Gareth Davies: Why the Trinity Mirror model threatens local journalism

Gareth Davies worked for the Croydon Advertiser for eight years, during which time he frequently made the news himself - as four-time winner of the weekly newspaper reporter of the year title and as the subject of a harassment order as he pursued the story of a conwoman who was subsequently jailed.

 Last week he provoked a Twitter storm with his tweets about the state of the paper he left in June. He has now put those thoughts into a detailed article, published below. 

SubScribe's view of the latest debate and state of our local journalism can be seen here, here, here and here.

As Davies explains, Trinity Mirror has yet to comment on  his thoughts as set out below. Further efforts are being made to encourage a response and SubScribe will happily publish an alternative view if one is forthcoming. 

On Friday evening I tweeted a photograph of this week’s Croydon Advertiser, the first edition in the weekly newspaper’s 147-year history put together without the input of the reporters who wrote the stories and with minimal involvement of an editor. Instead the paper was made up of articles taken directly from the Advertiser’s website by sub-editors based 50 miles away in Chelmsford, Essex. This is what Trinity Mirror, which bought the paper in October 2015 as part of its purchase of Local World, calls Newsroom 3.1, which is designed to free journalists to concentrate entirely on generating web traffic.

This week’s paper is a mess. Little to no thought has gone into its design. The story count is low and photographs have been used far beyond their usual size in order to compensate. The image I tweeted was of two consecutive pages which, instead of local news stories, consisted of  a pair of listicles: “13 things you will know if you are a Southern rail passenger” and “9 things you didn’t know about Blockbuster”. Both were clickbait written for the web and thrown into print to fill space - an indication of what the paper will be as a result of what Trinity Mirror calls a “truly digitally-led” newsroom.
As a strong believer in the value of local journalism, and having worked at the Advertiser for almost eight years, I felt people ought to know.

The tweets (you can find a helpful summary of them here) prompted a large response, receiving 400,000 impressions within 24 hours. People from outside the industry, including readers in Croydon, were surprised and disappointed. Many former reporters said they had left local journalism for similar reasons. I was also contacted privately by journalists at other local and regional papers who recognised an all too familiar tale but, knowing the likely repercussions, have been unable to speak openly about their experiences.

The Advertiser and the other papers in its newsgroup are far from the only newspapers trapped in this race to the bottom. Equally, Trinity Mirror is by no means the only publisher helping it along. It’s probably not even the worst offender.
But what is happening at my former paper is indicative of a wider problem undermining local journalism - and by that I mean what it should be and not what it has become - to such an extent that it is  probably beyond saving, at least in its traditional form. This article is about Trinity Mirror, and before that Local World and Northcliffe Media, but many of the problems it describes are playing out in dozens, if not hundreds, of newsrooms across the country.

Redundancy call on the school run 

On May 26 the new editor-in-chief of Trinity Mirror south east, Ceri Gould, read out a short statement to staff at five papers - the Croydon Advertiser, Crawley News, East Grinstead Courier  & Observer, Surrey Mirror and the Dorking Advertiser - announcing a restructure in preparation for the switch to Newsroom 3.1 (papers in Kent and Essex had been given the news earlier in the day). Everyone  was told that their current job no longer existed and that  if they wanted to continue to work for the company, they would have to apply for new roles. The announcement met with stunned silence.
We had known something was coming but, perhaps naively, not that. In a meeting later that day, reporters were told they would no longer have any role in putting together the newspapers they had worked for. Even the editor of the newly monikered “brand” would only have an “input” on pages one, three and five.
 Our sole focus would be on writing stories for the website and, as a result, we would have to go “cold turkey” on the paper. A reporter, who has since left, asked whether we would still have the time to meet contacts. The newsroom, she was told, would become “much more like a daily paper”, meaning that reporters would be “tied to their desks”.

The pack provided at the start of the 30-day consultation process included descriptions for each of the new roles. Mostly they described things we already did, but with a rebranding - such as creating “total content packages”, focusing on “digital engagement” and generating “audience reach”. A section labelled “Performance measurement” said that reporters would have to produce a “a required volume of certain types of content per day” - ie quotas - and would be “assessed regularly, taking into account audience traffic to your stories and therefore encompassing page views, unique users, local audience and other metrics”.
This last point was particularly alarming, given that Trinity had dropped a previous attempt to introduce web traffic targets for reporters at the beginning of the year after the Daily Post, the Liverpool Echo, Birmingham Post, Newcastle Chronicle and Manchester Evening News held strike ballots in protest.

I asked to leave because I believe Newsroom 3.1 is the beginning of the end of the Advertiser as a newspaper. I’ve seen the impact of similar changes at Newsquest papers in south London and want no part of it. I would have found it very difficult to have no input into something I had spent eight years of my life working on. Story quotas and judging reporters by web stats are barriers to producing good journalism, especially when imposed on understaffed and under-resourced papers. Taking voluntary redundancy allowed me to look after my young son but, even if that were not a factor, redundancy would have been my only choice.

I raised these concerns with Ceri Gould. My fear about the future of the newspaper met with no response but I was told there were no plans to introduce quotas or to measure reporters by page views. When I pointed out both policies were in the job descriptions we had been given, she said the documents were out of date, and that I should take it on trust that it wasn’t going to happen.
I was assured that Newsroom 3.1 would provide opportunities for talented journalists, even those sceptical about its merits. Ceri cited Martin Shipton, the Western Mail’s veteran chief reporter, who, she said, originally hated the idea but had since become an enthusiastic convert. He told BBC Wales in June that Trinity Mirror was “anti-politics” and had convinced itself that the public was “more interested in lifestyle type journalism…than about important decisions taken about their lives”.
At the end of the meeting I was told my request for redundancy would be accepted. The box explaining why read “personal reasons, disagrees with Newsroom 3.1, no appetite”

Three others in our group, including a news editor and a senior reporter with a combined experience of more than 20 years, also decided to leave. Only one had a job to go to. Three more journalists have left since then. That leaves six reporters, all trainees, to cover Croydon, Sussex and Surrey (rather than working for individual papers as they previously did), as well as far wider areas.

“Please think beyond our traditional patches,” says a guide provided to staff last month by an editor. “Big stories from Sutton, Bromley, Streatham and Caterham do very well for Croydon. Big stories from Horsham, Brighton, Haywards Heath and Horley do well for Crawley. For Surrey any big stories from across the whole county can do well.
"And, for things like travel, days out or really huge stories (such as the Shoreham Air Show disaster) people can be very interested in things well outside our patch.”

Even under the old way of working, these reporters, like so many across the country, had seen the opportunity to cover important matters of public interest - court cases, inquests, employment tribunals, council meetings - severely restricted.
Now this inexperienced team of six trainees covers a population of approximately 3.5 million, with each area having guaranteed access to a photographer on only one day a week. They are overseen by five news editors, two of whom have been promoted but are, I am told, still paid the same as when they were reporters. Trinity Mirror is looking to recruit three journalists but, as the adverts say the positions will be in Croydon, Kent or Essex, it is unclear how many of the staff who have left will be replaced.
(At the end of the consultation process all the newsgroup’s editorial assistants -  whose responsibilities varied from managing the photographic diary to writing community news - were made redundant overnight. One day they were at their desks, the next they were not. One, after 16 years' service, was told that she had lost her job over the phone while on a school run.)

Writing for five websites, covering areas we don't know

Reporters who applied for jobs were told they would be working shifts covering all areas in the newsgroup, which had not been mentioned during the application process. Instead of working 9am to 5.30pm, Monday to Friday, reporters now work shifts, the earliest of which begins at 6.30am and the latest finishes at 10pm on a weekday. Instead of each paper having one person on call at the weekend, who (at least theoretically) was allowed to claim a day back during the week, reporters now work both Saturday and Sunday on a rota. Employment law in England and Wales states that a person cannot be made to work on Sundays unless they and their employer agree and put it in writing. No such change to reporters’ contract has been suggested or agreed.

Working in shifts with a reduced number of staff means that, once every six weeks or so, reporters will have to work 12 days in a row (including, for some, finishing at 10pm on a Friday ahead of an 8.30am weekend shift the next day). When reporters are on shift during the week and then at the weekend they will have worked 59.5 hours in seven days. The legal limit is an average of 48 hours over a period 17 weeks. One reporter has calculated that, under the new system, he will earn 50p less than the London Living Wage of £9.40 per hour. When I began as a trainee reporter in 2008 I was paid £14,500. The starting salary has not improved significantly since.

Staff were told that working in shifts was the only way to make Newsroom 3.1 work with the number of staff available. It was sold to them as ending the exploitative system that meant they regularly worked well beyond their contracted hours without extra pay or time back in lieu. Yet even under the new system they are expected to work outside their allotted shifts.
The guide says: “I would hope everyone already does this, but please if you spot a huge story out of hours take personal responsibility for ensuring we get it online with the same speed and quality as we would do if it was within working hours.”
Staff, who work in an office with no union representation, feel misled.

“The change has been tough - uncertainty always is - but what I think has been the toughest is becoming a reporter for all three patches,” said a source. “During the consultation we were not told that was a possibility. In fact we were advised to pick what patch we would like to cover when listing what roles we would wanted to fill.
“Then, after our interviews, the roles had changed and we were now expected to write for five websites, covering areas most of us had no experience of. That came as a shock. It’s worrying that we have not been given the chance to sign a new contract as a result of these changes, especially with the new hours we are working.
“The new way of working has improved the way we cover breaking news, but the hardest thing is how under-resourced we are. I’m holding out hope that more reporters will mean more time to work on public interest stories rather than listicles designed only to get hits.”
Reporters are concerned that covering huge areas with significantly fewer resources will affect their ability to produce good journalism.
Thankfully, the guide finishes with a helpful reminder.

While we are working different hours and in a different way, we still want great exclusives, tip offs from well-cultivated contacts and brilliantly written features. We still need to be superb at the basics

Yet the opportunity to do these things has already diminished. Reporters have arranged to meet contacts only to be told they cannot afford to do so unless it results in a guaranteed story. How can contacts possibly become “well-cultivated” under those circumstances?
Even getting to these meetings has become harder now that all work-related train travel - an important consideration given the size of the patch reporters have to cover - has to go through a non-editorial manager rather than be claimed back under expenses.
Trinity Mirror wants reporters to be “superb at the basics” but, a fortnight into Newsroom 3.1, staff are already being told to make serious compromises to fundamental journalistic standards. I am told that, on July 21, a reporter was instructed by an editor to lift quotes from the website of the rival Croydon Guardian instead of corroborating the story himself. On a separate occasion another journalist was allegedly told to “cannibalise” a story from the same paper.
A source said: “[The reporter] was told by an editor to steal quotes because the policy is now to get a story up straight away if [the Guardian] ever have something we don’t. It’s embarrassing.”

That 1,000 clicks barrier 

Under a section entitled What Not to Do, the guidance says reporters should focus on “what we shouldn’t be writing about” adding: “Just because someone wants us to write something doesn’t necessarily mean we should write it.”
There’s nothing controversial about that; the same quality control happens in every newsroom. What is new is the way these web-only newsrooms draw the distinction between what is worth reporting and what is not.
The guidance continues: “If you don’t think a story is likely to get at least 1,000 page views then talk [to an editor] and we can make a judgment on whether we feel something should be covered. Important stories may still be covered even if we fear it might not get 1,000 page views but it may be a case of presenting or headlining them differently to how we normally have done.”
Ceri Gould said on Twitter that it was “factually incorrect” and “utter rubbish” to claim that this was her group’s policy. After being provided with an extract from the guidance, she responded:

@Gareth_Davies09 'policy doc?' is news ed saying, if you want to write story few want to read please speak to me first. 'Twas ever thus

— Ceri Gould Thomas (@CeriGould) July 30, 2016

Writing in his blog, David Higgerson, digital publishing director for Trinity Mirror regionals, also denied the policy existed before going on to justify it. He said the company wanted to start a conversation about stories that gain less than 1,000 hits. It was, he said, a case of “cold economics”: stories that do not get page views do not generate advertising revenue. He said Trinity was trying to “survive and remain relevant”.

Neil Benson, the company’s editorial director, said: “The point is that journalism without an audience is pointless.” Such replies are to be expected from a company that judges the value of a story only by the number of page views it receives. Such a policy also echoes a growing problem with a media industry reliant on Facebook for generating traffic. As Kath Viner, editor of the Guardian, highlighted recently, Facebook’s news algorithms give us more of what they think we want, stories which reinforce rather challenge our existing beliefs. 

Publishing content on a local news website using a crude measure of what has previously been successful plays into that and does little to encourage reporters to cover under-reported subjects.
On an average day a sizeable proportion, sometimes most, of the stories posted on the Advertiser’s website do not get more than 1,000 page views. The paper’s online readership has increased significantly in recent years and its daily targets are hit more often than not, but that is mostly down to a handful of well-read, well-written stories. 

Plenty of important topics, the sort of things local newspapers have a duty to report - local politics, complex health or education stories, for example - are often read by less than a thousand people. The early stories about Lillian’s Law, an Advertiser campaign which prompted a change in drug-driving legislation in England and Wales, did not exceed that number.  For the Advertiser this policy will create a website dominated by crime and Crystal Palace.

Live-blogging the opening of a pub or KFC

There’s another issue, given that the newspaper is now made entirely of stories taken from the web. It means the 8,000 people who still buy the paper will stop getting certain types of news. For instance, this week’s  paper had no "news in brief" columns, often made up of community stories and events. As they would not reach the page view threshold, they are now presumably seen as worthless.

Trinity Mirror's changes to their print products might be easier to stomach if they had led to significant improvements in the quality of their websites - after all, it cannot be ignored that fewer and fewer people are buying newspapers. 

Certainly traffic to the company’s websites has improved since Newsroom 3.1 was introduced, and given that’s how Trinity Mirror measures success, it is unsurprising the company treats the regular criticism it receives (media commentator Roy Greenslade recently accused chief executive Simon Fox of “strangling his newspapers to death”) with incredulity.

It’s also making lots of money, helped by dreaded “synergy savings” (see cuts) after the acquisition of Local World.
Even in the relatively short period I worked for the company I noticed an improvement in how we covered breaking news - if live-blogging almost everything is a sign of progress. 

During major incidents the difference is marked and, for the most part, provides a better public service. But the obsession with live-blogging extends to coverage of the opening of a Wetherspoon’s pub or a KFC.
The trivialisation of news means reporters are asked to turn almost everything into a list, as if no reader could possibly understand what they’re being told unless there’s a number in front of it. My former colleagues have been asked to liven serious stories up by “writing like they would talk down the pub”. This is the “journalism” becoming a growing feature of local and regional newspaper websites up and down the country.

It wasn't a bed of roses before TM took over

All of this is not to pretend that the Advertiser, and its sister papers, were problem-free before Trinity Mirror. 

In 2012, then owner Northcliffe Digital moved the paper’s office to Redhill, half an hour away from Croydon. Staff, most of whom lived in London, received no adjustment to their salary to take into account having to travel ten miles away from the patch they were meant to be covering in order to get to work. Overnight the number of people visiting the office plummeted and never recovered. 

When the Daily Mail and General Trust-owned company streamlined its business in 2012 in preparation for the sale to David Montgomery’s Local World, it announced that up to 38 jobs were at risk in Essex, Kent, Sussex and Surrey. Newsrooms were told the gap left by their soon-to-be-departed colleagues would be filled by a massive increase in the amount of copy provided, for free, by readers. 

The company envisaged that as much as 60 per cent of its newspapers would be made up of user-generated content (UGC) and it also opened up its websites to allow people to post stories online without any editorial input. The proposals prompted several senior reporters at the Advertiser to leave but, for the most part,the company’s bleak vision of the future was never realised. After a few months it became clear that few, if any, members of the public were interested in producing these stories, especially for nothing, and most of those posted directly online were done so by police and local council press officers, who realised it was an opportunity to publish unfettered PR. 

Local World arrived determined to make much-needed improvements to its new papers’ online coverage. Its solution was to tell already overstretched and undermanned news teams they had to produce twenty times more stories without any extra resources. The company even got rid of each paper's digital publishers. The pressure to meet targets was so great that some editors plumbed incredible new depths. One sent a photographer to the local high street to  snap people secretly, then published the gallery online to a swath of complaints. Another wrote stories about nude celebrities and even published a map of all the dogging sites in the county. One paper has a reputation for outright fabrication of  football transfer stories for clubs not even on its patch. 

The Advertiser was fortunate in it had a good crop of reporters, covered a newsy patch and, critically, had an editor who did his best to shield the paper from this clickbait culture. The importance of being led by the right person should not be underestimated. Our editor eventually left with no permanent job to go to when he was told by his Local World bosses that crime was going to be barred from the front page of the paper following complaints from commercial managers. The company would later replace a journalist of 45 years’ experience with two part-time reporters tasked with writing lists for the website. 

Similar issues have affected local and regional newspapers up and down the country. Some, including some owned by Trinity Mirror, have been closed or become online-only. While taken individually, these problems might seem inconsequential, the end result has been to create an industry that, as a whole, is unable to adequately fulfil the role of local journalism - to provide a public service, to be a vital part of democratic accountability, to be a force for change for causes that would otherwise go unnoticed and to chart social history. There’s no easy answer, though the ownership model of citizen publications such as The Bristol Cable provides a potential hint by removing local media from the control of large companies. But the solution cannot be to turn newspapers, and their associated websites, into thrown together collections of clickbait.

No comment from TM - but the door is still open

I approached Trinity Mirror for comment on the issues above and was told by a press officer that none would provided unless I identified where the article would be published. Since I cannot see what bearing that would have on the answers, I did not provide that information. Neil Benson, the company’s regional editorial director, did send a lengthy statement to Press Gazette, which included the thinly veiled suggestion that I left because I wasn’t “up” for the pace of live-blogging (I reported from the middle of a riot, including after being beaten up, for ten hours). He said the company was “disappointed” and “baffled” by my “outburst”- a not insignificant part of the problem - and that since the new structure had been introduced, the “culture” at the Croydon Advertiser “has been one of positivity and excitement about what the future has in store and how the newspaper and website are evolving”.

Having read this article, I’ll leave you to decide. 

Benson added: “As the UK’s largest publisher, nobody cares more about the success of the local media industry than Trinity Mirror and nobody has more of an interest in the local media industry succeeding than Trinity Mirror. The changes we make are about exactly that, ensuring there is a future for our newsbrands.”

If you are a journalist working on a local or regional paper and have experienced issues similar to those outlined in this article please contact gdavies06@googlemail.com in confidence. For those using PGP encryption, his public key is 4CEE 0B57 E05F D9C1 A9D9 E282 A7DC DA88 E58F DD92.

Click clique don't understand what 'local' means

Half a dozen teenagers, one waving a belt about, chase a couple of boys round a town centre at 8.30 in the evening. The police are called, find the boys, make sure that no one is hurt and leave them to it.

Is this a fight? Or a brawl? Or a story that a thousand people would want to read?

In a sane world of local journalism, it would make a nib. In today's voracious digital world, it is the fifth most important story of the day for the Croydon Advertiser.
Top slot goes to commuter misery on Southern Rail, followed by the threat of rain, a missing old man found safe, the fire brigade complaining about being asked to rescue animals, and the air ambulance being called to a cycle race.

Even in newsy south London, it's a job to find meaty stories to fill a weekly paper in the silly season, especially with only a couple of reporters. And it's even harder when they also have to cater for a website that needs feeding as often as a newborn baby.

In such a world, it's logical to try to make best use of limited resources and not waste time and energy on stories that don't cut the mustard. But how do you decide which stories are worth pursuing?
That used to be the task of the editor, or news editor or chief reporter. These days, however, there is no guarantee that there will be anyone with any of those titles in the office.
There are, however, algorithms. Easy. Once you know what people are reading, you can give them more of the same. And if you've got a story that might not attract a thousand readers, you can ask a higher authority - possibly fifty or a hundred miles away - whether you should carry on writing.

This philosophy is, according to Trinity Mirror's David Higgerson, sensible for two reasons: first, because advertising revenue is linked to page views and, second, because publishing stories that might reach only 0.4% of the local population would leave the paper in "not a strong place" in holding authorities to account.

Higgerson was writing in response to a series of Friday night tweets from the Advertiser's former chief reporter Gareth Davies, left, prompted by the departure of another reporter and by that day's issue, which had two "listicle" features on opposite pages. A proud paper had been reduced to a thrown-together collection of clickbait, stories scraped from the website by subs, he said. "Things are really shit."

Davies's timeline has been storified by Sarah Wickens and you can see it here. It makes depressing reading, and all the more so because the picture he draws will be familiar to so many.

The Croydon Advertiser was one of the Local World papers that were taken over by Trinity Mirror last autumn. Since then, a dozen editors have left their posts under a restructuring that has created regional editors-in-chief and more localised "brand editors". The leavers include high-profile journalists such as Neil White from the Derby Telegraph, Kevin Booth from the Leicester Mercury and Paul Brackley from the Cambridge Evening News.
Davies, who has won four reporter of the year titles at the Regional Press Awards, took redundancy from the Advertiser in June. The entire Mercury features department was disbanded the week after it had been honoured for its Leicester City Premiership supplement and Lee Marlow named feature writer of the year for the third successive year.
Meanwhile journalists at the Liverpool Echo, Newcastle Chronicle and Echo and North Wales Daily Post have been holding disruptive chapel meetings in protest at what the NUJ describes as a "merry-go-round of misery".

Today Trinity Mirror has published its financial results for the first half of the year and says it is on course to achieve £12m in "synergy savings" after the Local World takeover. As anyone who has ever worked for a company that has been taken over knows, "synergy savings" means getting rid of people.
The company also reported a 42% increase in pre-tax profits and a 30% increase in revenue. The latter is to be expected, since it has 83 more titles than it had this time last year. If, for a true comparison, you add last year's first-half income for those titles to Trinity Mirror's 2015 figure, it turns out that revenue has fallen by almost 8%.
Trinity Mirror has also had to find money for phone-hacking compensation payments and the folly of the New Day experiment. On top of that, there is  a ballooning pension fund deficit, up by a third to £426m. It's hard to blame Local World journalists - some of whom must be looking back fondly to the days under hatchet man David Montgomery - if they feel they're paying the price. "Gareth speaks for all of us," Lee Marlow told SubScribe.
Still, the shareholders are happy: there's an increased dividend and the share price is up.

So much for the financial background. Life has been rough for the regional Press for years, with many papers' print circulations down to clearly unsustainable levels.

The trouble is that almost all of our local newspapers are now owned by one of three groups - Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press and the American-owned Newsquest - each of which seems to have problems with the definition of "local". Well here's a clue: if something is 10, 20 or 50 miles away, it isn't local. If your office is on an industrial estate when your readers are in the high street, it isn't local.  If your reporter is in one town, your editor in another and your subs in a different county or even country, your product isn't local.

In his response to Davies's tweets, David Higgerson concluded: "I write as someone who loves the regional press as much as the day I first set foot into the Chorley Citizen offices on work experience in 1996."

Please bear with me as I, too, trip down memory lane. I started my reporting career at the Herts and Essex Observer in the market town of Bishop's Stortford. On Thursdays, the editor and I would drive 16 miles to Hertford to see the paper offstone at the offices of our sister paper, the Hertfordshire Mercury.  The two towns had nothing in common other than that they were in the same county. The newspapers were run completely separately, sharing only the same owner and the same printing set-up. Seven miles in the other direction, over the border in Essex, was Harlow with its own newspaper, the Citizen, which had nothing to do with us.
In 1980 Harlow got another paper with the launch of the Star, an independent freesheet.  It, along with the Observer and Mercury, eventually ended up as part of Local World.
Until last week, each had its own editor. But on Friday, Observer editor Paul Winspear, news editor Sinead Holland and Star editor Ken Morley packed up their desks and now all operations are run by Julie Palmer from her office in Hertford - by far the smallest of the three towns.  The area she oversees is quite compact compared with some local newspaper fiefdoms, but people in Hertford have no more in common with those in Harlow ten miles away than they have with the little green men on Mars.

My next stop was the Evening Gazette in Colchester, then part of Essex County Newspapers. It is now owned by Newsquest and run by an editor based in Basildon, 38 miles away. Again, the two towns and their environs are linked by nothing beyond the county in which they are situated.

That's the way it is now. I talk about local papers, Higgerson talks about the regional Press. My editors lived and worked in the communities they served. Trinity Mirror and Newsquest may talk about community, but they don't seem to understand the concept -  to recognise that there is more to it than geography. They look on a map and see that this town is ten minutes down the road from that one, and assume that of course one editor can look after both of them.  There are many reasons why local papers are struggling, but the consolidation of operations that take journalists physically ever further from their readers must be a key factor. And yet the tougher times get, the more they do it. Don't they look at the rise of the hyper-locals and wonder?

Let's go back to this 1,000-hits policy. I live in a village with about 250 homes. The Crown Estates owns a patch of land on which it wants to build 100 houses, and another patch on which it wants to build still more. This, as you can imagine, is an issue of abiding interest to us all, but of little concern outside the village. So it's unlikely that a thousand people would want to read about it. Does that mean the progress of the application shouldn't be reported?

Higgerson accepts in his blog that many important stories may not get over the 1,000-click barrier, and goes on to say that in such cases, a discussion should take place and ways found to make sure that readers want to read them. How? By sexing them up? By dumbing them down? By tricking the reader into clicking? Our websters could put up a heading saying "Village may be doubled in size" and get the thousand hits required to justify the story. But then people who aren't interested in Feering would move away without looking further.

And what's the time frame for these 1,000 clicks? A day, a week, a month? By far the most widely read post on this blog is the one about why local newspapers matter. It was written more than four years ago and reached about 300 people in the first few hours. It took a couple of weeks to get to the thousand, but over the years, it has had several resurgences and has had many thousand more views than when it was in the first flush of youth. Please take a look. I think it is still relevant and it has one statistic that will make you weep:

"In 1970, the Birmingham Evening Mail had a circulation of 400,000 and employed 113 journalists: 30 newsdesk and reporting staff, 25 district reporters, 23 news subs, 15 features staff, 20 sports staff and 9 photographers."

Some stories need just to "be" there, whether readers look at them at the time or not. The ground needs to be laid for the future - "paper of record" duty and all that. Take our village development, for example. Under the 1,000-click rule, it might be deemed unworthy of a reporter's attention.
But what if we all run stark naked through the streets, waving our Nimby banners, to protest? Suddenly it's a story. A proper local paper would have been on the case, following the proposals from the word go, but these days you'd be lucky if a reporter has time to go down to the planning office to see what's coming up, let alone get round to writing for an audience of a couple of hundred villagers.
So when we're all wobbling down the hill in the altogether, the reporter has to start from scratch - and there's no photographer on the staff to capture our embarrassment.
Then someone takes a picture with an iPhone and sends it in to the Sun or Mail. Before you know it, it's a national story and the local journos are left playing catch-up.

Enough of the fantasy. Higgerson is apparently concerned that a publisher's credibility in holding authorities to account might be compromised if less than 0.4% of the potential readership (the 264,000 people served by Croydon Council) clicked on its stories.
By that token, every national newspaper might as well give up and go home, since with a national population of 65 million, you'd need 260,000 clicks per story to achieve the same strike rate as 1,000 in Croydon.
A newspaper's ability to question authority lies not in how many clicks it gets on a story about an old man who goes Awol for a few hours, but on the reputation it builds up across the board.

In his tweets, Davies said that many council and health stories fell below the 1,000 page views mark, Higgerson's response was: "Let's ask why and do something about it." He suggests engagement on social media, live blogging of meetings. "It's not enough - any more - for us as journalists to say 'this is important and therefore we'll do it'. There is little point in writing something because we think it's important for readers to know about, but not to think how to get readers to read it in the first place."

Sounds fair enough. No harm in getting your overworked staff to tweet their wares, But journalists and executives everywhere should beware of the assumption that there is no audience appetite for serious subjects - look at the spike in readership enjoyed by the broadsheets during the referendum campaign.
There is evidence in Croydon, too, where the advertiser has a lone-wolf rival in the form of the Inside Croydon  hyper-local website. Its editor Steven Downes has had many a run-in with the Advertiser and, indeed, Davies, so he has understandably made merry with the Twitter storm.
The site has had more than three million hits since it was set up in 2010 and has 9,000-plus followers against the Advertiser's latest ABC circulation of 7,851. Downes says that in the five days to last Friday, his site had 18,000 page views - predominantly for its coverage of local politics.

There was no politics on the Advertiser's home page this morning. There were a lot of puffs for things with nothing to do with Croydon and when I clicked on the main headline, I was required to answer a "consumer survey" before being allowed to read the story - another of  Davies's tweeted complaints.

 I was, however, allowed straight in to the earth-shattering story of the High Street riot van.
At the top is a file picture of a police car with an out-of-focus figure in the midground. Ironically, for an organisation that has sacked all its staff photographers in favour of reader contributions, copyright-free agency stock and reporters' smartphone efforts, an ad invites the reader to buy the paper's pictures.

At the bottom, under several blocks of puffery (including repeats) were two comments. Both spam. Presumably Trinity Mirror can't afford moderators, which doesn't matter much when the commenters are self-serving trolls, but could matter a lot if they start libelling people.
Anyway, here's the story, all 118 words (interrupted by an ad and two puffs). Is it worth a thousand clicks? You tell me.

Why local newspapers matter

When was the last time you - or anyone you know - stood at the gates of a cemetery collecting names of mourners as they left a funeral?
When did you last attend a parish council meeting or magistrates' court? Or call into a local police station for a chat (rather than to hand in your drivers' documents) or check the upcoming weddings at the register office? 
Do you still look at the postcards in newsagents' windows and check the village notice board?
Indeed, have you the faintest idea of what I'm on about?
For generations of journalists, being soaked through or bored throughout were the price to be paid to learn their craft.  The lessons were given not by university lecturers, but by wiser older hands (sometimes as old as 23) who knew all about the fetes worse than death, that brides were more likely to carry a bouquet of  freesias than fuchsias, that rain never dampened the enthusiasm for anything and that the lady mayoress was frequently to be seen sharing a joke.  The biggest lesson of all was that faces and names sold papers - and that those names must always be spelt correctly.

Forty years ago a weekly newspaper serving a medium-sized market town could expect to have a circulation of between ten and fifteen thousand. It would be staffed by an editor, a news editor, a chief reporter, half a dozen reporters, a sports editor, a couple of photographers and three or four subs. There might also be a feature writer, often an older woman working part-time.
Nearly all of the reporters would likely be juniors - indentured trainees who would serve three years before taking their proficiency test. Some would stick to news reporting, others would find a niche in sport or features or even subbing. Some in bigger newspaper groups would move around during their indenture period so that they would taste life on a daily early in their training. Most would seek to move on once they had that proficiency certificate in their hands. The fundamental skills they had learnt would be expected everywhere; all the ads used the same phraseology: reporters had to have a talent for finding off-diary stories; subs must always be fast and accurate. 
The young journalists would move from weeklies to evenings to bigger evenings. Some would choose the executive route and find their place in the community as the editor of the local paper; for others Fleet Street was the dream. The ambitions were equally honourable - if not equally remunerated - and the result was that Britain had a thriving newspaper industry populated by well-trained journalists. (I am talking here about journalism, not about printers, electricians etc and the Mickey Mouse nonsense of the era.)
For those happy to stay in what were then known as the provinces, there were plenty of jobs and opportunities. 
You may like to sit down before you read the next par.

In 1970, the Birmingham Evening Mail had a circulation of 400,000 and employed 113 journalists: 30 newsdesk and reporters, 25 district reporters, 23 news subs, 15 features staff, 20 sports staff and 9 photographers.
There are national newspapers today that struggle to match that level of staffing.

Then came the freesheets and the landscape changed. 
People are fickle: readers cancelled their orders for the paid-for weeklies and the freebies flourished. Village stringers were as happy to send their snippets to the newcomers as to the old rags - and sometimes preferred to, since the freesheets' smaller staffs (often ad reps doubling up to perform editorial tasks) wouldn't  have the time or inclination to rewrite them. As time went by, readers became convinced they were getting something almost as good as they'd always had - and for nothing.
The local press struggled; advertising ratios grew, so that the papers became almost as ugly as the upstart rivals; costs had to be cut. Newspapers which had been run by local businessmen for reasons of altruism or influence were sold into groups that got bigger and bigger. Some paid-fors took the 'if you can't beat them' approach and went free.
The freesheet didn't kill the local rag. It survived to fight another day. But only just. The decline has been relentless, but the smallest thing can still shock. This morning it was not so much the Johnston Press horror, but the announcement  of the shortlist for this year's regional press awards that made me sit upright. There among the nominees is The Birmingham Post, once one of the country's most respected morning papers. And the category? Best weekly newspaper with a circulation of less than 20,000. (It's sister, the Mail with the monster staff and a circulation to match, now sells a tenth of the copies it did four decades ago - and "sells" is a generous term, since many are given away.)

Today  the local press is facing its greatest  fight - but with a much depleted army - and this time everyone is adopting the 'if you can't beat them' line. The combination of a series of recessions and the rise of the internet is a formidable enemy for the local press to confront and few would bet on it emerging triumphant.
The consolidation of small newspaper operations into bigger businesses with shareholders to answer to has removed all romance and sentimentality.The clank of the linotype, the smell of the ink, the thunder of the presses have long since been removed from most offices as pages are sent electronically to printing contractors hundreds of miles away.  With profits and circulations falling and debts rising, journalists are under ever greater pressure to work harder and longer. Jobs are being combined (for heaven's sake, even editors are being done away with) and editions cut.
The Bristol Evening Post is abandoning its Saturday paper. Johnston Press is turning dailies into weeklies and has sent the Editor in Chief of the Scotsman on enforced leave while it decides what to do about him, having abolished his job.
And all the time we are being offered assurances that readers will get the same local coverage across a range of platforms or formats or whichever digital buzzword is in vogue today.
Well, you have to admit that Johnstons have to do something. The Doncaster Star is an evening paper that sells 2,500 copies a night. Yes, 2,500. How can you run an evening paper with such a circulation?
There are big names in the Johnston stable, but all are scoring at a fraction of the rate they enjoyed in their prime. The Sheffield Star sold more than 200,000 in 1970, today its circulation is around 37,000; the Yorkshire Evening Post sold 250,000, today that is down to 35,000. The Halifax Courier, which has been told it is turning into a weekly, is down from 43,000  to barely 15,000.

Ashley Highfield, above,  Johnston's newish chief executive, today spelt out his vision for his local newspaper stable. And what is it?  To emulate mumsnet. 
Or as he put it, to create "themed digital destinations". Material on similar topics - gardening, football, events, small business news - will be "aggregated and enhanced with social media to create a compelling destination for people interested in that particular niche...websites like mumsnet have exploited this brilliantly and we can too. So our plan is to create several of these new businesses and then promote them on a national basis".
Excuse me? This is the future of your local newspapers? To turn them into online versions of Gardening Weekly or Football World? On a national basis? Have you not noticed that there are quite a lot of specialist publications and websites out there? With experts writing them rather than shoestring staffs. Why should anyone turn to the Halifax Courier online edition for gardening tips?
Another part of the strategy is to raise the price of the print editions. "Have you ever wondered why,"  Mr Highfield asks, "we charge 65p for a paper in one part of the country and £1 for a similar product elsewhere. There are many cases where we simply undercharge. Our experience is that price increases do not have an adverse impact on circulation. Consumers will pay up to 95p for a well-produced weekly product."
Right, so when Rupert Murdoch started his price wars, he got it all wrong did he? He could have raised the price and seen circulations remain the same?
Or if Mr Murdoch's experience doesn't convince him, Mr Highfield might care to look at his own group. A while back, the Yorkshire Post raised its price from £1 to £1.10, scrapped district editions and cut the newsagents' margins. The circulation fell. A survey of 1,400 people for the National Federation of Retail Newsagents said that 59 per cent of respondents were put off by price rises and 60 per cent said they were buying fewer paid-for papers than they were last year because of the cost.
And then there is that caveat in Mr Highfield's remarks: people are willing to pay "for a well-produced weekly product". If local offices are being closed (Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Bridgnorth are all for the chop) and staff being cut, how well-produced will these papers be? 
In his 1971 book Provincial Press and the Community, Ian Jackson of Salford University noted that the Cambridge Evening News left routine local news to its weekly sister and found that it assisted sales. "In towns where the weekly is largely a reworking of the previous week's local news as reported in the evening press, sales are often unimpressive," he wrote. The same must surely apply to regurgitating web content once a week.

The whole industry is being squeezed; morale is low across the board. But there are still organisations that want to produce truly local papers for their communities - and even in these tough times, some are seeing benefits that buck the trend.
***Last autumn only three regional newspapers saw their circulations increase and two of them were sisters: Norwich's Eastern Daily Press and  Evening News. In an interview with UK Press Gazette, Don Williamson, the papers' circulation chief, talked about home distribution and other matters that you would expect to concern a man in his position, but he also showed understanding of the editorial ethos. "We want to establish a bigger network of local correspondents and get readers and newsagents to have an affinity and love for the paper and a sense of ownership of everything we do."
Apart from the staff at the Norwich headquarters, including specialists in local government, health, education and crime, the papers maintain eight district offices and a London-based political editor. The editor EDP Peter Waters told Press Gazette  that he made it a principle to avoid shock, horror journalism. 
"We are still very conscious of providing a comprehensive local news package as well as national and international news, sport and business, We should do everything a national can do, with local news as our USP. 
"We want people to feel upbeat about where they live and they made the right decision to live in Norfolk. We are militantly pro-Norfolk. We run campaigns for people to shop here and holiday here. The papers belong to Norfolk.”

Tindle Newspapers are beating the same drum. The company founded and still run by Sir Ray Tindle at 82 operates under the motto "local papers at the heart of the community". The group has more than 200 titles and managing director Brian Doel says: "I am sure we could have saved money across the group, but we've kept each title very local with local editions and subs and reporters as much as possible. they know most about the community they serve."

Now Sir Ray is no latter day saint and people who work for the EDP or the Tindle papers may not feel life is quite as wonderful as their bosses paint; both groups have made cuts and consolidations. But the core function - to produce local papers - remains intact. The shot of the Tindle papers above show how each has retained its identity; they certainly can't be accused of homogeneity. Some are paid-for, some are freesheets. If you look at an edition online you turn the pages, just like a normal paper. For some you are asked to pay 35p or 40p, others are free.

Compare this with Newsquest, which now owns the clutch of papers that  made up Essex County Newspapers plus the Basildon and Southend-based stable that was once part of Westminster Press. The ECN group had its headquarters in Colchester, above, where the  Evening Gazette and weekly Essex County Standard were based. There were also district editorial offices for weekly papers in Harwich, Clacton, Maldon, Chelmsford and Halstead. All were  printed in Colchester. Today the weekly operations have been merged, the Gazette is still produced - but without an editor - and, to be fair, it has done well to hang on to a circulation around half the 30,000 it managed at its peak. Martin McNeill, who trained with the group in the 70s, is now the editorial director, overseeing the production of the Gazette and the Southend Evening Echo from the group's offices in Basildon. 

Let's just run through that again: a daily newspaper with no editor being run from an office more than 50 miles away.

Like everyone else, Newsquest is hoping to capture new readers through its digital output. The lead story on the Gazette's website at lunchtime today was

Mum's heart stops four times and she suffers stroke having twins

There was a photograph of the woman concerned with two children aged, at a guess, between nine and twelve months old. So this is hardly new news. The picture came with three pars of copy telling us about the heart stopping and the hospital's two-hour battle to save her life. The site then guides us to "Special report in today's Gazette". So that's it, that's all you'll learn unless you buy the paper.

Well, it's a strategy of sorts.

Clicking on the 'most read' list at the side, I bring up a story called

Slimmers urged to use new programme

It tells us that the Anglian Community Enterprise is setting up one-to-one classes to advise people on a weight loss programme that has helped 600 people to lose 200 stone over the past year. (That, as a reader points out, is an average of four and a half pounds each).  It doesn't tell us what Anglian Community Enterprise is (it's part of the NHS) or that the sessions are free - as are two other programmes that aren't mentioned in the story, which has no byline.

There is a Tesco ad embedded in the the copy; in the centre of the page there is a glittering mirrorball with roller skaters passing by; at the side there are six ads between the various links to other stories, and there are a further four on top of the Gazette masthead. Every one of the ads  is moving. It is almost impossible to read anything without being distracted by a flashing word or image. There are only four local stories on the page, but there are links to national news and features.

The Yorkshire Press, which sold 60,000 a night even with the mighty Evening Post as a rival in the Seventies, is also now owned by Newsquest. Its website looks exactly the same with similar national links, although obviously with different local stories.

Is this the way we want our local news? Will these templated websites with their dancing ads  attract or deter readers?

Local newspapers matter.  Royal Mail is not allowed to give up deliveries to homes just because they are difficult to reach; bus companies are not allowed to abandon rural services and cream off the lucrative urban routes; broadcasters are required to maintain levels of local coverage in return for their licences.

I'm not suggesting that  newspaper businesses should be regulated in the same way - you cannot force a private enterprise to provide a potentially loss-making service - but I am saying that those rules for the mail, the buses and the TV stations are there because local communities matter. It is important that people are able to keep in touch and feel part of the area where they live, to be able to reach friends and neighbours in person or through letters, papers, phone calls and, yes, online social networks. 

To produce a decent local newspaper, the reporters need to have proper contact with their readers and the community leaders. They need to go to those boring council meetings, not just to take notes, but to chat to people afterwards, to get the stories behind the stories. They need to maintain contact with the local police, the village shopkeeper. They need to be in court for all cases, not simply when they've been tipped off that there's an important or juicy one coming up. And if they don't build their contacts they won't even get the tips for those. 

We had to fight in the 1970s for the right to remain in council chambers to hear all the discussions. Councils used to be allowed to vote to go into camera and exclude the press without explanation. As a young reporter I had to stand and challenge such a vote when the law  changed, to seek an explanation for why what they were about to discuss was not fit for public consumption. The new rules were effective; government became more open. 

And now we can't even be bothered to turn up. Or rather we can't afford the time to turn up. If you've got to write up the Basildon charity fun run, the A12 car crash, the Maldon regatta and the Colchester factory strike, you've barely got time to ring the Stebbing parish clerk about last night's meeting, let alone consider attending in person.

So more and more stories are covered on the phone - but the contacts who tell us what happened are the people with the vested interest in seeing the story slanted in a particular way.  Justice and democracy at their basic levels are not seen in action. 

Local newspapers have always been produced largely by youngsters with aspirations. Those village calls have always been a chore, the staid writing style constraining. But this is about providing a service, about learning to deal with people, about being grounded and disciplined. If local papers become digital wannabe redtops with slang headings and endless celebs, there will be no use for them. And that matters. 

It matters because millions of people will be denied basic information about their communities. And it matters because this slapdash approach will drag down the national press. If local papers do not produce decent ethical journalists with basic skills, who will? National papers have set up their own graduate training schemes, but these are open to only a relative handful of the smartest young men and women. 

There are 50 applicants for every graduate post  - and the universities are turning out more media graduates than there are journalists employed across the entire industry. That means there's an army of young people with certificates saying they know what they're doing. But how can they find out for real? Everyone can learn a certain amount from the classroom, but there is still no substitute for what used to be called on-the-job training and where are these youngsters going to get that? 
How will they learn how to interview a woman whose five-year-old son has just died in the village pond? Will they understand the importance of shining a light on what's going on in the Mayor's Parlour? 
They need to know.
One day they may be interviewing the woman whose son has just been killed in a terrorist bombing in a shopping centre. Or looking into shady dealings in Downing Street that could bring down a Government.

***Important update: Don Williamson was sacked a week before he was due to retire in August 2012. He admitted falsifying the circulation figures for the Evening News and Eastern Daily Press. The figures were reaudted in October and showed that News sales had fallen by 6.2% and the EDP's by 6.5%.

Thank you for sticking with it to the end. Please do share your thoughts below. And please take a look at the other posts. They are all media related.

Sold down the river the Beeb's flotilla and fireworks fiasco - and a feeble fightback. Why didn't the top man have his hand on the tiller?

Hello and goodbye to Wapping a personal diary of life inside the fortress in the days before the strike that changed newspapers forever

Out of print a love letter to newspapers in this digital age. Why they don't have to die if we have the will to let them live and thrive

Missing: an opportunity How the hunt for Madeleine McCann could be turned into a force for good instead of just a festival of mawkish sentimentality

Riding for a fall Does buying a ticket for a jolly day out at the races mean you are fair game for the snobs who sneer and snipe?

Just a pretty face Illustrating the business pages isn't the easiest job in the world, but spare us the celebs who aren't even mentioned in the story

Food for thought a case study in why we should take health advice with a pinch of salt (and a glass of red wine and a helping of roast beef) 

The world's gone mad Don Draper returns and  the drooling thirtysomethings go into overdrive But does anybody watch the show? (But there is more Whipple in this post!)