Do not mourn the death of local newspapers

April 27th, 2009

The crisis in local news is not just about “the business model”, a phrase I am coming to loathe. It is about the fabric of a society and the careers that grew out of local journalism and have made so many contributions both to journalism and national life.

This is something that new companies such as Google, with all their wealth and lack of obligation to anything beyond their own exhilarated sense of entitlement, will never understand. Why would they when they can sell advertising around journalism that has been provided for free by increasingly desperate newspapers?

Writes Henry Porter

And I could not agree more – its crying shame then that those that owned “local” papers did not engage a little more earnestly in figuring our what local news looked like and how they made money from local news journalism in the early 21st Century. The cost is not just to local life, and local democracy, but people’s livelihood’s, and that in my mind is the full weight of the tragedy… I’ll get my Kleenex out for that.

So what to do about it?

Polly Toynbee suggested the creation of community trusts that could take the money from the ropey reporting of ITV, combine that with the BBC regional TV budget, aided by other subsidies and build good local, independent community journalism. What a sensible idea.

And I argue that news owners must focus on the core product – good journalism, and good writing writing, whilst working very hard at exploring what news and reporting looks like in the 21st Century and how one creates greater value for advertisers as a consequence. Trust is also of paramount importance. But its not a tweak of the dial. New technologies of cooperation either web-based or mobile based offer a fantastic opportunity.

But - what eventually evolves from this current process of creative destruction, will be the birth of a model; more attuned and purpose built for our era – as Wassily Kandinsky once said

Every work of art is a child of its time.

And if we value local democracy and local newspapers to support that, then – we should think deeply as to how we finance and support that child.

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