Had things turned out a little differently back in the late 1950s, it’s just possible that the cast in the TV smash hit Succession might have featured a rather different set of characters. Instead of featuring a media mogul partly inspired by Rupert Murdoch, it could have been based on yours truly – an uppity young Taffy trying to transform his local rag, the Cardiff and District News.
It had started well for me. At 15 I had a regular column with the very successful Penarth Times. Almost every household in the posh seaside town bought a copy. Then the proprietor decided we could do the same with a new weekly in the great metropolis that was Cardiff. He called it the Cardiff and District News and not only made me the editor of the teenage page but the circulation manager, too. Sort of.
It was my responsibility to deliver it to the newsagents. Me and an elderly lady with an even older Austin 7. We had a sale-or-return policy. Big mistake. I swear there were weeks when we collected more than we had delivered the week before. Lesson learned. The paper lasted about six months.
I moved to the Merthyr Express and learned another lesson: if a bright young councillor with ambitions to get rich and become the town’s mayor offers a naive young reporter earning £7 a week the use of his expensive luxury saloon whenever he wants it, there will be a price to pay. My wise old news editor warned me off. People trust their local paper, he said. You betray that trust at your peril.
I left regional papers for regional television: Television Wales and the West. I was the first reporter at the Aberfan disaster in 1966. After a lifetime in journalism covering wars, famines and earthquakes, it remains the most hellish scene I have witnessed. I still remember the tears leaving white strips down the faces of dust-covered miners digging through the mountain of waste that had crushed the school with their children in it. Some children were rescued. Many were not.
The world’s media descended on Aberfan. Some showed zero respect for a village in indescribable grief. They wanted a different story. Some were thrown out. Local journalists kept going back and ultimately helped expose the wicked mismanagement at the top of the National Coal Board that had led to the tragedy.
Local newspapers matter. So does all local journalism, including local radio and, yes, local websites. But especially local papers. Which is why it’s so sad that in the past decade, about 300 local and regional newspapers in the UK have gone out of business. And there’s worse to come. Reach, the UK’s biggest regional and local newspaper owner, whose titles include the Birmingham Mail, the Liverpool Echo and the Irish Star, is in the process of cutting jobs. More than 600 of them.
You need only open a newspaper, and then log on to Facebook or Google to see why. Advertisers are deserting print for digital. About 20 years ago, the UK regional newspaper advertising market was worth £2.5bn. At the end of last year it was valued at less than a tenth of that. And a scary number of us have stopped buying papers. Sales are probably down about 65% over the past 10 or 12 years.
The value of publishing behemoths has crashed in the wake of all this. From hundreds of millions in some cases to tens of millions. Or less.
But wasn’t this inevitable? The world has changed. Even someone like me, who owns the finest pair of rose-tinted specs this side of Fleet Street (remember Fleet Street?), can see why many people find local papers anachronistic and old-fashioned in a digital world. Imagine spending, as I did, many hours in Penarth standing outside churches, noting down the names of mourners at funerals. The boss knew that if their name was in the paper, they would buy it.
But I spent many more boring hours in meetings of the council’s planning committee. Boring to me, maybe, but not to those affected by the committee’s decisions. We need to know if our council is planning to chop down our trees before we get woken up in the middle of the night by the chainsaws. A decent local paper or radio station would warn us. It’s sad that the BBC now looks at local radio and sees the chance to save a few quid by chopping jobs.
Tony Hall, a former director general of the BBC, was almost right when he wrote recently: “The BBC is both local and global. These are two enormous journalistic strengths that no other organisation can offer. Local radio is too often an underappreciated part of the BBC’s output, and it may be an area where the market increasingly fails us.”
Or maybe it’s the BBC failing the market, with some services being cut to the bone and programmes effectively merged. Either do it properly or don’t do it all.
Then there’s the old controversy: how much has the ubiquity of BBC local news been to blame for so many local papers going out of business? As Hall acknowledges, in broadcasting the genuinely local commercial stations have for the most part been merged into larger entities. This has “important ramifications” for reporting on local councils, courts and so on.
A few years ago, the BBC set up the Local Democracy Reporting Service to head off charges that it was killing off local newspapers. The scheme pays for journalists who can work for any local news outlet. There are 165 of them and about 1,000 individual news outlets are signed up. They’ve syndicated more than 273,000 stories. It’s important, but it’s not enough. So what is enough?
Rhodri Talfan Davies, the director of BBC Nations, summed up the BBC’s strategy like this: “Attracting a new younger audience by transforming the way we work and adopting a ‘digital first’ approach in everything that we do.”
The cynical response interprets that as: more jobs online … fewer jobs offline. For those of us who are no longer young, we will mourn the passing of our local papers for holding power to account and giving some of us a flying start in our careers.
John Humphrys is a presenter on Classic FM after 51 years at the BBC.
