Ethos Public Relations Manchester

Local newspapers are dying – and the owners are to blame

by Chris Morley, Northern & Midlands Organiser, National Union of Journalists

Local newspapers are not dead but they are being killed by remote and irresponsible owners who care nothing for them but as a source of ready cash. The damage is being compounded by the air of defeatism being generated by often timid editors (with a few honourable exceptions) who refuse to challenge the bean counters to protect their own titles.

The fact is that the public has been conditioned to believe circulations are inevitably falling due to once-loyal readers switching to on-line news and other fancy new distractions. The old line is trotted out that young people are not reading newspapers and older readers are being lost due to life’s attrition.

No doubt some consumer tastes have changed to some extent. But let’s get real: younger people have never typically bought newspapers and aren’t we all supposed to be living longer in any case?

The true situation is that newspaper titles changed hands from the old family owners who saw their titles as giving them a virtuous and prestigious place in the community to a small band of corporate giants totally divorced from the consumers they are trying to reach. The new breed of owners consistently starved their local newspapers of investment because circulation income was only a small part of their earnings. So long as the advertisers kept on coming back, the money still came rolling in they thought.

And to wow the City, the profits rose higher not through new income streams or winning new customers but by cutting back, on staff and on quality. This happened in the boom times and so when things turned tougher the answer was to cut more to keep profit margins of 25-30 per cent going. And in this respect I charge the newspaper companies with sabotaging their own titles. They have done this by culling the most experienced journalists and circulation staff who had the best knowledge of what worked in retaining and winning more readers - but were the most expensive in wages.

Of course, if newspapers were just another commodity all this would be sad but just part of market economics. However, they are a lot more than that. They are part of our democratic fabric: scrutinising the powerful, standing up for the minorities and giving a voice to the ordinary citizen. Newspapers have been highly successful in fulfilling this role in our democracy for a couple of hundred years but the new media seen as taking on this task - local blogs and community websites etc - currently often lack the resources, professionalism or objective nature to make them influential, although there are some notable exceptions. And of course, so far, they have real problems in being able to generate the revenue and profits to become sustainable.

All this may just be academic if everything else was standing still. But it isn’t and the 600 journalist jobs under the axe out of the 2,000 posts the BBC has earmarked to go will only make the crisis in journalism – and therefore our democracy – that much more acute.

The cutting has to stop and as a society we have to learn to cherish quality – and pay for it.

Posted at 10:12am on 7^th November 2011