Reasons to be cheerful, courtesy of the counter-intuitive Ray Tindle, whose newspaper group owns 220 weekly papers.
Here are some quotes from the 84-year-old publisher in an interview with journalism.co.uk:
"Tindle Newspapers hasn't made one journalist redundant since the recession began".
"The average person isn't interested in the wider area but they are very interested in their immediate locality. If you had a paper for every street, it would sell. You couldn't do that, but you could do it for every town."
"People want to see their name in print. If my four-year-old granddaughter, Maisie, is in a nativity play, I want to see her picture and name in the local paper. And, by crikey, I would want everybody else to see it as well."
"The internet is wonderful, but it doesn't replace a local weekly. The public will require both it and local papers. The blog can have the same effect as a contents bill for a newspaper and the two can exist happily side-by-side."
"The recovery from the recession is already under way, led by printed newspapers with exciting innovations. We've survived five recessions. The local weekly press will live, not die, it will expand and flourish."
Well, I don't agree with some of that, but there is so much to appreciate about Tindle and the positive way he goes about his business that I'm happy to applaud him. He was hyperlocal before the term was invented.
Source: journalism.co.uk
