Wigan Today editor Charles Graham on well-intentioned government proposals that threaten local democracy and newspapers
You must have been living under a rock not to realise that local newspaper journalism has changed a lot in recent years.
That isn’t all a bad thing, I hasten to add, but the arrival of the internet altered the landscape drastically many years ago after countless generations of steady sailing for newsrooms.
Suddenly advertising income fell through the floor as car showrooms and estate agents, among others, decided they didn’t need to put their houses and vehicles for sale in a print supplement anymore but stick them on their own websites for nothing.
We used to get complaints that the now defunct Wigan Reporter broke letterboxes, it was that thick!
Also people got it in their heads that if news appeared online then it should be available for free.
The fact that much the same amount of work went into creating articles on a website than in a paper seems irrelevant to some folk, yet they wouldn’t dream of walking into a shop, grabbing a tabloid and walking out without paying.
Since the internet’s arrival we have had to be creative in keeping our papers going and continuing to provide trusted news.
Various technological advancements – including, recently, artificial intelligence – have meant that we have been able to survive with fewer staff, but I can’t pretend it has not been very tough.
And now a new threat is looming: from the Government of all places.
The English Devolution and Community Improvement Bill is full of good ideas about cutting red tape, but hidden in it is a proposal to scrap the statutory requirement for councils to put public notices in newspapers.
And running in parallel there are also plans to review the Licensing Act, one of whose proposals, in the same vein as the above, is for the scrapping of the law requiring alcohol licensing notices in papers too. This was proposed by a taskforce comprising people from the licensing industry and non-one from ours was invited.
That source of revenue from these payments is crucial to a huge number of smaller papers all over the country.
And let us not forget that losing those notices will deny a lot of people the chance to see important information about planning applications, road closures, a pub’s plans to open until the small hours and all manner of other key matters of public interest.
Not everyone has access to, or is comfortable with, using the internet or social media: a lot of my older relatives for a start.
Independent research from OnePoll shows that local news media remains the primary source used by the public to access public notices, ahead of other sources such as social media, local authority websites, search engines, and printed mailouts.
And people who still buy papers, as well as those who read online news are more likely to react to such announcements and may want to object to some of them.
In other words the disappearance of public notices from newspapers could deny them that opportunity and it would be a clear blow to democracy.
I am sure the Government isn’t proposing these changes to heap more difficulties on local papers. Its motives are surely to free authorities and businesses of bureaucratic and financial burdens that hamper them from doing the jobs they too are in power to fulfil.
We as an industry are as supportive as anyone of the hospitality industry. Pubs and papers face many of the same challenges.
But the fear is that if it becomes law that councils, pubs and clubs are no longer obliged to put out important announcements through the local media, then an innumerable number of smaller papers will wink out of existence in an instant.
And who then fills that void: politically-biased local authorities, well-meaning amateurs, mischief-makers or a combination of all the above?
It’s deeply concerning, and I really hope the Government has a rethink.
Otherwise it will be unwittingly responsible for striking a mortal wound to both local democracy and professional news reporting.