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15 July 2009 : Column 104WH—continued
Local and Regional Newspapers
2.30 pm
Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Lady Winterton. I am grateful for this opportunity to raise the plight of local and regional newspapers in a Welsh, if not Ceredigion context, but more generally as well.
The starting point for my interest in the matter was a visit a few months ago to the office of one of our local newspapers, the Cardigan and Tivyside Advertiser, which is an immensely well-respected local weekly paper. I was surprised to find that the total staff complement for the newspaper was just five people, with only two journalists-half of what there were two years ago. The paper covers the town of Cardigan, the lower Teifi valley and north Pembrokeshire-a large geographical area. Sadly, it is now characterised by fewer news stories and more advertising features, or attempts to secure them, and less real news that matters to people, to help retain sales.
The paper faces a downward spiral: sales are hard to win back, and jobs are subsequently put at risk. To use a butchery analogy of trimming the meat, I am afraid that it has been a case not only of trimming the fat; the reality is that the muscle of the newspaper industry is being trimmed fatally.
There is a similar story on a bigger scale with Ceredigion's other weekly newspaper, the Cambrian News, which has a readership of 68,000 people and covers a vast area. There are two editions, although that represents a reduction, covering Ceredigion, Machynlleth and Llanidloes in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), Merioneth, and the Dwyfor towns of Porthmadog, Pwllheli, and Criccieth in the constituency of the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams). Next year, that paper will celebrate its 150th birthday, but it, too, faces the challenge of reduced advertising and the loss of editions, jobs and its capacity to hold local politicians and public agencies to account. That picture is replicated across the United Kingdom.
I fear that a diminished local press diminishes the principles of community and democracy. My local journalists tell me that it is simply impossible for them to attend, in the way that they used to, sufficient meetings of community and town councils, the county council cabinet or its planning and scrutiny committees, the community health councils, the local health board or the police authority. Disseminating the work of those bodies has been an essential role of the local press.
Furthermore, more controversially perhaps, the local press is unable to launch detailed investigations. Stories are left untouched, and potential stories are not revealed. In the spirit of this debate, I shall stick to local matters such as the proposed industrial development north of the town of Cardigan, ParcAberporth, which swallowed vast sums of public money but has yet to produce a fraction of the jobs that were promised. Under normal circumstances, that issue would have been pursued by the press, but the press is without the resources to delve, to question elected Members and to challenge our role here. Stories are missed and local issues are not raised or aired. That is mitigated only in part by a vociferous
letters page, to which I have no doubt we have all been subjected in the past. A local press covering issues within the locality that the nationals would not touch is an essential part of our democratic process.
I am flattered that so many hon. Members have come to this debate. They represent diverse parts of the country. As someone who represents a scattered rural constituency with 174 villages, I believe that the community role of newspapers is critical. Pictures of local people enjoying themselves at the Borth carnival or the winners of the Aberystwyth and district agricultural show, reports from the women's institute, the local sports page, items about Master Evans being picked for the under-11s or Mr. and Mrs. Davies's golden wedding anniversary might be crass parish-pump stuff to some people, but it is important, cohesive community information.
Both our local papers have served the Welsh and English-speaking communities with distinction. The Welsh medium articles from local volunteer correspondents are important. They cover significant cultural events: the Urdd, local eisteddfodau and cymanfa ganu-the singing festivals-and Dydd Dewi Sant, or Saint David's day. It is important that pre-eminence is given to the Welsh language in Ceredigion. But there are also the big campaigning issues.
The Tivysidepromoted the restoration of Cardigan castle, which was the scene of Wales's first eisteddfod, and the campaign for a new hospital. Cambrian News campaigned against compulsory purchase orders in Aberystwyth town centre, for retaining key services and meals on wheels and against industrial scallop dredging in our precious Cardigan bay. Local newspapers galvanise opinion, sometimes working more effectively as campaigners than we do. Sometimes they work in concert with politicians, sometimes against, but they promote community interest, action and engagement. They are still a cherished local resource and are successful because they are local to people.
Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire) (LD): My hon. Friend makes a prescient observation on campaigning. Is he aware of the fact that, as a direct result of the work of the County Times, which is surely one of the finest newspapers in the western world, I submitted a petition regarding concerns about wind farm transportation through my constituency, and that the County Times, working with politicians in the Welshpool area, was directly responsible for raising the issue, exactly as my hon. Friend rightly says?
Mark Williams: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that observation. I emphasise the case that politicians work in concert with their local newspapers, and I note that County Times journalists have been spotted in these parts today. No doubt, they are lurking somewhere in the Gallery.
Local news for local communities is important, but the newspapers are struggling because of the range of news media that is available to people. That was brought to our attention in the Scottish context by the Scottish Affairs Committee's recent report, and also in Wales by the Welsh Assembly's broadcasting sub-committee, which discussed the challenges resulting from the increasingly diverse ways in which members of the public can access news and current affairs.
I should like to discuss some of the problems: first, the undeniable decline in advertising revenue and the effects of the recession, although there were the seeds of decline even before the latest recession. Between 2007 and 2008, advertising in newspapers fell by 12 per cent., according to the Advertising Association. Advertising across the board dropped by 3.9 per cent., yet advertising on the internet increased by 17 per cent. Recently, Gannett, the US-based parent company of Newsquest, revealed a 45 per cent. fall in advertising year on year, between January and March 2009, with the resultant loss of 11 local newspapers in north-west England. I shall not stray further into England, but these messages need to be heeded across the UK.
Regional publications have been restructured in the light of the recession. In January, Trinity Mirror merged Media Wales with its north-west and north Wales divisions. Seventy-eight jobs were lost, including 10 in Wales-again, there is a loss of local titles and local offices. The growing characteristic of such restructuring is centralisation, with more journalists working from one location. The journalists for the Western Mail, the South Wales Echo and Wales on Sunday are now based in one centralised newsroom in Cardiff. Twenty years ago, the tentacles of the Western Mail reached out with correspondents right across the length and breadth of Wales. We had a correspondent in my town of Aberystwyth, but that time is long since gone.
The news groups will rightly assert that, beyond the sentimentality of local titles, they are businesses and must fit in with models of profitability, but there is an added, crucial imperative in Wales: a different political culture post-devolution of which the electorate needs to be informed. Regional newspapers therefore are a tool for political and constitutional engagement. And yet one has to look very hard to find news of Welsh politics.
Bob Spink (Castle Point) (Ind): Has the hon. Gentleman considered using his communication allowance-since he is talking about political engagement-in a proper, appropriate way to help his local newspapers and his constituents? For instance, he could take a full-page ad to promote take-up for Warm Front before winter comes around or he could promote the take-up of the pensioners' credit, because two in five of our pensioners do not take it and lose £1,470 as a result. So he could use his communication allowance positively to help his community, and that would not do his local newspapers any harm, either.
Mark Williams: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for those suggestions, some of which I shall take back to Wales with me and some I am using already. For example, adverts for my surgeries appear regularly in the local papers. Those surgeries are costly, but an important principle is involved none the less. I will mention that in connection with local authorities and other public agencies in a little while.
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op):
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Trinity Mirror group, which has taken a hard-nosed attitude towards local newspapers and is about to close nine papers in the midlands, including the Burton Trader, the Ashby Trader
and Echo and the Coalville Echo, which, sadly, ceases publication next week. Can we not develop the point raised by the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink)? Should we not expect local authorities, public agencies and the Government to do far more information take-up advertising in local media that are under threat? Is not the message that must come from today's debate, "Let's do it now, before they disappear."?
Mark Williams: I concur. I will return to that point later. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that this is urgent, because, as he said, local titles are going to the wall now.
The lack of Welsh stories in the national news media is serious for those hon. Members who represent Welsh constituencies and explains why we attach great importance to the nearest things that we have to a national newspaper-The Western Mail in the south of Wales and the Daily Post in the north.
I now come to the point raised by the hon. Members for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) and for Castle Point (Bob Spink) on the emergence of local council publications, as distinct from advertisements in local newspapers. Although those papers contain local news, they are by their nature not independent and are competing with the commercial press, arguably speeding the decline of the local press and thereby reducing scrutiny of local authorities.
Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD): Is my hon. Friend aware that Birmingham city council is not only issuing its own newspaper, but that that paper is carrying advertising, therefore robbing local newspapers, such as TheBirmingham Post, the Birmingham Evening Mail and the Express & Star, of important advertising revenue?
Mark Williams: I shall append to what my hon. Friend said the phrase, "thereby threatening and jeopardising the future of those newspapers." The Local Government Association has asserted that no threat is posed and that three fifths of all council magazines contain no advertising at all or less than 10 per cent.
Paul Flynn (Newport, West) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman is proposing to distort market forces to provide a direct or indirect subsidy to local papers. Local papers are not known for their independent political view; many of them are outrageously biased politically. Is it sensible to ask for public funds before we can impose on local papers the same duty of political balance that we insist on from the broadcasting media?
Mark Williams: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that observation. I will take a generalist view in the debate, but I will assert that we stand to lose rather more from the decimation of the local newspaper industry as we know it.
Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con):
I have some sympathy with the point made by the hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn). I have been in touch with a number of my local newspapers, many of which cover not just Westminster but other central London boroughs, and the message that has come through loud and clear is that they worry intensely about council-run newspapers effectively stepping in
their way. I can see that that is quite an issue. But is not the independence that the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mark Williams) mentioned largely illusory in many parts of the country, not least because local newspapers rely on local authority advertising, particularly recruitment advertising? Is not that one reason why there is less independence than in the broadcasting world?
Mark Williams: That point was mentioned in the report by the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, which hon. Members will have read.
Local councils should be encouraged to take out longer advertising contracts, to run the campaigns that were mentioned earlier and to sponsor local party initiatives. There are precedents for that in Wales, with county councils sponsoring the Papur Bro-the network of Welsh language community newspapers across much of Wales. I encourage hon. Members to look at the Scottish Affairs Committee report and the one from Wales, which urges the Assembly to review its job-advertising strategy.
I take hon. Members' points about the independence of newspapers, but I also take seriously the threat to their existence, because their absence would ultimately threaten and have a detrimental effect on our democracy.
Mr. Andy Slaughter (Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman has struck a raw nerve on the point about local authorities. Whatever the threat from withholding advertising, the threat from setting up a rival publication is real in many areas. Has the hon. Gentleman seen the LGA brief-a self-serving, disingenuous document-which said that there was no threat whatsoever from local government newspapers, whereas we know that they are parasites and stiflers of local newspapers?
Mark Williams: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that. I had a similar reaction to the hon. Gentleman's on reading the LGA brief, although I will not use the poetic language that he uses. None the less, he makes a strong point about the threat to our local papers.
I want to celebrate the local press. It can be immensely irritating to us, but it undertakes a critical public service. When we talk about the press, as the National Union of Journalists reminds us, we are talking about individuals with mortgages, anxieties about jobs and many of the stresses that have been experienced by some of us, as hon. Members, in recent weeks. We need to talk about support for the journalistic community and upskilling journalistic skills, as our committee in the National Assembly recommended.
I do not want to be dismissed as some kind of luddite. We need to address the perception of daily newspapers publishing yesterday's news tomorrow. That is the challenge. I will continue to campaign for the nearest that we can get to universal broadband across my area. That is not an easy task in rural Wales. I am a great enthusiast for the universal service obligation, with all that it entails, and much of what the "Digital Britain" report contains. According to Ofcom, 90 per cent. of people in our communities consume some form of local media; yet since the 1970s, newspaper circulations have been declining by 2 per cent. per year, and recently, local television and radio audiences have been declining as well. Among recent broadband adopters, 10 per cent.
read fewer local newspapers and one in seven listens to less radio. For me, in the spirit of plurality, it is about choice overall and about choice of media. Many lack that choice, as local newspapers are diminishing.
Mr. Mark Field: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again; he is generous. He has talked about new digital media. Let us be honest and say that we-all hon. Members in this Chamber-are unusual, being relatively middle-aged and big consumers of newspapers. The generation younger than us will barely look at a newspaper at all, and they regard digital media as the focus of attention for particular local stories. Although in central London we have some good online offerings from local newspapers, the big elephant in the room is that they face competition from the BBC, which benefits from a £3.6 billion annual subsidy, building up an impressive, active and interactive media operation. But that is the real problem. The next generation, who will not necessarily consume their newspapers in anything other than a digital form, is now finding that there is no point going online to see what the local newspaper has to say and will find quite effective local news through the BBC online offering, which has the benefit of significant public endorsement and funding.
Mark Williams: On the one hand, I share the hon. Gentleman's optimism about the new technologies, but on the other I am concerned, because we must seek a balance between those two things. I am reticent to say that the younger generation is not interested in local papers, and that is not my experience in my constituency. We must combine new and traditional technologies, and I shall come to that later.
Technological changes have threatened how news is consumed, and the internet is heralded as the natural successor to the printed word with the benefits of immediacy and interaction. All news groups have recognised that, and have reflected it in developing online newspapers. Trinity Mirror reckons that it still receives 90 per cent. of its income from the printed word, but 10 per cent. comes from digital. The balance is shifting, and that presents challenges to news groups, but advertising revenue on the internet is limited.
A critical theme for the industry is the rules on cross-media ownership. The NUJ's evidence to the Welsh Assembly broadcasting sub-committee highlighted the dangers of an homogenised news service, but moved in the direction of relaxing competition laws to alleviate concern about disappearing and vulnerable titles. The recommendations following its investigations have been slightly usurped by recent announcements, but it urged that cross-media rules be relaxed to allow exploration of new partnerships and that there should be accompanying measures to protect the plurality of local media. In a Welsh context, the Assembly said that we should consider means of supporting English language journalism, including the upskilling of journalists to meet the challenges of online technology.
I hope that the Welsh Assembly Government and local authorities throughout Britain will be minded to take a more strategic view of advertising to ensure that relevant titles are not overlooked. Implicit in that is the suggestion that an advertising strategy from local authorities, the Welsh Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, the UK Government and so on must be communicated to the
papers. In a spirit of Celtic solidarity, I commend the conclusions of the Scottish Affairs Committee whose report said that
"under pressure from the current economic climate, diminishing advertising, and the explosion of alternative news and information sources in electronic format, the industry has been forced to dramatically restructure itself, often at great cost to its dedicated and knowledgeable staff."
I could so easily have inserted "Wales" instead of "Scotland" in that text.
It is vital that the Welsh Assembly and UK Governments ensure that the Welsh newspaper industry is not made unviable because of overbearing competition from public sector advertising and that the industry can create sustainable business models through consolidation and mergers, subject to appropriate safeguards, while maintaining high quality, varied and independent journalism that reflects the Welsh identity. One could easily have inserted "Wales" for "Scotland" in that conclusion of the Scottish Affairs Committee report, and indeed I have done just that. It fits the bill perfectly.
More recently, however, we have had the results of the Office of Fair Trading's inquiry that accompanied the "Digital Britain" report, which recognised the problems facing local and regional newspapers and did not go down the route of legislation to change the rules governing media mergers. The Minister is new to his post, but he is mastering his brief. Will he assure me about the extent to which that will satisfy the concerns of some of us who believe that necessary mergers between different media organisations is one way of alleviating the great concern in our communities about the fate of local newspapers?
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