Liverpool's last Post

Less than two years after it morphed into a weekly paper, the presses have stopped rolling on what was the Liverpool Daily Post for the vast majority of its 158-year history.

The migration from daily to weekly publication has become a trend in some sections of a struggling provincial press in recent years.   Yet while several titles have flourished under this new model, increasing their circulations compared to the latter days of their daily incarnations, the Liverpool Post faced a bigger challenge than some - and it came from within the same building.

With its sister publication, the Liverpool Echo, selling ten times as many print copies, the clock was always ticking for the Post.   To its great credit, the relaunched paper tried to offer something distinctive and adopted a more investigative approach, often leading with an exclusive on some aspect of public life in the city.   Unfortunately, these scoops, combined with detailed analysis and specialist business and arts coverage, failed to excite the dwindling newspaper-buying public of Merseyside (declaration:  I bought the Post more often as a weekly than a daily, but still only if the lead story caught my eye).

The good news is that the closure isn't resulting in journalistic job losses.   The bad news is laid bare by that same fact - this isn't about naked cost-cutting, it's purely due to lack of demand.   Broadsheet-minded print titles appear fated to struggle at a local or regional level in times of falling circulations, as evidenced by the demise of the brilliant, but short-lived North West Enquirer in the mid-2000s.  

Two years after the Post went weekly, there is still no answer to the question posed by this blog at the time - is there a new generation which simply doesn't care for what might be termed big-picture local news?   Moreover, is the appetite for all forms of local news falling in proportion with collapsing readerships?   

Website traffic for the local and regional press is, unsurprisingly, on the rise.   However, whilst it might be reassuring to suggest an inversely proportional relationship between the two, on-line hits don't always equate to the fully-rounded experience of reading a print copy.   Although every reader won't read every story in print, the process of flicking from cover-to-cover increases the likelihood of encountering journalism which the individual might never make the necessarily active choice to access on on-line.   Factor in links to suggestions for similar stories and it's easy to see why even regular website visitors could end up with a rather narrowly-focused diet of local news.   

The Liverpool Echo has promised to absorb both the staff and the substance from its sister publication and, although it has shed tens of thousands of its own readers in the last decade, the paper's circulation appears remarkably healthy when compared with others serving similar-sized urban areas.   And that has to be welcomed, because the need for local news - whatever the commercial realities - hasn't diminished in the digital age.   

The local press is a vital component of journalism's ecosystem.   Whatever those of us in broadcast might like to think about our ability to originate, there's many a local radio station and regional television newsroom that would notice the difference if they started each day without local papers as a reliable reference point.

So Liverpool is unable to sustain two daily papers in 2014 - hardly news worthy of holding the front page.   A sad change, certainly, but not seismic - yet.   That tag can be reserved for if the day ever comes when it can't sustain even one.

Signposting the future of the provincial press?

The announcement this week that the Liverpool Daily Post is to cease publication in its current form might have made headlines locally - but it hardly came as a shock.

The well-documented woes of the regional press were compounded on Merseyside by the decision in the late 2000s to turn the Post's more populist sister paper, the Liverpool Echo, into an overnight publication, thereby pitting it directly against its stable mate.   In an attempt to mitigate this obvious clash, the publishers morphed the always more analytical Post into a specialist arts, politics and sports paper.   The Echo was also given a "main extra" edition (usually off the press by early afternoon), in order that at least some of that day's news might appear in what is still regarded by many as an evening paper.

 

Neither sop was ever going to save the Post.   The nonsense model of publishing two, essentially competing local papers at a time of freefall in local readerships would always see off the more vulnerable of the two titles eventually.  By the end, the Post had 8000 readers, just a tenth of those enjoyed by the Echo (which itself is down from over 110,000 only five years ago).   The luxury of having two local print papers might well come from an age which has now passed, but what of the future?

Local factors might have accelerated the demise of the Post, but there can be no hiding from the wider issue that is the perilous state of the provinicial press.      The Post will now become a weekly publication (heavy on the analysis), with a website that continues to update daily.   The Echo might attempt to compensate by gravitating back towards its own more middle-market heritage, but with even the likes of Roy Greenslade forecasting a swift end to all print papers in the regions, perhaps it's time the traditionalists (declaration of interest:  I am one) sat up and took notice.    

The thirst for the kind of in-depth analysis now promised by the weekly version of the Post will be an interesting indication of just how much a new generation craves this type of local news.   The Birmingham Post followed an almost identical path in 2009 - and, two years on, the new model remains intact.   However, it is notable that the provincial titles which have been first to fall have been at the heavyweight end of the scale.   Similarly, the demise of the North West Enquirer, a laudable, but ill-fated venture back in 2006 to serve up a diet of considered analysis and in-depth politics to a region-wide audience, places a question mark over the kind of local news which is valued by potential readers.   To complicate matters further, the value placed on a particular type of journalism does not necessarily equate to its worth - and local democracy hinges on the strength of local reporting as much as it ever did.

Are those who argue that it is only the method of consumption which is changing in the digital world actually failing to consider a more pertinent question - is there a new generation which cares in sufficient numbers about what might be called big-picture local news?   

I hope and think that there just might be.   If so, then, as I have argued elsewhere, it requires the kind of journalism which can best be provided by established media organisations - and that means it needs to pay its own way.   

Unfortunately, answers on that conundrum are as thin on the ground as increasing circulations.