Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

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.

i actually think that "picture of councillors pointing at potholes lol" (while admittedly hard to avoid given how unphotogenic many of them are) is part of the problem as a reaction: there's a self-hating element to it of "anything glamorous can only happen in the metropolis" as much as an acknowledgment of the stripping out of any local control of resources. the people's soviet of cleobury mortimer is not going to last long if it fails to tackle the bins at least adequately -- and the moves were made to ensure failures along these lines decades ago (the mid-80s to be precise). but local is where radical movements do probably have to start -- and that means paying attention to accident blackspots and the prevention of flytipping and which property development schemes are approved and why, and whether fire prevention is properly seen to, ruthlessly unglamorous bureaucratic stuff mostly

Good post.

sure, my own amusement at the actual photos of pointing councillors is the sheer awkward mise en abyme propaganda of the pictures themselves. the business of local governance is way more important than that, probably more important than most of the telegenic national stuff.

Is it just SE London or does anywhere else have trendy start-up local papers with faux craft beer names (Peckham Peculiar, Dulwich Diverter)?

that is not a SE London thing, that is a Peckham and Dulwich thing lol

mind you I really ought to help the Woolwich Whatabout off the ground

my amusement at local councillors pointing at potholes is how corrupt and shite local councillors in Glasgow have historically been

when I was doing the journalism part of my undergrad degree we had an assignment to go attend a local council meeting for a purpose I can't really remember. Everyone in our class went to the same meeting because it was Glasgow City Council and meant a day out to the pub after it. I quickly realised we were all going to submit the same story so I went to one in my actual hometown. The GCC one was mid-afternoon and well-attended, my local one was at 7pm on a cold Wednesday night. A councillor actually fell asleep during the meeting. I sat at the back, took notes and ended up with two news stories in the local paper, one of which then ended up being reported in a national. All I had to do was turn up and sit for two hours - there was no attempt to mask what was quite obviously classic "waste of taxpayers money" situations. There's definitely scope for local press to improve.

Every municipality needs a reporter sitting in every city council meeting, really the main reason to still think the elevated mission of Journalism is even a thing imo

I didn't pursue news journalism at all in the end, all the people I know who stuck with it basically did 2-3 years doing deathknocks and then migrated to features or broadcasting and I don't recall anyone ever complaining about having to attend a council meeting the way they complained about attending a fire or car crash

Madchen makes a good point - the Lewisham Ledger is features not 'news', but it's actually remarkably good. Somehow they seem to have a proper staff and everything.

https://lewishamledger.tumblr.com/

is the Liverpool Echo any good?

Yes.

Camden New Journal is good and still has an opinion page reserved for a socialist in God’s waiting room.

was a good one in glasgowlive recently of councillors standing next to a bus stop
https://i2-prod.glasgowlive.co.uk/incoming/article18620289.ece/ALTERNATES/s810/2_JS214838692.jpg

Classic!

The Dulwich Diverter was tweeting this week about only having one advertising slot left, so that would imply they're doing OK.