Local news


Watching the numbers nosedive


How papers’ websites are run is hitting local news, says Roger Lytollis


T


wice a year, sales figures for the UK’s regional daily newspapers are published. For nearly 20 years, I’ve been


reading these with a mixture of disbelief and despair. Circulations continue to nosedive. In the first half of 2024, the dailies’ sales were down by an average of 17 per cent year on year. Papers that in some cases sold


hundreds of thousands of copies a day are selling… rather less. Liverpool Echo: 10,961. Yorkshire Post: 9,461. Scotsman: 7,133. Manchester Evening News: 6,519. Birmingham Mail: 4,401. The biggest beast of all, the London Evening Standard, has just moved to a weekly edition after 197 years of daily publication. Of course, many more people look at newspapers’ websites than their print editions. But the way the websites have been managed is a big part of local journalism’s problems. I was a feature writer on local papers,


mainly in Cumbria and also in Edinburgh, from 1995 until being made redundant by Newsquest in 2019. During my first decade in the job, local papers were still flying high. Then publishers began prioritising websites. At the same time, the music and film industries were fighting piracy, maintaining the notion that their work should be paid for. Newspaper publishers were determined to give their work away.


12 | theJournalist In principle, I don’t care if


people read newspapers as a hard copy or on a screen. What matters is whether the publisher receives enough money to run a sustainable business. Publishers thought their websites would bring in sufficient ad revenue to cover the loss of newspaper sales and advertising. Many of us argued that giving away our product was not a good strategy. So it has proved. Post Covid, the big groups launched online-only titles. Many closed within a couple of years. One statistic highlights the struggle to turn clicks into cash. Reach is the UK’s biggest newspaper publisher. Its titles include the Liverpool Echo and the Manchester Evening News. In 2023, after two decades of paper sales being cut while the websites were promoted, print still accounted for 75 per cent of Reach’s revenue. Numerous factors have conspired


against the industry, such as social media companies creaming off ad revenue from newspapers’ online stories. But bad decisions by newspaper bosses have played a major role in local papers – those that survive – becoming shadows of their former selves. I explore these issues in my memoir, Panic as Man Burns Crumpets: the Vanishing World of the Local Journalist. First published in 2021, it was recently released with a new afterword. This describes how trends have accelerated.


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Local papers are still caught in a vicious circle. Falling revenue leads to cuts. Cuts lead to poorer products. Poorer products lead to falling revenue. The results are evident. One of my former papers splashed on a city-centre scheme, reporting it will have ‘twin pathways’. I’ve spent far too long wondering what that means. ‘Twin pathways’ is all the information given. This is what happens when journalism is reduced to copying press releases, with overworked reporters too busy churning out stories to ask even basic questions. It has finally dawned on some publishers that they should charge for access to their websites. But this is only after the quality of the content has plummeted, and after readers have had it for free for 20 years. Publishers have encouraged the idea that their work is worthless. The big groups’ strategy for local papers is one of managed decline – keep cutting costs to keep making a profit until there’s nothing left to cut. People are willing to pay for local


Many of us argued that giving away our product was not a good strategy. So it has proved


news. Hyperlocals – independent papers and websites – are thriving or at least surviving. Mill Media’s model of good-quality long reads and investigations, funded mostly by subscribers, has seen it expand from Manchester into Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham, with plans for London and Glasgow. Whether this model could work in the many smaller towns left with little or no local journalism is debatable. More certain is the dedication of those still striving to keep communities informed.


Panic as Man Burns Crumpets, Little, Brown


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