Local Democracy Notepad

In the latest round of the local authorities v local newspapers saga, Scottish newspapers appear to have regained some of the classified ads that they lost to the MyJobsScotland site (“Local government jobs – all on one site!”).

This is an interesting one. Now that the c-word is out in the open, surely government should simply be advertising all of it’s vacancies on it’s own site and avoiding advertising costs?

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A number of right-wing bloggers have – for some time – been urging an incoming Tory government to put all government jobs online in order to shaft The Guardian newspaper Save Taxpayer’s Money.

MyJobs Scotland: Public subsidy for local newspapers reinstated?

Sure, there are equal opportunities issues, and there’s clearly a case for advertising some posts in minority newspapers, but beyond that, it’s hard to see how newspapers can expect the sort of cuts that they’d demand elsewhere to not impact upon them?

The Scottish decision has a whif of political cowardice and special pleading hanging over it – and I suspect that it illustrates the way that press influence can often be used to promote the business interests of press-owners.

There is the question of how local journalism can be made commercially viable – and it’s clearly an issue that needs to be addressed with some urgency in the interests of our democracy. We plainly need more / better local journalism than we have at the moment and a way of funding this needs to be found – this is one of the jobs that ‘Digital Britain’ have been charged with.

But this is, surely, not the same as offering a public subsidy to the handful of near-monopolies that dominate the local news market in such a careless way?