For anyone following the ongoing row over council ‘newspapers’, this week has brought out issues which get to the heart of the matter.
Leaving the question of revenue aside for a while, the argument essentially goes like this;
The editors: We provide fair, accurate and, most importantly, unbiased coverage of what goes on in the local corridors of power.
Peter Barron’s column admitting to feeling a “warm glow” on reading about the Cornish county council scrapping its free monthly magazine summarises well.
The councillors: Local papers don’t provide a suitable level of coverage and are only interested in knocking stories.
Darlington councillor Nick Wallis’ broadside on the “one-eyed nature of the local press” sums this view up neatly.
But what of the readers? Are they getting the important information on decisions taken in their names in town halls across the country – from either source?
Some of the responses to Roy Greenslade’s article on the subject make for uncomfortable reading:
“I agree with Roy in theory, but in practice my local paper is unreadable and full of syndicated crap.
“And incidentally, the ‘pillar of democracy’ argument rings a tad hollow when you have five local papers and the press desk at council meetings is still sometimes empty,”
“I don’t buy my own local newspaper in this part of London because it’s very downmarket – it hasn’t responded at all to the changing demographic of the area”.
etc. etc. you get the picture and as HoldTheFrontPage has also pointed out to me, there’s more comments in the same vein on their posting here.
Which has left me wondering what the truth of the situation is. Personally I’d consider it a serious attack on democracy if the idea of ‘matter of record’ ends up becoming too unsexy to be worthwhile in the very publications we rely on to be our eyes and ears in the community.
Previously the bedrock of any local paper’s coverage, it would be interesting to know how many pages the average local paper now devotes to such reporting and what measures are in place to ensure it isn’t now put at risk by diminishing resources and office-bound reporting staff.
Maybe the power of the interwebs could be harnessed to carry out a snapshot survey of exactly what council coverage is currently being published in local papers.
A survey could work in the manner of a meme, with bloggers across the UK picking one day (or week if the enthusiasm for this is there) and looking at their local paper to quantify how many page leads, picture stories, single columns etc. deal with local authority decisions.
If you’d like to join me on something like this, let me know via the comments below.
Dim Sum Digital 
It’s a perfect storm in many ways. Councillors are often very thin-skinned and therefore don’t like to be criticised. On the other hand, a critical story about a council will sell more papers, or be better read than a story which says “council does job well”. And in any definition of news, “council does job” is not really news.
That said, there are papers which go too far and therefore aren’t fair and balanced. But is a council newspaper which just pumps out the positive news from an authority the correct counterbalance? Surely the sensible approach would be to make council information more accessible, both good and bad.
Could councils make online streaming of meetings more widely available? That would make it harder for any papers which consider council coverage to be “unsexy” to hide behind the argument that they don’t have the staff to send to the town hall because it could be accessed, live or archived, from anywhere – and also open up discussion on council meetings to a wider variety of news sources – hyperlocal blogs, personal blogs, community forums and so on. I’m also surprised at how many councils still don’t put all the papers related to an agenda online – some still only put the basic agenda sheet up.
Assessing how much council coverage is in a newspaper, or corresponding website, would probably produce some very interesting results. It would be important to note how far council activity goes these days, often far beyond the traditional scope of what we know as a council, so would coverage of partnerships etc also be covered? And should other public authority-related reporting be covered – eg SHAs, RDAs, PCTs, police authorities, road safety partnerships – all bodies which make very important decisions which also get varying degrees of coverage. And before any conclusions are made about a paper’s coverage being acceptable or not, it would interesting to try and establish how active the public body is in pushing information out.
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Thanks for your input David. I couldn’t agree with you more in respect of getting more council and public authority material accessible online and having some consistent data formats for all UK authorities would be a start there. Your point about other bodies is also well made with so many local decision-making authorities now involved it would seem this bread and butter reporting is more needed than ever before.
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your survey a great idea – happy to help spread it throguh the hyperlocal networks
However, like Dawkins ‘god delusion’ perhaps we should define a ‘journalist delusion’ where the people who write about newspapers, their theory and academic practice think that any paper, local or otherwise actually reports the dry facts of what happens in the chamber or committee room.
as @david notes above the interest is in what is a story and that is almost inevitably an argument or row or a ‘failure’.
also the dry proceedings of council are very very boring. councillors in general have made no effort to modernise the way their meetings are conducted to make them accessible and comprehensible to regular folk who may be affected by the issues being discussed. I have been to dozens of local meetings (when did you last go to one BTW) that are crushingly boring, but important.
the real challenge for the system is to begin by putting a more C21 face on a C19th process, but then to change the C19th process itself to make it more open and accountable – the Obama town hall events on health care are the sort of thing it would be great to see in the UK.
our community site in kings cross does cover much dry council business that affecst the area – this kind of thing http://www.kingscrossenvironment.com/2009/07/my-entry.html
it isn’t very interesting to a wider islington audience served by the Gazette but we cover it on our local site becuase we live or walk nearby – we are a volunteer operation not needing to sell advertising
for the best of all council chasing websites in the UK see http://www.pitsnpots.co.uk where a borken local democracy has led to some remarkabel web based accountability
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This sounds a really great idea Sarah and I’d be happy to be involved in looking at some titles in the West Midlands. I think it would need to be over a week to get meaningful data.
Would you be looking for a mix of city councils covered by the big regional dailies and smaller district/county councils covered by weeklies? It would be interesting to compare the two.
Yoosk has been concentrating on building conversations in partnership with both the press and the councils, positioning ourselves as neutral brokers.
It’s an entirely new model- councillors want to engage and get reported ‘fairly’ and verbatim, newspapers don’t have the resources for this. So we’ve automated the process and involved the community in conducting the interviews. Here’s a journalism.co.uk report:
http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/534613.php
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Hi Tim, sorry for the delay in responding. I have today had a go at breaking down my local paper. Be interested to see how yours compares. Interested to hear about Yoosk too and would like to know more about how it develops.
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I think this is a problem and not one I can see an immediate answer to.
The idea that PA will offer a no frills reporting service on things like courts and local council meetings is an interesting one and I think we have to see more sharing of resources between the major newsgroups.
There’s also the issue of local venture capital-type funds being made available so that groups can bid for funding to provide local output.
I’ve noticed a backlash from residents in my area to the cutbacks of the South Manchester Reporter and one of the things I’m starting to do is to collate all the info I get sent as a parliamentary candidate for Manchester Withington and reproduce it as a bi-weekly email newsletter.
It’s not about politics or ‘Vote for Me’ but about being useful. If anybody in the area would like to receive the newsletter or would like to contribute info to it then email me at lucy.powell@gmail.com
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