Local newspapers v council newspapers redux

The Western People - do local newspapers in Ireland illustrate the problems with English local newspapers?

My recent sojourn in the west of Ireland has made me look at this whole newspapers v councils issue in a new light.

Roy Greenslade, it seems to me, is thinking inside a very English box. On the Guardian blog, he accuses Darlington councillor Nick Wallis of disingenuity in his dealings with a local journalist when he says (of the fact that his local authority is publishing it’s own newspaper):

“I’m guessing this hurts the local newspaper industry at a time when advertising revenue is at a premium.”

Greenslade goes on:

But Wallis has the gall to add that “local councils can’t win” because “they’re damned if they have a council magazine with significant costs to the taxpayer, and damned if they try to offset those costs with advertising revenue.”

That misses the point by a mile. Councils are not damned for not publishing at all. Council taxpayers across the country are not demanding that their councils produce mini-Pravdas. They know it’s propaganda and treat it as such.

What those residents don’t realise is that their local newspapers are losing revenue and facing closure because their councils can’t stand proper independent scrutiny.

Barron, one of Britain’s most respected regional editors, runs as good a paper as his Newsquest/Gannett budget allows.

I’d suggest that it is Greenslade who is missing an important point here. His loyalty to his own profession is touching, and there is no question that Britain’s journalists aspire to subject local authorities to “proper independent scrutiny”, but the people that own the newspapers (and it is they who count here) simply don’t share this conviction. Mr Greenslade will be familliar enough with books by Nick Davies and John Lloyd to understand this churnalism point, and it’s disingenuous of him to ignore it here.

The last few words in that quote, above, leap out: “…as good a paper as his Newsquest/Gannett budget allows.”

Media owners have not, for some time, shown much concern for the quality of their local reporting. The problem, I would suggest, is in the market failure that has impacted upon local newspapers. It runs something like this:

• Local printed media – with it’s high entry costs and strong economies of scale – tends towards monopolies that secure their position by driving down prices
• This results in a market failure whereby the need to secure a monopoly drives out local players who would compete on quality as well as price

In the UK, we have a handful of media groups that offer a fairly low-level of editorial service, selling newspapers cheaply and handing the profits that accrue from their economies of scale over to their shareholders. Our problem is that we have consolidated mega-groups of local newspapers.

It also isn’t the business of a local councillor to ensure that every single industry exists in an ecology that ensures that it will survive – particularly when they have many of the characteristics of a monopoly.

There are plenty of other industries where private sector monopolies compete with public sector ones, and in that dialectic, British local newspapers have not really done enough to warrant any protected status.

Councillor Wallis also does have a point with his ‘damned if you do/damned if you don’t’ argument. Local newspapers never run articles about how shoddy their reporting of local issues is. They never publish a leading article attacking themselves for pandering to consumer reflexes over their journalistic duties to provide fair, unsensationalised coverage of local issues. The uncritical recycling of Tax Payers Alliance press-releases that many newspapers indulge in would convict them of this in front of any jury.

But if a council were to put out a newspaper at huge costs in order to fill the gap that the failings of local newspapers have created, you can imagine the headlines. Thus the need to compete for advertising revenues.

Looking at the local and regional newspapers in the Irish Republic, a very different picture emerges – if Mayo County Council were to launch a council-run newspaper to compete with the Western People, it would be transparently foolish, given the political pluralism that the paper reflects, and the micro-detail on local issues that it provides.

The Western runs a fairly tight operation. They have a handful of full-time reporters and some local stringers – well-networked locals - who provide good hyperlocal copy for a fee that is somewhat lower than that of a full-time reporter. And they have a handful of irascible columnists that file regular as I please pieces that are taken with varying levels of seriousness. In some respects, The Western has, for many years, anticipated the kind of relationship between newspapers and citizen journalists that may eventually emerge in this country. The Western is part of a small group of regional newspapers and the staffing and ethos in the building is plainly different from most local papers in the UK.

But, in County Mayo, the local newspaper is widely taken. I don’t have their balance sheet in front of me, but I suspect that a higher percentage of the cash spent by readers and advertisers goes on reporting, and the price is slightly higher than many local papers in England. And I doubt if councillors would have the nerve to consider competing with them. The fact that it’s possible in a country that is as suspicious of spin as we are in the UK speaks volumes.

Our problem in the UK is that we’ve allowed a situation to arise where no-one is prepared to pay very much for journalism. It’s a classic example of market failure. In other areas – health, education, and so on, the response in mature democracies has been to declare these items to be merit goods and to subsidise them out of general taxation.

On balance, I’m probably against this being done on the rates for all of the Pravda type arguments. But I’d agree with one general point that Councillor Wallis of Darlington made: That there is a problem with the quality of local reporting. It’s one that is damaging the reputation of local government, and with it, the reputation of democracy itself. It needs fixing – and Newsquest’s shareholders are the least of our worries in that respect.

The problem is in the market failure of the newspaper industry. We’re told that the internet is a gamechanger and outfits like 4iP are helping to provide seed-funding for initiatives that can help to break out of this problem.

But in the meantime, Councillor Wallis – in his defence of the public interest – is damned if he does anything and damned if he does nothing.