Local Papers

[00:00:08] If you want to start a local paper, you need a few things. First off, you need a population who can read and have the right to vote. You've got to have the means of production and distribution, which used to mean a printing press and transport to get your paper into newsagents quickly. You need the right to sell advertising. Ideally, you should be the only place people can place ads in your neighbourhood. And of course, you need journalists.

[00:00:35] Historists, people shrewd enough to know what makes a good news story and with the clout to get people to answer questions they'd rather avoid. For most of the 20th century, all these things were there in Britain. And local newspapers thrived. They weren't all small-time operations. The biggest ones had a circulation of more than a quarter of a million. And in London, much more than that. But now, they're dead on their feet.

[00:01:02] Once-proud publications have been gutted. They've become horrible websites, gaming the Google algorithm for clicks about when Celebrity Traitor starts. 4.4 million people live in news deserts where there is no meaningful local coverage at all. What happened to the local press? I'm Ros Taylor, and this is More Jam Tomorrow.

[00:01:32] I can't help being a bit nostalgic for local papers. I did work experience at the Shrewsbury Chronicle. And I can tell you there was a lot more original reporting going on there than in parts of the more famous places I've worked. So let's go back in time to the Gloucestershire Echo on May 4th, 1995. Price, 28p.

[00:02:02] Rachel Broderick, as she then was, wrote the splash. Man dies in lorry crash as flower truck overturns. That's flower as in bread. I remember that story really distinctly. Dr Rachel Matthews is a journalism specialist at Liverpool John Moores University. And she wrote that story 31 years ago. I mean, I did work for Gloucestershire Echo for a long time. And then I was its news editor for quite a long time. And at that time, it was a successful regional daily newspaper

[00:02:31] covering half of Gloucestershire. And it had five editions a day. So three of those were timed, but two of them were regional. So that particular paper that I've kept was the Cotswold edition. And I was the district reporter. So I was based in Stowe on the World. And I was covering half of the Cotswolds. I had another colleague in an office in Sirencester. And so that accident actually happened on Stowe Hill. And I just remember it really distinctly because the lorry overturned.

[00:03:00] There was a man from Bolton-on-the-Water, which was just down the road, who was in his car. The lorry fell on top of him and he died, sadly. So it was a very typical story. And we would have followed. Well, I know I followed it up because I couldn't really remember doing it. Went to his family afterwards, knocked on the door, you know, doing the dreaded death knock, which people really hate. But actually could be a really nice thing to do. And you end up talking to the family about this person who's lost their life.

[00:03:27] And the follow-up would have been, you know, the obituary for him. It was quite hard because there wasn't an awful lot of hard news in that area. And yet you're trying to produce a daily newspaper that is saying what's going on. But quite a lot of the stories that you would have done were what we would have called off-diary stories. So you would have gone to find those yourself. So actually having an accident was probably quite a good day for me. That sounds really awful. But, you know, it was something that actually happened. I didn't have to go and find it.

[00:03:57] It was just there. You covered it. And as a journalist, that's a fairly easy thing to do. The fact is that local news is often very boring to anyone who doesn't live there. But that doesn't matter. As the editor of the Limington Times, Circulation 15,000, told the BBC in 1963. Many people consider that weekly newspaper journalism is dull and uninteresting.

[00:04:25] But there's no reason why this should be so. Whilst admittedly many reports will be routine and nothing can be done about that, there does very often arise the story where strong comment can be made and fresh facts brought to bear which wouldn't normally be known had it not been for the action of the newspaper. The national journalist is more fortunate inasmuch that he has a better choice of stories to

[00:04:54] go from, taken from any corner possibly of the world or certainly the country. The local journalist, on the other hand, has to cover all stories which occur within his locality, some of which are interesting to him and others which are not. But they are of interest to somebody and therefore the story has to be covered. I mean, the Cotswolds was a great source of quirky stories.

[00:05:21] We're always coming across quite amazing things. The Man Who Collected Gas Cookers is another one that sticks out in my mind. And then The Pig that used to have regular correspondence with Colin Firth because they'd starred in a film together. So because of this lack of hard news, I became quite an expert in these quirky stories.

[00:05:45] And then we move on to page two and there's lots of announcements, births, marriages, deaths. We've also got lost and found, which is something you don't really find anymore. There's a parakeet. At least there's a parakeet with a question mark by it because someone's found a bird and they don't know if it's a parakeet or not. Absolutely. And I think, you know, when I was looking through the paper to, you know, supply you with some copies, I was really struck by, you know, as you say, it was 30 years ago.

[00:06:13] But if you look in that paper, all the things that underpin the industry at that time, so the small ads, the classified ads, the jobs, the motors, the property, the national news. There's national and international news in there, if I remember, if I, you know, remember correctly. And so what you really had there was a daily paper that was a complete service. So you didn't necessarily have to go. I think the telly is in there as well, isn't it? You didn't have to go and buy another paper. You just went and bought the Gloucester Schreco.

[00:06:41] And I know that, you know, you'd stand in the newsagents and the newspaper was probably in the newsagents for about three o'clock in the afternoon. And there'd be a queue of people waiting to buy it. And someone would look at the front page and someone would look at the back page. And they didn't necessarily know that I'd written it, you know, so you'd just be in the queue watching their habits. But really, that newspaper was trying to give them that complete service of what was happening in their area,

[00:07:04] whether it was a birth, a marriage, death, a lost parrot, you know, or a chance to buy a new car or to find out who'd been killed in the accident that probably blocked the road that you'd been sitting on earlier in the day. And you've got some important reporting on page three. Hurry up and fix our prefabs. So council tenants living in cold and damp prefabs in Tewksbury have been told they could wait until the year 2000 for their houses to be updated. And that's important, isn't it? It's the kind of thing that would never go anywhere near a national publication.

[00:07:33] But this was a voice for these people who didn't necessarily have any other way to put pressure on the council. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I mean, I think, you know, obviously, I was a journalist for quite a long time, and I've probably been, I think now an academic for even longer. And my research has really focused on that relationship between newspaper and community and how that the local journalists sees themselves as supporting that community.

[00:07:59] And I think that that story embodies that relationship, is that you see yourself as a watchdog and you see yourself as a voice for people who were voiceless. And in your professional career, you would, that's one of the marvellous things about local journalism, actually, particularly in somewhere like Gloucestershire, as I'm sure you can imagine, you deal with the whole spectrum of society. So at one point in my career, I actually went to Highgrove when the king was only Prince Charles at that time.

[00:08:26] You know, but so I'd been to Highgrove, but at the same time, I'd been in the houses of people who had nothing and knew nothing, you know. And so you're actually, a lot of what you did was trying to represent those people and trying to actually, you're almost like a bit of a social service in some places because of the kind of things that you can point people towards and the information that you have. I mean, as a journalist, you're trained in how all the systems work. So you know who to go to to find things out.

[00:08:55] You know who to go to to get things done, which the man on the street quite often doesn't. And you could always help them negotiate those systems. So particularly when I was on the news desk of the Gloucestershire Echo, where if anyone rang up the newspaper and the receptionist didn't know who to put them through to, they would always put them through to the news desk. And you would get people ringing up saying, who do I ask about this? And you know, in that kind of information and that sort of service,

[00:09:21] which is quite often unseen in the role of a local journalist, was actually really important. Then you've got two pages of classified ads. A job at a BMW dealership. Cleaners wanted. Rabbit hutches. And because it's the Cotswolds, lots of horses and horsey gear. These kinds of things would be online now on a job site or Gumtree. In my academic life, I have written the history of the local newspaper, starting back in the 18th century.

[00:09:50] And those sorts of adverts were always, to some degree or another, part of the makeup of the local newspaper. And of course, why they're so important is, firstly, they were a really strong form of revenue. And so, of course, with the advent of the internet, and I mean, I think it was Craigslist was the first thing that took classified ads away from newspapers. It actually really undermined that revenue stream. But of course, the other thing is, yes, they were about money, but they're also about information and they're also about, you know,

[00:10:19] they're just another aspect of a community, aren't they? Of finding out that life. So they kind of have a dual purpose because they help finance the newspaper. But as content, they help readers just a little bit more information. What's happening? You know, oh, is that local garage expanding? You know, oh, I wondered whose horse it was that was galloping over that field. You know, so all these things, they form part of that patchwork. I mean, one of the things we used to do, and this was when I knew that I was sort of so committed

[00:10:49] to local newspapers, was that at one point I was also a sub-editor on Gloucester Echo. And we used to have pages and pages of community news that a whole band of correspondents around the county would send in. And clearly they wrote far too much and you had to sub it all down to fit it into the pages. And even so, you'd probably have about eight pages worth of information that you had to fit into four pages. And it would take, you know, a day, a day and a half to do this job because you were trying

[00:11:18] to cut it without losing the sense and to, you know, still pay tribute to the information that these people had bothered to write. And I used to find it fascinating. I would offer to do it because the minutiae of life that was contained in those reports, I mean, all of life was before you. It was, I never found it boring. And I think, you know, it's just been, just actually looked at an article today that's

[00:11:43] written by Raymond Williams, who's a really famous cultural historian, and actually saying, what's it called? It's got a really great title. Culture is ordinary. And it is, you know, for most people and most people, their life is local and culture is ordinary. So something like the regional newspaper has all of that stuff in it. One of the things it has in it, which I noticed, is the court reports. This is almost a name and shame function, isn't it?

[00:12:09] You've got all these people who are being identified with their addresses for ages for not having bought a TV licence or driving a vehicle without an MOT or driving through a red light at a level crossing. And you think, God, that must be really quite embarrassing if you were a local and you knew that your name, you were kind and you knew that your name would be in the local paper. Absolutely. And I mean, it's one of the principles of British justice, isn't it? Is that, you know, justice is not only done, but it's seen to be done.

[00:12:39] And so the rights of press to attend court, you know, is really there and enshrined in law. And it's one of the things that happens a lot less now. And there's been quite a lot of study on how little that's done. And you may be aware of the local democracy reporting scheme that is part funded by the BBC. And obviously reporting councils and courts is one of the gaps that that scheme is supposed to plug. Having said that, I mean, that thing that you're talking about now would have been from the court list.

[00:13:08] So if it's just a list, that wouldn't have been a reporter sitting in court. That would have been information that came from the court that, to be honest, a copy taker probably just input into the system. But yes, you would have somebody's name, you would have their address, you would have their age, because obviously you don't want to mix them up with somebody of the same name or the same address. You've got to have all those details to actually distinguish that person from other people. You know, so it was a way to put that all in.

[00:13:37] I mean, yes, perhaps in a way it is only a step up from putting people in the stocks. I must admit, I never really thought about it that way. But, you know, you did do it. But on the same page, you've got a local hero story, a classic one, where you've got a couple of unemployed guys who are brightening up a Cheltenham council estate and they'd be clearing overgrown gardens. And they're helping. There's a bid to help single mothers and pensioners living locally.

[00:14:05] These guys are heroes, you know, and there's a nice picture of them. It's the kind of thing that if you were in the paper, you'd snip it out and keep it working hard. And that is celebrating people and raising up examples of good behaviour in the community, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But actually, I think that's really important because when you think about how people feel about where they live, and this has really become the focus of my work actually as an academic,

[00:14:29] is actually trying to quantify the impact that local newspapers have on places and how people feel about themselves and on communities. And so you need the whole package. You don't just want the bad news. You want the good news. And it's those connections that that sort of information makes that's really important. So obviously, you know, if you think about how people might portray, for instance, unemployed

[00:14:58] people as being, you know, lazy wasters, and suddenly you've got a story about two unemployed people who are going out and doing something really good, then in a really small way, that makes a difference. But all those small ways add up to a big thing. And I think that that's the that's kind of the bit that people don't count when they're trying to work out what we lose when we lose the local newspaper. It tends to be quite, as in many things in society, you know, people like things that are quantifiable.

[00:15:27] And some of that stuff isn't really very easily quantifiable. You know, it's much more intangible. But I think having a mix of content in the newspaper, it was a tried and tested mix that was probably have been in place for 100 years by the time that newspaper was being published. So it worked, you know, for whatever reason, it all added up into a successful commercial product that had a community benefit as a kind of side to it.

[00:15:56] What happened to the Gloucestershire Echo? Oh, gosh. Well, now, basically, there was two newspapers. There was the Gloucestershire Echo that covered sort of Cheltenham on one side of the county. And then there was a Gloucester citizen that was based in Gloucester and did the other side of the county, both owned by the same newspaper company, which at that time was Northcliffe Newspapers. Now, the first thing that happened was they moved into the same offices. I mean, the shape of the local and regional newspaper industry since the advent of digitization

[00:16:25] in particular, and then exacerbated by the banking crisis in 2008, which obviously caused the recession, you kind of had this double whammy where resources were just removed from the local newspaper. So they basically have consolidated and consolidated and consolidated and contracted and contracted and contracted. So first of all, the Echo and the citizen moved in together. Then they were under one website because it became a digital first publication. And that would have been, this is Gloucestershire.

[00:16:54] So those different identities were lost. There were obviously needed fewer staff. So people were made redundant. They don't have local offices anymore. They may have local reporters, but they tend to work from home, particularly since COVID. So that kind of visibility of your product has completely changed. And you just don't have the manpower that you used to have. I mean, the Echo is one example. I mean, there's a great snapshot of the Coventry Telegraph in the 80s and 90s, which was doing

[00:17:23] like over 100,000 copies a day it was selling. And you only had nearly 100 people working in their newsroom. I mean, it's unheard of. You know, whereas today in a daily newsroom, all right, probably not in Coventry because it's probably still a little bit bigger. But say in somewhere like Gloucestershire or Worcester, you've probably got 12 or 15. You know, by an order of magnitude, it's so much smaller. Now, clearly technology has a bit of an impact in it and it helps to automate parts of the job that would have been a bit more labour intensive.

[00:17:53] But the basic result is that now you do not have that same kind of boots on the ground coverage that you used to have. And as a local journalist, how did you feel about your responsibility to the local community? Because having worked as a national journalist myself, you sometimes feel very, very disconnected from the things you're writing. But it's not like that when you're on a mental level, because you know very well that if you

[00:18:19] get something wrong or if you cover something in a way that's inaccurate, you know, or misleading, there will be come back and you won't be allowed to get away with it. No, you absolutely are not allowed to get it. Well, you weren't allowed to get away with it. And people would let you know in no uncertain terms. I mean, and sometimes you would do things that were, you know, usually they were accidental. And I think a couple of standard examples, once we were doing an obituary for somebody with a really unusual name who died.

[00:18:48] And so we went to the library and said, have you got a photo of this chap? Yeah, here's a photo of this chap. Well, it wasn't the same chap. It was someone with the same really unusual name who was alive. And fortunately, he thought it was quite funny. So we just put a story in the paper saying, sorry, wrong picture. This person is, you know, and, you know, and apologize. And quite often, as long as you were willing to correct, put a correction in, which we always

[00:19:16] were, we were that kind of newspaper, we never tried to cover up our mistakes, then it was fine. But you had to be accountable. That accountability was really important. And in a strange way, one of a proud moments in my career was again in Stowe on the World. There was a very controversial application, planning application to build a Tesco store on the outside of the town, which did eventually get permission. But it was a hugely divisive issue.

[00:19:44] Obviously, it's a local paper, you know, we were covering this issue. And I actually got accused of being biased by both sides. So I knew that I was doing something right. Well, you know. Right. You're doing the right thing. I mean, you're cheap by jowl with these people. So I can't remember ever making us not cover something. But it did mean that you had to, you know, you obviously had to do things without fear or favor. But you also, you had to get it right.

[00:20:11] And you had to be as even handed as you could be. And I suppose the other thing about that was the whole structure of the newspaper had, and I think this is one thing that's really gone from local journalism, or at least it's changed. We had lots of layers of quality control, really. Because if you think, I mean, not as much as they used to have in days of hot metal, but even so we would, you know, I would be the reporter on the ground.

[00:20:36] Then I would have a news editor who would read all my copy and check it was all OK. Then there would be a sub editor who was probably a much more experienced member of the organization and, you know, and got all this stuff in their head. Then we had a library with a librarian and lots of cuttings. Then you had, you know, the editor who was going for everything. So lots of people were looking at this kind of this information before it was actually printed.

[00:21:07] So there were many, many chances to pick up errors. And there were certain things, I mean, if you were to write about something, say cheese rolling, everybody knows about the cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill in Cheltenham, you know, a mad, mad thing to do. But everybody knows about that. So there would be a cuttings file that was two inches thick. And when you wrote a story, you went to the library, you got that cuttings file out and you looked at it. You never just wrote something.

[00:21:34] So your newspaper was part of a continuum of information as well that I think was really, really important. And I think a lot of that has been lost. I mean, some of my most recent work has been about working with archival collections relating to local newspapers, which is basically all that stuff that gets chucked out when those newspaper offices have contracted. And yet which people in their place, in the community think is really, really important.

[00:22:02] And, you know, for me, it's important because it's almost like an industrial relic, you know, of how a newsroom operated. But it's just all that information is so valuable. And how are you preserving it? Are you digitising it or are you putting it in a... Well, what I've actually done is I've developed a toolkit with an archive colleague of mine working on a project funded by the National Archives, which actually sets out what people who want to step in and save those collections should think about.

[00:22:31] So we don't tell them to digitise it because those collections, they can be made up of all sorts of things. I mean, you can have the banned copies of the newspaper. You can have half a million photo negatives. You know, you could have the cuttings library. You could have newsroom diaries. I mean, there's all sorts of things. It depends. It depends what's being thrown out and it depends what people step in and save. So we've just sort of done, you know, you need to think about this, this, this and this. And these are the sorts of issues and approaches you might want to take.

[00:23:00] Because yes, people do usually digitise them, but they only tend to do it partially. And there's lots of other issues about it. I asked Rachel if it had been easier for local government to get away with cutting so many services because there were so few papers to cover it. So I think the short answer is yes, but I think it's probably a bit more complicated than that because I think that there was a big change in the way local government operated when they got rid of committee systems and they introduced cabinet systems,

[00:23:27] which I think made the decision making process more opaque. So I think in a way, yes, the press are there less, but I think there was probably also that change meant there was less for the press to report on. And there were some things that happened, like a lot of council meetings, you could look at them online. And I suspect all the papers were, the papers were only available online. Whereas, you know, we used to, particularly when I was on the news desk,

[00:23:54] you would have a stack of local government papers, you know, of committee papers come in that was probably, you know, six or eight inches high. And I was the queen of the planning applications. As you can imagine in the Cotswolds, any planning application could be really controversial. So you'd be whizzing through them looking for the stories. I mean, and again, you know, thinking of funny stories, there was the ordinance that everyone in Chipping Camden,

[00:24:21] which is a very picturesque Cotswold town, had to paint all their burglar alarm boxes, Cotswold stone colour because they didn't want them to be read, you know. Or there was a row over a notice board in this little hamlet that made it all the way into the national press. And I can't even remember what was so remarkable about the notice board. So, you know, but anyway, so those sorts of stories were really popular. But yeah, so I think it's a double-edged sword.

[00:24:49] I think that there is less reporting on local government, but I think it also became harder to report local government. And I think that also the other issue is around the access you have to local government, because I know I personally had a very good relationship with the officers and the senior officers in local authorities. So that I had like a really, really good understanding of things like local government finance,

[00:25:16] probably much better than anyone's needed to have, really, because the chief finance officer would sit down and explain. I mean, I really knew how council tax worked, really, really knew all the ins and outs of it, because they would give you the time to sit there and talk to you about it. And the chief executives would, and they were very open. And I'm not sure that that same degree of communication is there anymore. So I think it's probably a bit more complicated than just fewer journalists, less reporting.

[00:25:45] But I mean, the short answer is yes. So is there any hope for local news? What might get people excited about it again? Maybe even prepared to pay for it? Jim Mortensen is the editor of London Centric, a local journalism startup he runs on Substack. London isn't the smallest of local patches.

[00:26:15] It's got the same population as Austria. But since the Evening Standard turned into a glossy weekly mag, there's no other publication that covers the whole of the capital. I think we're at the bottoming out moment where it's as bad as it gets and something new can be reborn from what remains. A lot of what people talk about with local media is sort of a memory of what it used to be in the 90s and 2000s.

[00:26:42] And a lot of how people in the media industry talk about local media is rooted in those good old days. And that, I don't think, reflects where a lot of people in the general public are. They do still have trust for local news. They do still have interest in things that are going on in their local area. But the idea that the sorts of big local title is the sole source and arbiter of what matters is just not true anymore.

[00:27:08] And I think sometimes local news business has done itself a disservice by trying to pretend that it is still the case rather than just acknowledge the reality that the world has moved on and they need to work out what niche they're filling now rather than being something for everyone in a city. So where can local news media sit now? You're on Substack. What form is it going to take? Is it going to be video? Is it going to be platforms like Substack? Well, to go slightly more conceptual, what is local news?

[00:27:38] Is it the post from the genuinely well-meaning volunteer in a local Facebook group? Is it the Instagram account that keeps you updated on the shops that are opening in your local town but isn't really a news account in a traditional sense? Journalists obviously focus on the professional outlets with people doing something that resembles reporting, which tends to mean at the moment that we talk about places that look a bit like newspapers

[00:28:06] or online versions of newspapers. But probably in terms of finding out what's going on in your area, for a lot of people the local Facebook group has replaced the old paper and that definitely has more reach. And the fight back might lie in places that are canny enough to do more video, more social first stuff. But the big issue for anything resembling a professional local news organization is how do you make money? And that is the missing part of it.

[00:28:36] You don't need a lot of money. But if there is an incentive structure at the moment that means you see local news sites with young reporters going age 23, 24, they churn out 30 stories a day using AI for a year and then they leave completely disillusioned with no idea about how to find out anything original. That's destroying trust with audiences and it's destroying the willingness of young reporters to try and do something that makes a difference in their local community.

[00:29:04] So do you think there needs to be some sort of concerted government effort to try and put some juice back into local journalism that goes beyond the BBC's local democracy reporters? I mean, government will spend ages wondering if there's anything it can do about this terrible situation. Is there anything it can do about this situation? Or does it have to be more bottom up? One, I don't think you can serve an audience if you don't focus on serving them, giving them what they want

[00:29:33] and thinking about that. And a lot of newspapers, the attitude seems to be, but we're publishing the stuff we always used to publish and we can't get an audience for it anymore. Well, maybe you've got to change. Secondly, I mean, the government's putting in a few million into its local news fund. It's doling out five and six-figure grants to news organizations to try new things. People have been bidding for that and the results came in recently. So you'll see a few places starting to do trials of that, but that's been done in a slightly interesting way by DCMS.

[00:30:03] So we'll see who got the money and what they'll do with it soon. But I run London Centric and we're self-funded, profitable and doing a slightly odd thing, which is we don't try and cover everything in London. That would be impossible and crazy. What we do is try and do investigations and things around the edges that people are willing to pay for. And we try and shift the dial on a modest number of issues that we investigate deeply rather than overwhelming people

[00:30:31] by trying to cover everything. In an era where you don't have to pretend to cover everything, people can get some idea about their city from multiple sources. What they're often lacking is not the announcement of something opening or closing. What they're often lacking is the person who's had the time to spend two or three weeks finding out what's really going on on a wider scale behind the entire decline of that high street rather than one shop.

[00:30:58] So we try and leave the sort of quite basic announcement stuff for other places. That still finds a way to people. And the stuff that isn't PR, the stuff that takes a lot of work, that's what we focus on. So we've shown that there's thousands of people willing to pay for that. And we've got a business model and a team of three. But I'm still recording this podcast at my kitchen table. It's still not a glamorous, buzzing newsroom. And there's a long way to go before anything resembling that

[00:31:28] is financially viable. So I do think that a lot of it is focused on... A lot of the chat around local newspapers in the UK and elsewhere is focused on sorts of mourning an era that isn't coming back. And it's time to just accept that and try and rebuild something new. And it's also clear that the interim era, where local news websites were filled with 15,000 write-ups of what Piers Morgan said this morning or what Harry and Meghan have been up to

[00:31:56] ostensibly on a site about a mid-sized city that's mysteriously getting millions of clicks for gaming Google. That sort of stuff's recognizable to anyone who's spent time on the internet in the last decade. And it's just hollow and worthless and it's destroyed those brands. And you can see that Reach, one of the really big local publishers, is now saying it wants to retreat from that and go into something a lot more like the subscription local news model because they realise that they've screwed it. And where are you going to get the talent? I mean, you've worked on nationals,

[00:32:26] you've recruited a team, but you need a bit of training and to do any kind of journalism, you can learn a lot on the job, but it helps. Is there a new model? Can we kind of get beyond the whole... It used to be the case that you had to do an NCTJ, which takes a year and it's quite expensive. Is there a way you can shake things up and try and train people in a different way for a different era? I've never said a day of training in my life. I've got no qualifications. Yeah, yeah, no, I know, but same here.

[00:32:56] Well, there you go. The people don't need it talking to each other on this podcast. But we, you know, let's put it, say, in the older age bracket, right? What about people in their 20s who want to get into journalism and just want, you know... I think the people, the smart storytelling online is going to come from the kid that knows how to make the TikTok explaining things. What I find is often the communication skills of the younger lot are much better than myself as an ageing millennial who grew up on Twitter.

[00:33:25] You know, I am not good at editing together a smart Instagram reel that would reach a million people and I have to employ people to do that for me. What I am better at than them is working out how to dig, work with the legals on things and get stories over the line. So the trick I find is actually the communication skills and talents just instinctively from that younger generation are fantastic. And what they need guidance on is sort of, you can knock on someone's door and ask a question. You just can. You're allowed to do that.

[00:33:54] As long as you go away, if they don't want to talk, that's fine. You can dig through financial records and if you come across something that looks dodgy, you can write, this looks dodgy. And that's the bit that people often don't realise. It's that you don't need a lot of training. I think what you kind of need more of are editors and what you've found is a lot of these local titles are often edited by people only a couple of years out of training themselves. So they've never really gained the skill base

[00:34:20] and there's just sort of been the residual knowledge you need to understand a local area and to know, oh, well, you know, if that landlord's up to that, then it's probably because of that. That takes years to build up and also requires a bit of backbone that you wouldn't necessarily have as a trainee. That's the problem, I think, in terms of getting people in. It's expensive to hire people. And a lot of local journalists, you look at the salaries, they're literally minimum wage jobs and they require full qualifications, driving licences and all of that. Literal minimum wage,

[00:34:49] you would get more working in a supermarket or whatever. And understandably, anyone with ambition and no parental money to back them goes, well, that's clearly not a career. Or they do it for a year or two and go, I would like to be able to afford my rent. I'm going to get a different job. Are you optimistic, though? Do you think they're willing? Yeah, I'm really optimistic. I mean, I'm having the best... I think local journalism is amazing because when it hits, you make a real difference in your area. And, you know, with London-centric,

[00:35:19] we point towards in two years a string of stories that have really had impact on London and improved the lives of people in it. I think people need to get over themselves and stop worrying about trying to recreate something that's not coming back in terms of the local newspaper package of the 90s and 2000s. I grew up with it. I liked it. But, you know, it's just not necessary anymore. The bits that we need are basic understanding of what's going on. Non-cranky checks on what the local Facebook groups

[00:35:48] are saying. So that's less so for me who covers the whole of London, but in a specific area of the capital or in another city when you've got the Facebook group blaming the HMOs that are supposedly being handed to migrants for free or whatever. Is anyone actually checking that claim before it does 15,000 shares on Facebook? No. Will it be good to have more people doing that? And then, I guess, is finally the fact that some people are willing to pay for it. You know, it's not available to everyone and it definitely works better in wealthier cities

[00:36:18] than in poorer ones, but there are a few thousand people everywhere who are willing to pay and believe in this. And the money, the money to do local journalism well if you strip out all the legacy corporate costs of the big players, it's not expensive to get a few journalists and get them writing. The challenge is having a business model to support even the costs of a few hundred thousand pounds a year. You know, if you're a philanthropist wanting to make a difference, funding an outlet in somewhere that's a news desert would be great.

[00:36:48] But I do want to nuance that by saying a lot of people think charitable giving or something like that could solve the problem here. And I think that focusing on your readers and what they actually want to read is the bit that a lot of these places miss. You can be quite boring if you only ever sort of cover worthy local news. Like local papers always had a bit of fun. They were about your community. Life wasn't boring. And shock horror people weren't buying them for the account of what had gone on at the council meeting. The fact that that happened to be

[00:37:18] on the front page was a byproduct of what they were really buying it for which was to see their kids' pictures in pages eight and nine alongside a funny story about a workplace and also something about the sport. Whereas you've just done a story about vegetables that grow on the edge of rivers in London because of the sewage. Yeah. And we made chutney out of them and ate them. I mean, if that's not classic attention-grabbing local news,

[00:37:46] we harvested sewage tomatoes and then turned it into chutney. That's a sort of classic 90s local newspaper story. I'm very proud of that one in that long tradition. So, you know, the people figured out what people would read and knew for decades. We then sort of forgot in the chase for clicks. Interesting, well-told stories will build an audience. The cost is paying. The trick is working out how to pay for them.

[00:38:20] Ah, yes. Pay for them. This is the first More Jam tomorrow in a while and that's because 2026 has been a challenging year for me. I have MS and in March I had a nasty relapse. Then the NHS put me on a drug that wipes out some of your B-cells and while I'm very grateful for that, it wasn't without side effects. So the plan is to settle back into a routine of one helping of jam per month. If you'd like to donate a fiver to our running costs, just head over to co-fi.com slash morejam tomorrow

[00:38:50] and make a one-off payment. I'd like to thank all the people who've made regular donations. I halted those a few months ago for obvious reasons while I got back on my feet. And thanks to you all for listening. We'll be back in November with a brand new episode on a very controversial topic. I'm Roz Taylor and that was More Jam Tomorrow.

[00:39:19] More Jam Tomorrow was written and presented by Roz Taylor. The producer was me, David Turnbull. Voiceovers were also by me, David Turnbull. Music was by Dubstar. More Jam Tomorrow is a KTC production. Cat noises by Katie.