Matthew Cain's blog

Lots of very well meaning people are very concerned about the future of local newspapers. These people worry about the health of local democracy when local newspapers are closing and increasing parts of the country have no local news.

But anyone who has been involved in local politics will be familiar with this debate. When I worked for Alan Whitehead MP, he would knock on the doors of residents of Southampton who would remember him not for his stunning election victory in 1997, or even his consecutive defeats of 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 in the same onstituency. He was remembered as the “man who closed the aviary”. The aviary was of course, much loved and its passing has never been forgotten by some Southampton citizens. But when it was open, it was not sufficiently well loved for enough people to have visited it. The debate about local newspapers has the same ring of an ‘expectation gap’ between how life is and how we would like it to be.

This concern for local newspapers well-founded. They fulfil an important role in society. With so many public spending bodies operating in a community, scrutinising the local area fora, the PCT, police, safer neighbourhoods schemes, childrens’ centres, schools, local businesses and so on is an important and time-consuming activity. A local newspaper should also reflect the richness of a local community – those public interest stories ‘the oldest person to . . . the youngest person to . . . the biggest float at the school fete’. Without these functions life goes on but we are all a little poorer for it. Moreover, local newspapers are often read by people who are more marginalised in the local community than national newspapers, other forms of news or the internet (possibly not unrelated to the job ads) helping involve them in society that little bit more.

But it’s worth remembering why we are where we are. Local newspapers were failing adequately to report public bodies long before they started closing. It was the struggle of trying to get a local reporters to a council meeting, a cabinet committee or a committee inquiry that led local authorities to create their own newspapers. And where local newspapers did cover local politics, the newspaper rarely had the circulation across diverse communities to justify a local authority advertising in that newspaper alone. How many people who are concerned about local newspapers buy theirs every week? Anecdotally it’s not quite the complete commitment you might desire of a protest movement.

The situation at the moment – where local newspapers are being crowded out by expensive council-run freesheets – is anti-competitive and probably unsustainable. But to suggest that if councils only stopped producing their own newspapers there would be a flood back to the traditional paper is misleading. And there’s little evidence that people were better informed of their local politicians ten years ago, before councils tried to do more to make themselves accountable.

The health of local newspapers is also bound up in the health of local democracy. Whilst there are undoubtedly lots and lots of meetings – and many of these take place outside the town hall (making them more resource-intensive to cover) – local public bodies have less control over the cash they spend than ever before. Is it any wonder people don’t buy local newspapers to discover the effectiveness of public services at doing what they’re told by central government?

So if we don’t want local newspapers to become the new aviaries, what are the options?

First, we need to lead by example by buying the newspaper. We could also contribute every now and then by submitting an article, an op-ed, an idea for a story or a picture from our street. We could even attend a local meeting and write it up. Will Perrin and Talk About Local can show the way. Failing to recycle our local council-run freesheet would be irresponsible – though the threat of local authorities missing their landfill targets would introduce a new incentive. But in the absence of local public bodies with genuine power – the need for accountability will not feel so important.