Daily Mail & General Trust has never been known to run one business agenda when the company could be running three. So the Northcliffe Media owner's call last week for further mergers in the regional press to aid the transition to a brave new world may well have signalled more than just another lurch towards consolidation among the industry's main players.
How that plays out with shareholders and in the offices of Johnston Press, Newsquest and Trinity Mirror will be a matter of fascination and speculation for the industry. In what remains of the readerships and newsrooms of the provincial press, however, it will be a very different story.
Consolidation has been the C-word of the regional journalist for 15 years. An industry that soaked up as many media graduates as the universities could supply when there were massive paginations to be filled has now just as expeditiously merged them out of existence, with those remaining largely being metamorphosed into writer-subeditors who can take pictures.
It wasn't always all bad news for journalists and journalism, though, when consolidation came knocking. In the short period when the times were good, independent dailies and local weeklies were snapped up by the regional groups to the delight of many staff, who saw offices and plant re-equipped and pay creep up almost in line with pagination.
With the crash, however, has come not only brutal staff cuts but a savage retrenchment in local journalism. Some publications have retained staff – and a semblance of community journalism – more effectively than others. And it is no coincidence that they are largely outside the major groups.
At the bottom end of the circulation table Sir Ray Tindle points to his hyper-local journalism which thrives on 150 small weekly publications, nine of which have been launched since the start of the recession. And at the top, the Wolverhampton Express & Star group despite rigorous cost-cutting still follows its tradition of regarding local journalism as its key to survival.
It is impossible in times of almost daily contraction to correlate circulation figures with questions of ownership or quality journalism. But sales of local newspapers – mainly weeklies – where cuts have been less severe seem to have suffered less.
This may be an argument in favour of those who feel the major regional consolidation of the last 20 years was an ill-judged exercise by an industry with eyes only for high margins. Few regional journalists in the current climate would say otherwise.
The verdict that really matters, however, lies with a jury that is still out. And so far few readers are seeing any mitigating circumstances as their cherished local papers are printed earlier and earlier, further and further away from home, carrying less and less news of any relevance to their communities.
Sean Dooley edited several regional daily titles for Northcliffe Newspapers and was editor-in-chief of Staffordshire Sentinel Newspapers until 2005. He is now a media consultant
