’s good half?” I texted back: “I hope not.”
Fulham went on to score five in the second half. See? There’s always hope.
