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Union calls for public subsidies to save local papers

Local newspapers should be given public funding to ensure they survive into the future, the National Union of Journalists has told a government minister.

The union’s Parliamentary group met Ed Vaizey, minister for culture, communications and creative industries, yesterday to discuss options for supporting local papers across the UK, amid concerns about falling circulation, closure of titles and cuts to journalist posts.

The NUJ wants to work with Mr Vaizey to plan a roundtable of experts in the New Year looking at new models to help sustain local newspapers within their communities, including classing them as community assets.

As part of this, the union is calling for the proposed group to look into how local papers could be funded or part-funded on a public service model.

It said if newspapers were to receive such public subsidies, they would need to prove they could meet a “public benefit test”, with certain requirements such as a commitment to reporting council meetings and courts and providing a forum for the local community.

The union believes that newspapers should be made community assets under the Localism Act 2011 to prevent titles being closed overnight and to give potential new owners, including local co-operatives, the time to put together a bid for a paper.

The NUJ claimed that 20pc of the UK’s local newspapers had closed in the last decade, with only 70 launches, and it raised concerns about regional publishers increasingly relying on reader-generated copy.

NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet said: “The NUJ believes that journalists should be at the heart of their local communities, speaking and listening to their readers.

“It believes there is a strong future for local papers, which enjoy high levels of trust among their readers. Yet the sector is in a precarious position.  When times were good, the newspaper chiefs squeezed profits, made unwise acquisitions, built up debts and failed to invest in journalism.

“Year-on-year cuts, pay freezes and increased workloads have created low morale among newspaper staff. The transition to digital production is fraught with danger – and it appears that professional journalism, community journalism and investigative journalism could be casualties.

“There is a real danger that local, campaigning newspapers will wither on the vine. The NUJ believes that the model is not bust: local papers need to rediscover their local roots, so that local advertisers know they are reaching their market and readers can see that reporters are working on their patch as a watchdog and friend.

“That is why we will be discussing with the minister how government can contribute to the future of a vibrant local press which serves its community.”

A survey of NUJ reps revealed many reporters were no longer covering council meetings and court hearings and the union said that this trend was depriving people of the information they needed to make judgements when voting in local elections.

The union also quoted figures given to the Leveson Inquiry in 2011 by media analyst Claire Enders, who estimated 40pc of regional press jobs had gone in the UK during the last five years and the sector had lost £1bn in advertising since 2008.

The meeting with Mr Vaizey took place yesterday, which was the European-wide Stand Up for Journalism day.

29 comments

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  • November 6, 2013 at 8:10 am
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    Local newspapers don’t need public subsidies. They need their managers and share holders to adjust their expectations in terms of profit. Let’s not forget most of them are still making decent amounts of money.

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  • November 6, 2013 at 8:27 am
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    KellyC is spot on. Most weeklies are in profit still, and in some cases decent profits too! As a retired circulation director I am still in touch with one or two MD’s who are still making serious dosh from good weekly newspapers

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  • November 6, 2013 at 9:07 am
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    In the case of JP the debt is so huge and of their own making, so why should they be subsidised? They have papers that make profit, but all in vein. When all the cost cutting is done, maybe someone will acknowledge that they have to make more money from their local advertisers and that those advertisers will expect quality advertising from a staff that knows the area; has an interest in them seeing an increase in footfall through their advertising; be pleased with the service and want to spend further. Print advertising is where the most revenue can be made, not digital, and yet in the more upmarket YP Magazine from last week I was shown ONE advert with ‘Sleidht rides’, ‘shoose your own gift’ and ‘to book tickt’. A good portion of the smaller ads were also illegible due to too small a type size or an inappropriate font being used. Does management look at the papers these days? There are far fewer creative, attractive ads and more ads that should never have been published.

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  • November 6, 2013 at 9:43 am
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    Newsquest was operating at 35% profit margin and 11% year on year dividend growth last time I checked (couple years back but post ‘crash’)

    TM has made £100+m each of last three years.

    Local papers are doing ok on those figures.

    Its when you throw in the enormous debt repayments they all have to make – borrowed at pretty poor interest rates to fund growth during the boom years.

    Now these orgs are saddled with too much debt and dwindling returns -means the shareholders are unhappy.

    The model is totally flawed.

    By all means give money to support the independents but giving taxpayers money to boost the shareholders of the huge PLCs is a disgraceful idea

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  • November 6, 2013 at 9:53 am
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    If there was a strong future for local newspapers, they would not need subsidies!

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  • November 6, 2013 at 10:03 am
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    It is a totally unworkable idea. If this is what the newspapers are pinning their hopes on they are finished already

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  • November 6, 2013 at 10:59 am
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    As if the public doesn’t hate journalists enough already. This sort of away-with-the-fairies gibbering is why I left the NUJ. And why would the government, of all people, want voters to be better informed, when our political system only functions at all because of ignorance, bigotry and bias?

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  • November 6, 2013 at 11:32 am
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    The only cure for this idiotic situation is the breaking up of the giant corporations who own most of our “local” press. They make big profits, to the joy of their shareholders, because the newsppapers they own have mostly been reduced to the status of “brands” with precious little local connection. If they thought they could get away with totally centralised editorial to fill the gaps between the ads they would – I suspect only their circulation managers stand between them and that move, and many weeklies are already only regional newspapers with a couple of slip pages. Break up Johnston, Newsquest & Local World and restore local managements and fully local editorial teams, with much shorter ownership chains and lower profit expectations, and you’d revive local newspapers. They might not be able to fund expensive head offices, layers of management, company cars and monster dividends but they wouldn’t need to; the Editors would become real editors again, instead of the only local sub in the place (although in the real world h/she would be one of two or three – I’m talking weeklies here); local news would come into a local office; but with modern technology you could still print at Didcot, still get your ads made up at some central location and still even buy in some features. If Ray Tindle can do it, so can everyone else. BUT for this to work you’d need plenty of really effective managements and local editorial teams, not just middle-class kids from London with media studies degrees whose real aim is TV stardom.

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  • November 6, 2013 at 11:39 am
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    Surely there’s also an issue of political interference too. Those worried about the Charter should be even more worried about public funding.
    Press officers would be able to rehearse the mantra: “If you print that article critical of our policy, we’ll have to have a little review of your public subsidy – won’t we!”

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  • November 6, 2013 at 11:57 am
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    Please, NUJ, find your way back to this planet ASAP!

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  • November 6, 2013 at 12:25 pm
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    Newspapers already get a substantial subsidy from the government through mandatory statutory advertising worth up to £50m pa as Steve Barnett and others have been pointing out. But this subsidy is undirected and doesn’t necessarily go on producing public goods that the market wouldn’t produce on its own.
    I am surprised to find myself agreeing with the NUJ that well-directed subsidies could be the answer

    There are a lot of subsidies in the local news space – we rounded some of them up here http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/much-subsidy-goes-newspapers/

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  • November 6, 2013 at 12:31 pm
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    For once in 40 years, the union is spot on. Modern democratic society cannot be left to just a few self-interest groups such as the big newspaper publishers. Journalists as a whole have failed to stand up to these proprietors and everybody knows that “hacks” are in the pockets of monopoly groups. You cannot openly criticise your employer because this would hinder your chance of getting another media job. (And this is in an industry where fresh ideas are supposed to be everything).Newspapers are a very closely knit world where word soon gets around. Publishers don’t have to tell editors what to print because editors know not to bite the hand that feeds them and act accordingly.
    Journalists are keen to kill the opposition, but they are cutting their own throats because this simply strengthens the hand of the monopolists and limits their own job opportunities elsewhere. This is also partly why journalists wages are so slow.
    The result is a dry as dust regional press the fate of which the public is completely indifferent to.
    Britain pioneered the industrial revolution. Today it must develop a completely new media concept, and one not reliant solely on advertising. Too many journalists are cynics who feel they are above the reader. This is often reflected in what they write.They should either find another profession or go work on the Guardian.

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  • November 6, 2013 at 1:02 pm
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    Sadly,all weekly and daily circulations are falling; surely this must mean that the public are losing interest in local newspapers…for whatever reason,and to ask for public money to be given to something that the public has ceased buying…well Michelle perhaps that argument could have been used to save the typewriter industry,post offices etc……………

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  • November 6, 2013 at 1:12 pm
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    I would support public subsidies, but only if the cash would not find its way back to big multinationals – it should be public money for a public service.
    There is a system of subsidised local papers in France but I don’t knopw how it works – can anyone enlighten us?

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  • November 6, 2013 at 1:45 pm
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    Local newspapers are already publicly funded – by those who buy them!

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  • November 6, 2013 at 1:48 pm
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    Sir Ray Tindle is better than no papers at all, but would his concept of journalism succeed outside the Chocolate Box places in Cornwall, Devon, etc where most of his titles exist (London is a special case). His brand still smacks of Sir Winston Churchill, the British Empire, Upstairs Downstairs (I can’t spell Downton Abbey). To most people in Middlesbrough, this sort of thing went out in 1950.

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  • November 6, 2013 at 1:49 pm
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    Wake up NUJ! Yet another reason why I shan’t be renewing my membership and the Coventry chapel dwindles even further.

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  • November 6, 2013 at 2:13 pm
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    I agree GladImOutOfit … but hope the central location you refer to for ads to be made up wouldn’t be India!

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  • November 6, 2013 at 3:40 pm
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    Nut Indent – If public money was used to subsidise newspapers there effectively would no longer be any local democracy. Can you imagine proprietors, large or small, exposing local authority wrong-doing if the existence of their newspaper depended upon council/state support?

    Unionman – Have you ever read a French regional newspaper? Most of the stories are on the level of the material contributed to UK weeklies by local village correspondents. I have been reading French regionals for years and it is exceedingly rare to see what I would call really hard news stories, or anything exposing wrongdoing.

    The press in France, for the most part, is extremely deferential to authority. Do we really want that here?

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  • November 6, 2013 at 5:03 pm
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    Perhaps if publishers stopped employing village idiots to do there work for them and handed back editorial to the professionals they would sell more papers. Standard’s are going down and down. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys

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  • November 6, 2013 at 5:13 pm
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    ‘Standard’s are going down and down.’

    Priceless.

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  • November 6, 2013 at 6:39 pm
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    Totally silly idea making NUJ look silly too. How on earth could any paper do a story on dodgy cllr or public money wasted on fancy limo story when the council is underpinning. Plus if NUJ read the papers they would find out that every council in the land is cash strapped and making more cuts!

    The problem is as outlined in the many comments above.

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  • November 7, 2013 at 12:05 am
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    Standards, Tony, Standards.

    As far as Tindle goes, sorry, it doesn’t work. Maybe his papers do work well in nothing ‘towns’ like Crickhowell, Bordon and Axminster (although anyone could run a paper there, such is the lack of news), but as anyone who’s recently read the disgraceful Enfield Advertiser, the shameful South London Press and the moribund Yellow Advertiser can attest, Tindle Newspapers are incapable of providing a service to places of more than 100 people. Maybe it’s the management at his papers not being able to run things, I don’t know for certain.

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  • November 7, 2013 at 12:14 am
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    Giving newspapers subsidies is like throwing money down the drain. Many of us can see it but far too many journos still have their heads in the sand – local newspapers are dying. They don’t speak to the people any more, they are not relevant in enough people’s lives. There would be a chance to completely overhaul the industry and change what newspapers were about, but sadly staffs have been cut to the bare minimum, and the most creative ones have left, or are probably about to.
    The dinosaurs or those winding down the clock remain on local papers, and they ain’t going to change anything, they just can’t see the problem or have the brains to come up with a solution. The newspaper industry is hardly a mecca for creative types these days sadly.
    The NUJ has lost the plot too. The model is completely broken and can’t be fixed, this is a disgraceful idea, any left-thinking organisation should be ashamed of itself for backing such a waste of public money.
    And stop harping on about getting back to local roots! The world is at people’s fingertips now, we don’t all want to know about what’s happening in our surrounding streets. Hyperlocal is a crazy model – why on earth would advertisers want to limit their audience so much as well? We’re all on the web now – don’t shrink your areas, expand them!
    You might as well go out with a bang…

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  • November 7, 2013 at 11:04 am
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    Having read all the comments I can only repeat that some form of financial help must be given to regional newspapers in the interests of democracy.
    After working more than 35 years in regional newspapers I can tell you all about ambitious councillors, bent coppers, institutionalised NUJ members, dodgy estate agents, etc etc.
    But the way things are going, the big media companies are ruining newspapers and shackling all those who work for them. Journalists must be empowered to make them independent of publishers so that they are not afraid to speak out.
    I’m not talking about pouring taxpayers’ money down a public drain, but journalists should have the same level of authority as doctors and teachers.
    Incidentally, all the raving right-wing national newspapers received indirect State aid for years through not having to pay tax on newsprint imports.
    The BBC and the Guardian both receive a form of subsidy and I don’t think any of the HTFP contributors would take issue with that.

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  • November 7, 2013 at 2:08 pm
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    I think most of the contributors to HTFP would struggle to detect any logic in the posts from nut indent.

    ‘Journalists must be empowered to make them independent of publishers so they are not afraid to speak out’. So journalists would be freed from responsibility towards the publishers who pay their wages and instead become dependent on pleasing whatever public bodies are supposed to be going to subsidise titles?

    I don’t hold any particular brief for most of the major newspaper publishing groups, but I would much rather be beholden to them than to councillors/civil servants.

    Nut indent is also making too much of an assumption when he claims HTFP contributors do not take issue with subsidy of the BBC.

    The BBC’s massive public subsidy gives it a huge and damaging advantage over any other UK news organisation, broadcast or print.

    It is certainly time the BBC was made to share the licence fee income. The playing field needs to be levelled.

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  • November 7, 2013 at 2:12 pm
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    Ridiculous idea. Clearly no newspaper publisher would accept a subsidy after fighting so hard to get Eric Pickles to ban ‘tax-payer subsidised council Pravdas’.
    The management of these companies have a moral compass that always points in the right direction, and they would never put profit over prinicple.

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  • November 11, 2013 at 1:47 pm
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    Rupert Bear…are BBC journalists frightened to speak out in case the licence fee gets cut?
    What about the Guardian journalists, are they inhibited by their newspaper’s trust status?
    The right wing national newspapers in the UK have been indirectly subsidised by the State for years through newsprint import taxation policy.
    You will never get anything in perfect balance, but what alternative idea are you suggesting? Journalists are at war with each other (trying to kill rival publications off) which is bad for democracy, disastrous for their pay packets, and only plays into the hands of the big groups.
    As for you lot who go on about Council Pravdas, how many of you speak Russian? In other words, you base your understanding on second hand information from political animals like Pickles.
    Let me remind you of the first rule of journalism: NEVER ASSUME ANYTHING.

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