Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

xps to Pinefox

"I find it an interesting comparison; not really sure what the right conclusion is."

these brave lads on represented on the stamps didn't just do their Third Reich national service in various extermination centres that liquidated numbers greater than the entire population of Belfast twenty times over and then some more and they also made up the volunteer auxiliary police units doing the einsatzgruppen's mass killing of jews for them. To just put them on display without any context at all other than "here is some anti-Soviet resistance art" is deeply deeply fucked up is the right conclusion to come to!

attitudes must lag a fair bit behind reality,

There's a huge lag on this I'd say, same reason companies are able to get away with cutting corners for a long time before their customers start complaining

and who the are all these people trusting local newspapers,

People trust the idea of a local newspaper, they assume local newspapers are either neutral or just about roadworks.

To a large degree people have already decided what a media outlet or figure has said before they've said it (and don't really register what they actually said), which is why it doesn't really matter what Owen Jones or Toby Young actually say. The perception is more important than the reality - local newspapers avoid this because the perception is that they are mundane and, by extension, unbiased

People trust the idea of a local newspaper, they assume local newspapers are either neutral or just about roadworks.

Given the circulation figures for local press, a lot of people responding to that question will be trusting the likes of the Liverpool Echo rather than eg. the Woking News & Mail.

people trusting local papers seems like it's part of the same phenomenon as people trusting local government more than national govt and national govt more than the EU, it feels closer and therefore more accountable, like you theoretically could influence its trajectory if you wanted to (whether this is true or not)

also that they have a better understanding of you and your life and circumstances - though isn't it the case that increasingly local newspapers are owned by the same small number of publishers and share centrally produced content, the genuinely 'local' content is diminishing?

when i last got a look at the operation of my local paper, 20 years ago probably, it had 4 journalists tops. yeah my understanding is a lot of local papers are owned by bigger publishers, you can see the shared style if you look at the websites or layouts of a bunch of locals.

I've been saying forever that local newspapers will be the last to go. Go, they will, but they'll outlast the national and bigger regional ones. A local is closer to its audience, that tires of big (inter-)national scandals they've already seen on telly/internet/twitter/fb and grand oPinIoNs way quicker than of what happened to their neighbours neighbours, or the town 2 miles away.
People trusting local newspapers is because - when done good - they are part of that newspaper, they can easily be involved in the creation of it. Accountability, like soref said, also a big factor at play. A good, independent (!) local newspaper (not the sort of copy paste rags that soref talks about at the end of his post) serves a community of readers that identifies as that community, and allows interaction between newspaper and community.

Sincerely,

Editor-in-chief of an independent local newspaper,
LBI

:)

i'm not sure that those exist in the UK

Also: charge for your paper, make it subscription only. You can't expect people to care about something that's given to/forced upon them for free.

xp Alas, branching out to the UK is juuuust outside of our budget ;)

They make take our lives but they will never take our freedom to print photos of councillors pointing at potholes!

Otm! :D

aren't most of the UK local rags all owned by the Trinity Mirror group or something like that now? I rarely click on mine these days because the assault by adware is too much.

it's been downhill for the shropshire star since they dropped BUNION

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_P5-KXUCbsI8/TKIGJD03UWI/AAAAAAAAU5Q/of4eVYnVRvU/s1600/Bunion+1959-10-09.jpg

that cartoon is... good?

Yes.

i'd forgotten Bunion! he was also in the Express & Star which was likely the same company as the Shropshire Star

UK local newspapers are mostly a hellscape owned by people like Gannet, published centrally, with one 20-year-old J-grad on the staff writing for four different papers without leaving the office.

The difference in them from just 15 years ago is really depressing. It was always going to be bad, but the profit-stripping has made it exponentially worse. There is still room for good businesses and journalism to be had there, but Gannet etc distort the market so badly they’ll never get the chance.

that Bunion strip is v good, aargh at the presumable microfiche elements all over it

Four journalists would be unparalleled luxury for most local papers at this stage. They used to serve as training slopes for the nationals and published a lot of flimsy or irrelevant crap but they were when properly funded a vehicle for keeping councils accountable and that's largely gone now.

Anvil OTM that people trust the idea of a local newspaper rather than the paper itself, the vast majority of respondents won't have read theirs in years, it's more of a generalised feel that because something's local it's more likely to be on their side. Or they're just using it to find out when the local Sainsburys is open over Easter or whatever.

I created a free account to read the Guardian today!

Because they were urging me to do it and requiring me to press buttons to get to pages.

(xp) They're good for following schools sports competitions complete with heartwarming pics of under-9 judo champions holding up their trophies etc

brb going to start a kickstarter for the BUNION graphic novel collection

i only look at websites not the real thing nowadays but i'm pretty sure local papers are mostly good for following shock horror stories about petty crims and then writing comments about hanging petty crims

The comments sections are terrifying hellscapes as well.

at least when it was just a letters page the psychos had to be committed enough to buy stationery and a stamp.

Seems like local news press is simultaneously always hailed as the foundation of a functional news system nationwide yet itself only good for trivial stories with minimal reach.

Lamb owner left 'sickened' after finding animal beheaded in field
Police have ruled out other animals causing the injury

some skulduggery afoot in Denby Dale, police have been questioning some of the usual suspects!

xp

there's a lot of mythology and sentimental posturing behind that take which relied on avoiding the fact that the majority of the national press has always been about sensationalism, invading people's privacy and generally acting the cunt too.

if anybody endangered the idea of a free press it was people who used the 1 percent of investigations that uncover serious political corruption to justify the 99 percent of investigations into who somebody off Strictly has been shagging and what's on their answerphone

Manchester Evening News produces about 4 good pieces of journalism a year and the good impact of those is easily outweighed by the psychic harm done by the reams and reams of sensationalism and misery they churn out

MEN is a big newspaper though innit, in comparison to smalltown publications? Just pointing out the editor of the Hudds Examiner is called Wayne Ankers.

Is there such a thing as a decent local daily in this day and age? The Evening Standard has been considered a joke or an irrelevance by Londoners for a long time. How's the Yorkshire Post these days?

For the best of humanity you really need to read the comment sections on crime news. Bring back hanging, never mind deporting the bastards - execute them etc... Yorkshire Post is a Tory rag so it doesn't get many clicks from me, the news section seems like they might employ a few actual journalists.

Probably even lower in quality than the ES

haven't looked at a Yorkshire Post in forever, the Hull Daily Mail is so entrenched round here that the YP was only read by the solicitor class i think

since someone was asking abt this on twitter (the only good place) does any local alt.media survive these days up yr way NV or calz or anyone not london-based? this was the competitor in the 70s that piously hoped to keep local coverage more radical and more honest (the rochdale alternative press was the first place to run stories exposing lib MP and paedo abuser cyril smith for example, at some risk to themselves)

this layer of media wd by definition i think have to be urban, bcz its content basis was listings (on the time out model) supplemented by small ads. the internet has totally stripped out the latter (gumtree etc) but doesn't actually serve the former very well, as anyone will testify who tries to navigate time out on-line to find out what there is to do on a free day in london

(as a dedicated city limits reader, i always hated and boycotted time out and disliked its aesthetic as well as its latterday (a)political choices-- tho i'm happy these days to accept that mid-late 80s CL has since spawned more dangers than TO, self included no doubt lol)

I used to read the T0dm0rden News when o'er there. From their website I can't even make out if they're still on paper or digital only. Owned by JPINews, just like the Yorkshire Post. xp

Maybe local news is an outdated concept to the extent that a website should be branded as such or organised around location.

I look at BBC News less and less but the ability to breakdown regionally has always felt like a good model. Actually I just went to this and it's totally changed lol - see it's now generated from entering/remembering your postcode - not sure about this (altho the design itself seems fine)

there's the salford star, but I don't know how regular or wide its distribution is

nashwan you are WRONG

Severn Valley Railway receives £250,000 of National Lottery support https://t.co/TmerjjJGKa pic.twitter.com/HiHEU1e6dM

— SHROPSHIRE (@DailySHROPSHIRE) July 15, 2020

xp Four of the seven top location-based stories are about last night's Palace match which is stupid. A smarter version of this would I guess give you something more like the main BBC News page but with every story local (enough) so you don't see the same thing more than once.

i was going to go with this but it turns out it's an essex-based story in a shropshire paper, a para-local tale at best

Gull is freed from Covid-19 face mask https://t.co/nkPwFrVrvh pic.twitter.com/1Fe7tUnx4F

— SHROPSHIRE (@DailySHROPSHIRE) July 20, 2020

The system unworks

the only alternative print media in Hull i remember were run very haphazardly and mainly with style mag-ish aspirations, or they were just straight music or football zines. there's at least one online alternative to the Hull Daily but it focuses on positivity which is good and necessary but a bit bland and toothless

but it focuses on positivity which is good and necessary but a bit bland and toothless

I hate positivity lol, especially in my newspaper, but it's where the money is, all 'experts' on local media p much agree on. Light-hearted, more space for businesses etc (to cash in on). I get it, it's just not what I like, and it kind of takes away journalism out of it. Can it serve a community and still make money? Def. Many hyper-locals over here serving just one city get by that way.

Also this is why we'll be going down eventually. I'd rather go bust than wear a smile :D

Those hyper-locals "don't do" local politics either. The amount of local councils that are never visited by a journalist is rising rapidly here, I expect it to be the same in the UK.

positivity can be a broad church, you're right that all too often it isn't. personally i've got no time for crime beat name and shame stuff, it's evil and unnecessary imo. obv there's an ideal space for good journalism somewhere between puff pieces and lurid stories about your neighbours.

There's positivity in human interest stories and interviews w/ people who do something nice or good or interesting imo, or just... showing beauty, in photography or whatever. I took your 'positiviy' remark as meaning the kind of one-dimensional, superficial "everything's great!"-stuff about local businesses or whatever, ignoring problems or not holding local politics to account.