Once at my old local paper, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, a trainee made the mistake of sniggering when asked to cover the allotments sub-committee. ‘Don’t ever fuck with allotment holders,’ the news editor warned. ‘It may not matter to you, but they take those little patches of land very seriously indeed.’ Like most of the news editor’s salty words of wisdom, this advice was forged on the anvil of bitter experience. Grimsby’s allotmenteers guarded their marrow and runner bean patches with a Balkan-esque blood-and-soil passion. The slightest mistake could generate no end of angry phone calls and green-ink letters.
I am not sure allotment coverage was quite what King Charles had in mind when he lavished praise on local newspapers last week. But in a reception laid on for 400 hacks at Buckingham Palace, he hailed their work as a ‘cornerstone of democracy’ – something they’ll doubtless be milking for coming editions.
How many people will be reading is another matter. Just like the King’s many other conservationist passions – rainforests, white rhinos – local newspapers are already an endangered species. Bled dry by the loss of ad revenue to the internet, nearly 300 of Britain’s local newspapers have shut since 2005, and those that remain are sadly a shadow of what they were. The Grimsby Evening Telegraph, which sold a respectable 47,000 copies daily when I was there in the mid-1990s, now sells around 8,000. The King’s paper up in Balmoral, the Aberdeen Press and Journal, which is mainland Britain’s biggest-selling regional, only sells about 25,000. Newsrooms that once stood proudly in city-centre squares are being turned into pubs and hotels, leaving criminal courts uncovered, and councils unscrutinised.
The problem, though, isn’t just that people don’t want to read them. It’s that, increasingly, nor do they want to work on them. Local newspapers used to be the main training ground for Britain’s journalists, be they tabloid kings like Kelvin MacKenzie (The South East London Mercury) or Radio 4 broadcasters like John Humphrys (Penarth Times). But few journalists of the future want to work in what seems like a dying trade.
Last year, for example, Portsmouth College closed its local journalism training course because of a ‘decline in student interest’, ending a 60-year run that spawned the careers of John Pienaar (South London Press) and Sky News presenter Mark Austin (Bournemouth Evening Echo). Instead, media wannabes eye careers in PR, or as YouTubers and influencers. I saw this for myself recently when I did a guest lecture at a journalism course at a Midlands university, alongside the editor of the local paper. He’d just posted a job ad for a trainee, to which not one of the course’s students had applied. Distinctly unimpressed, he devoted his lecture to the ‘local newspapers aren’t as dull as you think’ routine, talking up the various big stories they’d had in the past year.
I doubt he changed many minds. The lifeblood of local papers is indeed drawn from the parish pump, as my own cuttings file from Grimsby attests. Aside from a gangland killing involving a Grimsby drug dealer nicknamed ‘The Codfather’, most of the headlines are somewhat humdrum, such as ‘Youth arrested in chip shop frenzy’.
What a local paper does offer, though, is a chance to observe Britain in microcosm, something few other professions ever get to do. The beat includes sink estates and respectable suburbs, the town hall and the magistrates’ court, garden fetes and nightlife, the seamy underbelly and pillars of the community. Sure, planning rows and youths on the green may sound parochial, but like allotments, they’re what make up our lives. And when local reporters then move to the nationals, they bring a knowledge of provincial life and how it ticks – something Britain’s media could have done more with in the run-up to Brexit. Today, by contrast, many scribes on Fleet Street start life as graduate trainees, where the majority of reporting is office-bound anyway.
In fairness, I was hardly delighted to start my career in Grimsby. It was the only local newspaper to offer me a job after postgraduate journalism training, but at a time when most friends were gravitating to London, moving to a former fishing port in Humberside was not appealing. Grimsby felt distinctly small town, with little to entice a metropolitan 20-something. There was no university, no gastropubs, and lots of time-warped clubland entertainment that resembled the stage acts in Phoenix Nights.
Nor was it the easiest news patch to make your name in. Grimsby’s impoverished council estates had crime a-plenty, but seldom enough to grab the attention of the outside world. If Fleet Street or the BBC wanted stories on northern deprivation, they’d go to Moss Side in Manchester or Byker in Newcastle. Looking back, it was easy to see why people felt overlooked, and why Grimsby later became known as a Brexit-voting stronghold – not that fame has done it many favours. Today, it’s the first port of call for lazy London TV commissioners seeking poverty-porn.
It was easy to see why people felt overlooked, and why Grimsby later became known as a Brexit-voting stronghold
Yet like many in my trade, I regard my days on local papers as the most useful in my career. A colleague likens it to doing a gap year in reverse – rather than travelling beyond Britain to the wider world, one journeyed inwards instead, to places that could seem just as alien, especially to the average London-centric hack.
Many, of course, argue that Facebook pages and bloggers can do just as good a job as local papers. But bloggers seldom bother covering things like the allotments sub-committee, nor are they often seen down at court – another big aspect of local life that now often goes unreported. This isn’t just because they lack the legal training. As every local newspaper hack knows, defendants don’t always appreciate having their case publicised. While a local newspaper can usually face down the ‘print my name and I’ll kill you’ bluster, a solo blogger might feel less brave.
Local papers have been the authors of their own obituaries. Many have innovated little since the 1950s, serving up tedium about potholes and road signs of the sort that is parodied in online spoofs like the Framley Examiner. And with a few commendable exceptions such as the Manchester Mill, a new online venture that has pioneered decent long-form local journalism, the writing is often dull. Sure, local news editors have always told trainees to ‘play it straight’, but when TikTokers and YouTubers are competition, it helps to show a sense of humour and irony.
Indeed, the supreme irony is that now should actually be a golden era for local newspapers. For Britons, after all, have never been more obsessed with all things local, be it the meat in their butchers, the produce in their grocers, or the craft ale in their pub. Why not embrace the idea that the local newspaper should be cherished too – and even perhaps be paying a premium for? You can always skip the allotment coverage…
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