Well, the latest set of regional newspaper circulation figures are hardly a surprise. We knew they were going to show further declines in sales. Even so, they make for appalling reading. Year on year, every morning title sold on weekdays in England, Scotland and Wales is down. Every evening title is down. Every Sunday title is down. That is, as far as my researches go, an unprecedented situation. There has never been a complete set of minus signs before. And local weeklies have recorded their worst returns in living memory too. Very few of them have managed to add sales and most of those that have show only the smallest of marginal rises.
This is a truly shocking set of circulation results and confirms that the gentle downward sales trend has turned into a cliff-fall. Of course, there is one central mitigating factor. It is clear that readers are becoming viewers, choosing to read on screen rather than in print. Newspaper websites are assuming increasing importance and it's essential, if we are to get a clearer picture of the real audience then there needs to be hard data to show how many people are accessing those sites (see my posting below, Regional press tries to get at multi-platform facts). Paid-for titles are also suffering from the competition from free papers and free ad magazines. People are coming to expect that news is, and should be, free.
I fully accept that we are in the midst of a communications revolution and print is suffering from its effects. Britain is hardly alone in that respect. In the United States and in Scandinavia, the same kinds of problems are occurring for paid-for newspapers. But I believe Britain is different in one important respect (and I realise that this is a controversial statement): its regional and local journalism is just not good enough to retain readers let alone win new ones. I am not arguing that everything is worse than it was years ago in some entirely mythical golden age (though I'd be happy to debate that possibility too). What I mean is that newspapers have failed to raise their game in the face of competition from elsewhere. They are not offering the kind of quality journalism, day on day, that makes their papers required reading. They are not comprehensive enough in their coverage; too few fail to set the local agenda; too few are staffed well enough – in terms of quantity and, dare I say it, quality – to provide the professional service that can hope to serve the audience properly. The very idea of a local reporter being able to devote days to an investigation of any kind has long since passed. As I've said so often in recent years, all local paper staff are viewed as piece workers hacking out words by rote.
One of the main reasons for this is, of course, the gradual erosion of staff numbers and the parallel erosion of salaries. Too few people of real talent and ability are prepared to take up jobs in the regional press or, at least, to spend very long working there. Owners must be to blame for this. They failed to invest in journalism in the times when they were reaping rewards from a booming advertising market. And, when that boom was over, the first section to suffer cuts was editorial. Yes, there have been launches. Yes, there has been an understanding of the need to invest online, though that has been both belated and, too often, has been done on the cheap. But it's undeniable that journalism is a labour intensive activity that make a time-and-motion approach to their work wholly inappropriate.
Unless owners grasp that editorial content is the key to wooing an audience the current cliff-fall will become steeper still and they will end up without any readers at all. Nor, once their print "brand" disappears, will they be able to hold on to an online readership either. In the immediate future at least, print and web have to run together in order to retain an audience. Unless owners and managers grasp that fact, they will hasten the demise of newspapers and, in so doing, rob communities of the main information source that underpins our democracy. And that ain't as pompous as it sounds. It's the reality staring us all in the face.
