The excellent Emily Bell of the Guardian has been tweeting the Oxford Media Convention 2010 which is taking place at the moment in … er … Oxford. Among the many interesting matters being discussed (role and scope of the BBC, for example) there is one rather startling rallying cry being issued from a source with a huge vested interest. (It reminded me of James Murdoch’s obviously altruistic speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival last autumn…)
Sly Bailey, CEO of Trinity Mirror and ‘owner of a large stable of local and regional newspapers’ has said that “if we truly value local press we must stop council newspapers” and accused council-issued newspapers as “propaganda masquerading as journalism” – going on to call such organs ‘mini-Pravdas’ and asking us to “imagine if it happened on a national level with a government newspaper…”
This is startling for two reasons: (a) she would say that wouldn’t she? (b) she doesn’t appear to ask why local authorities feel the need to tell their own stories in the face of the treatment they often get from local newspapers.
I am not defending the decision by local councils to publish their own newspapers. I think there are dangers in this, but only if they take over from local newspapers as a main source of local information – which they won’t do, of course. However, I fully understand why exasperated local councils might want to tell their own story in the face of the aggressively negative slant given by many local newspapers.
When you feel you are being misrepresented by not-very-good journalists at local level and find yourselves never put in a positive light for public consumption, what do you do? Just sit back and accept it? Or proactively tell your own story?
Local newspapers are in serious decline. This is bad news in itself. Local newspapers have traditionally offered the local population scrutiny of local authority decision-making and spending. They have served the public as guardians of accountability by covering the detail of council meetings and committees and telling the community what is going on and identifying the right questions to ask of their elected representatives.
But this is no longer the case; the world has moved on. My own experience of local government coverage is that only negative stories play – that there is a less-than-intelligent and often ill-informed editorial bias brought to bear on stories involving the local authority. Many public servants simply feel that they are constantly fighting a losing battle in serving their local communities and that any effort to build up the positive image of a local community is undermined by insistent negative image-making.
If local newspapers are to be supported and rediscover their ‘vocation’, they will have to examine themselves as well as target local councils for by-passing them. Relationships of trust are not necessarily relationships of unaccountability. I know CEOs of local councils who believe passionately in accountability, but are fed up with the single diet of negativity. The only way of ensuring the accountability of local media for how they do their work is to affect their sales by finding alternative ways of telling stories.
I doubt if Sly Bailey ever actually read (or reads) Pravda. (I do, but would love someone to get them onto Twitter…) It would interesting to know if she actually reads any local newspapers from her own stable. But, if the cry to halt the ‘mini-Pravdas’ is to hold any weight, it will have to involve self-examination by local media themsleves (and their owners) and a willingness to base reportage on relationships characterised by intelligence, accountability and accuracy. (See previous posts and Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News.)
The misuse of ‘Pravda’ (truth) works in more ways than one.
Nick Baines's Blog 
January 21, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Nick, 20 years ago, we had 4 local papers, now we have two. Even, a paid for one, has copies put through doors free two days after publication. The Free One (Part of the Archant Group) comes full of 90% advertising and 10% news.
Bexley Council promotes its services via a quarterly newsletter, and runs an excellent web site, which is useable and informative. But as not everyone has access to a computer or the internet, they maintain the news letter beside it.
When Ken was Mayor of London, we received the London Paper, which was a clear vehicle for propaganda for the Mayor and all his works. Boris has been more elusive, but twitters a lot.
I value local media, having dealt with them on a regular basis in my working days with the TA – and even did Media training, having the life frightened out of me by a very aggressive radio reporter. But I found that cooperating with them, worked for us on Recruiting as free coverage was always better than paid for adverts.
I fondly remember the edition of the Ilford Recorder which quoted me as the Commanding Officer, rather than the Administrative Officer, I immediately applied for his pay grade.
On a serious note, your interaction with the media is surely a vital means of the Church getting an informed message across, as there is so many ways of being misunderstood or misquoted. I often wonder about who researches some of the stuff I read, and who they have spoken to as a source – certainly, not someone like myself, who is on the bottom rung at the coalface so to speak as a Parishioner and working within a Parish. Perhaps we are looked on as the Plebs who do not have a mind of our own.
January 21, 2010 at 1:44 pm
“I am not defending the decision by local councils to publish their own newspapers. I think there are dangers in this, but only if they take over from local newspapers as a main source of local information – which they won’t do, of course.”
Fair point, but what about areas like Greenwich with no paid-for paper, and where the council paper has a better distribution than the others?
January 21, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Darryl, interesting point. Polly Toynbee wrote about encouraging local people to work up their own organs of local communication and accountability – easier in online media. But the Council that has no competition will clearly need to have its local communication checked, challenged or applauded. This used to be the job of local journalists who were trained and valued for detailed scrutiny – their jobs are disappearing fast, but it isn’t just the fault of councils.
Interestingly, Alan Rusbridger (following Sly Bailey at Oxford) called for a more positive hybrid approach to local news gathering and reporting – involving some paid and some volunteer writers.I guess this is where blogging could have a role.
January 21, 2010 at 1:57 pm
I wonder what the reaction would be if the government launched its own national newspaper and justified it on grounds that Mr Paxman is always mean to them on the telly.
(yes, I know the government owns the London Gazette, but that doesn’t really count!)
Anyhow, if the council wants a “right to reply”, why not regularly book a block of pages of advertorial within the newspapers for its own messages?
I am sure a couple of pages of council messages and propaganda would be cheaper than trying to run a newspaper in-house, and by supporting the independent media, you can boost the quality of the publication – which in turn leads to more readers and hence more people seeing the council’s own messages.
Win, win.
January 21, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Ian, good point. The difference is probably that the local authority can put its paper directly though every door (increasing the likely readership and giving the subliminal message that it is communicating with its constituency) whereas, for a range of reasons – not all connected with trust- to do with changing cultures, fewer people are buying local newspapers. I still wonder if a coalition of local interests (including the local newspaper if it is prepared to work with rather than against the local authority) is the best way ahead for the future. The total loss of local newspapers would be bad.
January 21, 2010 at 2:06 pm
If local councils feel there’s a public service to be offered by entering local media, then why not set up editorial trusts to run them? Or get students involved (see East London Lines for a student-run local news project) to offer training for local people?
There’s definitely a few newspaper editors/proprietors asleep on the job, but market failure shouldn’t be an excuse for the blatant propaganda as seen in the likes of Greenwich Time.
January 21, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Interesting to see if others find traction in this – which sounds like the sort of thing Polly Toynbee was encouraging.
January 21, 2010 at 2:51 pm
ISTM that there are two significant (and complementary) drivers of poor local (esp political) reporting. The first is the low staffing levels, and the virtual disappearance of a “county hall” correspondent with some real expertise in reading the runes of local councils. The second is the rise of complaints led local journalism. One classic example last week here were those who complained of rubbish bags being piled up in the streets because of the snow. This was a front page story about the way in which councils were ill-prepared for snow, and council workers lazy opportunists at getting days off. Nobody thought to ask the complainant why she and other people were leaving their bins and bags in the street when they knew there wasn’t going to be a collection.
January 21, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Good post and comments. I think there is a real role for local papers as truly community papers. I persuaded the local paper to let everyone know about our church ‘Party Day’ [open day to you and me] on the basis that they could get one story out of telling poeple it was coming and another that it had happened. The real problem is that stories don’t earn money – most of them are not at all really newsworthy – they cost money, needing reporters to find them. However, the adverts earn money and the ‘news’ is then a ruse. I don’t mind our local council news, but I do think it could be paid for by using the community papers. The councils and the papers have a mutual interest in joining together and they should recognise it.
January 21, 2010 at 8:32 pm
I’m not sure that Council “Newspapers” are contributing to the demise of local papers.I think it has more to do with the web and advertising.
In our borough we have a good weekly e-mail blog which gives a factual account of things with much less bias than the free papers ever did. It doesn’t have to pay people to deliver it and it doesn’t, as yet, carry advertising. So why have a local paper.
In a misguided bid to get circulation up so that advertising revenue increases the local papers became more trivial in their coverage thus actually abandoning their position of strength. They can’t compete with the web for instant impact.
As with all new technology the web is both good and bad. We have to come to terms with a world where data is commonplace but information is scarce and where informed comment, such as blogs from worthy Bishops and editorials from thinking and informed people, is muddled up with the uninformed discussing the unknown.
I don’t know the solution but I do like Daryl’s idea of editorial trusts, I am sure it fits in somewhere.
January 21, 2010 at 8:40 pm
We’ve just had a really positive experience with our local paper, the Surrey Mirror. They picked up on something through our church website, sent a reporter and photographer round, and produced a very accurate account of the interview that I had with them. It’s a really positive story for the church, shattering some of the ‘church is dying’ myths that are around. Overall I feel the Surrey Mirror does quite a good job of reporting local events in East Surrey.
January 21, 2010 at 10:23 pm
I can’t say I’ve bothered to find and read the local paper since moving to Upper Suburbia in the summer. More fool me, although to be fair I have been getting involved in my very-immediately-local community and will probably expand that a bit as I continue to settle in.
I spent part of my childhood in a city with two papers — one daily that had to be paid for and one subsidised by adverts, which was owned by the same company as the paid paper and delivered twice a week along with various flyers. I delivered both (not to the whole city!), to earn pocket money. There was a definite sense of the one paper being the “real” one which had better reporting and even some honest debate, and the other being a bit of a gossip rag, of little or no consequence.
I think maybe in London I haven’t worked out which is the “real” paper. I’m not saying that the paper I delivered as an eleven-year-old had the quality of journalism that you would like — I generally only got around to reading the front page. But most papers I have read here seem to be specialist or biased or just plain shoddily-written. I don’t have the time to read them all and try to sift meaning out of them, so I hope that my more media-aware friends will let me know (probably via Twitter) if there is anything I really need to know about. This doesn’t give me an entirely accurate picture, because only a small handful of people I follow on Twitter are in my borough, but it certainly flags up most things.
I have a similar problem with just about all media, really. I don’t have a television, but if I did, I don’t know where I’d find time to watch it much. I certainly couldn’t keep up with the news on any level that I would be able to engage with in a productive way, and I know from experience that when I am in the same room while other people have the television on in the background that I just get frustrated and upset — it’s not that I don’t think I should care about the issues presented, but the way they are presented on television doesn’t present a clear channel for me to get involved or even to voice an opinion. My metaphorical to-read pile for books is growing weekly and I’ve just had to accept that I’m probably not going to catch up and some of them will be books that I skim even though they deserve to be read properly. And there is so much music out there I haven’t heard, and I’ll only ever get to know a fraction of it; there are whole genres I don’t really know at all because I’m practising or teaching or composing or performing for significant parts of each day, and I can’t listen to music while I do those things. If anything, as a musician I should be better acquainted with goings-on in the music world than my computer programmer friends, but actually they have more time to listen to (new) music than I do. I’m most likely to encounter it if someone asks me to perform it or I happen to be looking for additional repertoire.
I wonder whether that sort of media saturation is another reason people aren’t as inclined to purchase a local paper these days, and how local papers can get around this. Sensationalism or attacking local services as news don’t seem to work very well.
I’ll see if I can find a local paper tomorrow. Who knows? I might be pleasantly surprised.
January 22, 2010 at 9:03 am
[…] Baines, the Bishop of Croydon, no less, responded to her thoughts on his blog: Local newspapers are in serious decline. This is bad news in itself. Local newspapers have […]
January 22, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Do the Council publications even conform to the definition of a newspaper? In our area they are the same size as a tabloid newspaper but the aim is quite clearly to communicate Council news to the voters. I don’t see why Murdoch et al should have a monopoly on tabloid sized folded paper publications.
The broadcast and printed media are twitchy about the whole area of blogging, free publications etc just as the music industry is twitchy about downloading, file sharing etc. But being twitchy about it isn’t going to make any difference to the fact that times have changed.
It’s quite ironic really, I remember a few years ago the newspaper proprietors were incredibly sure that times had to change and new technology which destroyed specialist jobs in the printing trade was a good thing. Now the technology is threatening their profitability all of a sudden the news is a specialised field for which we should be made to pay a premium.
January 22, 2010 at 7:35 pm
[…] journalism, local government, newspapers, Pravda, Sly Bailey | Leave a Comment Following yesterdays’ response to Sly Bailey’s rallying call to kill council-produced local newspapers, some interesting […]
January 23, 2010 at 11:39 am
It strikes me that complaining about the spread of council newspapers is complaining about the symptoms and not the causes.
From talking to councillors myself, the picture I get is that these moves are often driven by a combination of low local newspaper readership and local papers which take a by default very negative approach to the council, almost regardless of the merits of the story.
It’s the combination of those two that makes running a council newspaper attractive and cost effective.
January 30, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Surely there’s a difference between seeking to tell your own story and creating something which looks like a newspaper, feels like a newspaper and smells like a newspaper but which actually is just full of council press releases? Readers aren’t thick, they know when they are being spun, and that applies equally to the ultra-negative newspaper and the pro-council council newspaper. Surely the time would be better spent by the council working to improve that relationship? The point made about circulations is a different matter, but if a council is setting up a newspaper just to get its positive message out, then it really needs to assess why it hasn’t been able to get its message out through the existing local media.
January 30, 2010 at 5:50 pm
To answer Pam’s point – most council ‘newspapers’ don’t look anything like newspapers. There are a handful of councils, though, which produce regular newspapers which go way beyond the remit of a council publication, and behave and act just like newspapers – apart from when it comes to holding the council to account.
January 30, 2010 at 9:08 pm
David,
I think the reason some councils can’t get their message out through the existing local media is that the existing local media have a completely negative approach to anything the council does. ‘Positive’ doesn’t get covered – ‘negative’ gets front page.
February 15, 2010 at 11:14 am
Hi Nick,
I think that is partly because ‘council does job’ isn’t seen by many news editors to be news, much in the same way as ‘it rained today’ won’t be story – it’s what is expected. And often councils don’t help themselves with the way they try to put that news across – dry, bland press releases with very boring pictures. But at the same time, a negative story, in my opinion, shouldn’t automatically be a front page contender, and certainly if the complainer can’t answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘Have you spoken to the council about this?’ That all said, setting up a council newspaper which only pushes one view – the council’s – and excludes the valid views of many others won’t solve the problem either, because readers will see through it, thus rendering the council publication a waste of time and effort.