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!)