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.

Whose story is it anyway?

Show me a broadcast journalist who has never got a story or an idea for a story from a newspaper and I'll show you a liar.    

Cross-media fertilisation might sound like a concept straight out of a digital babble bible, but it is actually as old as broadcast journalism itself.   What kind of newsroom would operate in complete isolation, blind to the output or content of other sources?   Just as press journalists will monitor television and radio news programmes, so broadcast journalists have traditionally checked the papers (and now their websites) to ensure that they are not missing out on a story which is yet to appear on their own radar.

This fact was seized upon by some critics of BBC local radio when the corporation announced a review of the service last year.   Claims abounded that local radio journalists were lifting stories from local papers in their coverage area.   Research by the BBC debunked that suggestion, but the threat of swingeing cuts to the local radio budget raised fears that local stations would be rendered incapable of sustaining the current standard of journalism.   Last week's announcement that local stations are having less money taken from them will hopefully secure their journalistic future.

The issue has, however, highlighted the oft-overlooked question of originality in broadcast journalism, at both the local and national level.    Is the primary role of the broadcast journalist to uncover stories or to bring them to life for the widest possible audience?   Every broadcast journalist with an ounce of pride will say that it should be both - but, in reality, how many times does the necessity for the latter mean the former is sacrificed?   

Original journalism is the holy grail for any journalist, but it does seem the press often takes the lead when it comes to doing the digging.    Perhaps that is because broadcast is more labour intensive and the need for recording, editing and presenting a polished product usually leaves little time for anything else.   Yet considering the pagination of newspapers nowadays, the 24-hour business of updating their websites and the fact that press newsrooms have seen some drastic cutbacks of their own, maybe that explanation is just a little too easy.   Here's a more uncomfortable proposition - are print journalists just more suited to good old-fashioned investigative journalism than their broadcast counterparts?

Fortunately for broadcasters, however, nobody owns the news.   Just because one organisation has originated a story does not preclude others from reporting it.   And here is where broadcast comes into its own.   Broadcast journalists are the profession's storytellers.   A relatively dry story on paper can be brought to life by a television or radio package or interview.   Real voices, explaining complex issues or conveying a sense of place or emotion.   The best broadcasters transport the listener or viewer to the heart of a story - and then guide them through it.

Broadcast journalists are also usually best placed to develop a story.   Original journalism is not confined to the bald notion of uncovering facts.   It can be about moving a story on, putting the facts unearthed by another organisation into perspective - and under scrutiny.   This weekend, the BBC's Sunday Politics did not originate the story of a potential £8 million bonus package for the RBS Chief Executive Steven Hester - but it was able to put the Sunday Times findings to a cabinet minister and press him as to whether such a deal would be acceptable.   That still counts as original journalism.

Similarly, as the most trusted and widely used source of news, broadcast outlets are well positioned to present stories in an accessible and engaging way for the widest audience.   Last year, ITV Anglia ran an extended feature on the planned NHS reforms, hinged on the fact that the new commissioning groups were being trialled in the region.   Anglia Television journalists were not the first to uncover the potential pitfalls and controversies of the reforms - but they did highlight and explain them to an audience which might otherwise have turned the page when seeing the issue reported in the press.   Original journalism.

Of course, broadcast journalists do still get traditional exclusives.   In the top tier of the hierarchy of news, broadcasters will often find stories come to them first.   In 2005, the preliminary findings of the inquiry into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground were leaked to ITV News, which handed them a powerful exclusive on one of the biggest stories of the year.   Meanwhile, broadcast journalists routinely prove just as capable of cultivating their own sources as their print counterparts.   Last year's Newsnight investigation into alleged corruption in boxing was an example of what many would regard as traditional original journalism - the direct reporting, rather than the re-reporting, of a story.   So while broadcasters must guard against the worst forms of churnalism, maybe their originating capacity is sufficient that the odd local radio or regional TV story 'sourced' from the previous day's papers can be forgiven.

Perhaps in this multi-platform world, it is not surprising that traditional news outlets are also beginning to collaborate with each other, for their mutual benefit.   Channel 4 News has worked closely with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on several stories and ITN and the BBC have both partnered Guardian Films.   Competition is a healthy aspect of the profession, both in broadcast and print, but as traditional outlets face new challenges, co-operation might need to be more readily embraced.      

The apparent surprise in some quarters that the BBC occasionally uses private investigators (as revealed last week at the Leveson Inquiry) is perhaps indicative of a perception of the level at which broadcast journalism operates.   There seems to be a tacit assumption that it is not the role of the broadcast journalist to dig as deeply as their counterparts in the press.   Yet while broadcast outlets must fulfil their primary obligation to bring the news that matters to the masses, they should never lose sight of the scoop.   

So as well as telling a good story, broadcasters should always be trying to find one, too.

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.