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Are the big owners putting our local newspapers in jeopardy?
As MPs act to stem the crisis facing the UK’s local press , media expert Jon Slattery looks for a return to community papers like the New Journal
THIS is a terrible time for anyone who loves local newspapers.
Every day seems to bring news of more job cuts and gloomy predictions that the industry is about to be wiped out by the rise of the internet.
Things are serious.
More than 900 local journalists have lost their jobs since last July, some papers and many offices have closed. Circulation and advertising revenues already reduced by competition from the internet have fallen dramatically as the recession deepens.
MPs are so worried that a weakened local press will no longer be able to fulfil its role as a watchdog for local democracy that they have put down a series of Early Day Motions in the House of Commons.
One “reaffirms a commitment to high quality local journalism as an integral part of engaging people in their community, strengthening local identities and democracy.”
Another says that “local newspapers have an absolutely central role at the heart of local communities.”
Yet only a few years ago the big publishers who own large groups of local newspapers across the country were riding high.
They were making profit margins of up to 30 per cent and were valued by the City as worth billions of pounds which meant they could borrow millions to buy more newspapers. But, how things have changed.
Some of those big companies now have a market capitalisation of less than 90 per cent of what it was five years ago, their share price has fallen through the floor and they are saddled with massive debts. Some local journalists feel they are paying the price for mismanagement which has nothing to do with the performance of their own titles, which still make money, but with decisions taken in boardrooms miles away from where they operate.
In one regional newspaper group the decisions are taken by the parent group based in the US.
All this doesn’t sound very local.
Maybe that’s where the problem lies. The reaction of the big publishers to the current crisis is to lobby the Government urging it to relax the rules surrounding regional newspaper mergers and acquisitions so they can become even bigger.
But there is a counter argument that the business model of the big groups is as broken as that of the banks and what is needed is a new type of local media which is based on a smaller scale and is closer to the community it writes about.
The National Union of Journalists claims the current crisis cannot be solved by old methods. The union’s general secretary Jeremy Dear says: “We shouldn’t just look at how to protect existing companies but how to help journalists, local communities and businesses develop alternatives that may be specialist, small-scale, may be trusts, co-operatively run or simply locally-owned companies.”
This is the crux of the debate at the moment.
Does the regional press have to operate on a bigger and bigger scale with far fewer journalists based in news factories producing lots of different titles many miles away from their readers?
Or should new forms of local media on a far smaller, community, scale be encouraged to flourish without having to make the huge profits once enjoyed by the major publishers?
Whatever the argument it is vital that a healthy local media be it in print on the web, or both, survives.
It is the only place that brings together dissenting voices and opinions together in an ordered way to challenge the authorities that govern our local lives.
The local press helps bring a community together with its combination of hard news, coverage of local authorities, schools and football clubs and sport.
In the Camden New Journal and Islington Tribune’s case, it also throws in lots of readers’ letters, features and even recipes for lamb shanks.
You just can’t get that kind of news anywhere else.
The idea of a new, smaller, community-based local media represents a return to the roots of the local press when papers were started by mavericks rather than as a highly profitable product run by people who journalists despairingly describe as “bean counters” as they chop away at editorial costs.
A community-based newspaper run by a maverick, now who does that remind you of?
n Jon Slattery is a freelance journalist living in Islington who was deputy editor of the journalists’ weekly magazine Press Gazette
No fat cats at the CNJ
THERE are scores of weekly papers in London, and practically all of them are owned by four large publishers.
The big four expect their newspapers to perform like any other business with high profit margins and high dividends for shareholders – even in today’s recession.
The Camden New Journal and its sister papers, the Islington Tribune and West End Extra are different.
We are a small independent group – one of two in London – founded in 1982 by journalists.
Owing to our form of ownership, we have neither shareholders nor executives paid “fat-cat” bonuses.
We were set up as a real community paper – and we always put the community first.
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