Abstract
The newspaper trade has never been entirely respectable, but it was once possible for journalists to find fulfilled lives alongside neighbours who chose more orthodox careers. If the local paper was unlikely to make them rich, they could at least expect their salaries to rise with those of the teachers, university lecturers and local government officials in the restored Victorian terraces to which all aspired.
It's not so easy now. As the economics of the newspaper industry break down and managements strive to remove their greatest costs, any middle-aged reporter who continues to command reasonable money might as well staple a bull's eye target to his or her back. The next generation is cheaper, more tractable and arrives free from sentimental notions about print.
If this were merely a story of human obsolescence it would matter only to those forced to find new employment. Where will they all go once the public relations industry realises there are no journalists left to talk to? But when local newspapers reduce staff and remove experience there are bigger consequences. Who will keep an eye on the police and the courts and the councils? What's the market for stories of anti-social behaviour, scams by conmen and sweat-shop labour?
It would help to know how serious the problem is, for there is remarkably little hard information about current numbers of reporters. In a world of anecdote, we hear more stories about the heart being ripped from newspapers than about cub reporters finding the same pleasures in local news as the journalists who went before them. What is not in doubt is that there are fewer titles and they are struggling to sell fewer copies, produced by fewer staff. If there are bad things going on in our communities, they are going on with less fear of press scrutiny.
The obvious people to blame for this decline are the publishers: journalists have never liked management and they surely got us into this mess, not least in promising their shareholders double-digit profit margins How on earth did they think halving the number of reporters and doubling the price of the newspaper was anything more than papering over cracks?
Yet our regional newspaper publishers are hardly alone in striving to find an online model that works. The economic revolution provoked by the arrival of the internet has challenged cleverer minds than those traditionally attracted to newspaper management. Who could have foreseen such a precipitous decline in print, so many easy alternatives for advertisers, the free availability of news and the massive attraction of something called social media?
Journalists are good at diagnosing the problem – particularly when it has become obvious enough for all to see – less adept at prescribing the cure. We liked the old world of editorial and commercial, church and state, where someone else had to worry about the money and we were left alone to spend it. This is an unusual trade in having always offered social utility, albeit one that is not as instantly demonstrable as rubbish collection, funded by private enterprise. The only subsidy the industry knows is freedom from VAT.
The capitalist model has served journalism well in promoting energy and competition, but does not allow private businesses suddenly to pursue journalism out of philanthropy rather than profit. Those entrepreneurs who have made a fortune elsewhere and decide to buy a newspaper do not abandon the principles of business that made them rich in the first place.
It is also hard to envisage how public money can come to the aid of the industry. The current mood is to retreat from state funding of the BBC – albeit dressed up as the TV licence – rather than to extend the principle. The nearest thing to state funding is the BBC's decision – surely to be admired rather than denigrated – to spend around £8million a year to fund 150 journalists on local newspapers and other media. Now there is an initiative others might follow. We wonder if Google, Facebook and other giants of the new world order that so admire open access to information have got a little spare cash to spend on subsidising a few local reporters.
