All the vital news: vicar shot, church fete slightly delayed
The editor who interviewed me for my first job as a reporter was a taller, thinner version of Harold Macmillan. He chewed on a matchstick throughout our encounter, only removing it from his mouth to bark out questions.
“Can you drive?” was the first one. I could not.
“That’s no ruddy good, is it? Do you live in the area?” I did not.
“That’s no ruddy good, is it?” I began to wonder if this was quite the career for me. I’d written to 80 editors, but this was only my third interview and it wasn’t going all that well. Perhaps I should have listened to the careers specialist who psychologically tested me and concluded I should become a trading standards officer.
“Tell me,” the editor said, after a while. “Are you a member of the Socialist Workers party?” I had to admit that I was not.
“Ah, well,” he sighed, shaking his head. “That’s something, I suppose. Can you start next Monday?”
These days, I’d be lucky to get three interviews even. The local and regional newspaper business is in crisis. Papers are closing, and hundreds of journalists are losing their jobs. It’s so bad that people are calling for the government to step in and subsidise titles: you know, once they’ve finished bailing out the banks, and then maybe the car industry, and the pubs too.
So local papers will likely have to fend for themselves. Probably just as well - you know what state-sponsored local news would be like. “World praise as Gordon Brown rescues fluffy kitten from tree; ‘Conservatives would have left it there’, says prime minister. Plus the best of this week’s films, reviewed by Mr Jacqui Smith.”
At this point, I would normally say that the market is the answer: poor papers will close, leaving much-needed elbow room for the good ones. But this particular market is more complicated than that.
There are two local papers sold in my village shop. I won’t name them - in this business, you never know when you might need the work. One has the air of a title that has seen better days. It’s old-fashioned and not very well designed, and I have known it to print the same story twice. Every so often, I get to the end of an article and have absolutely no idea what it’s been about.
This paper’s rival is an organ of clear professionalism: well designed, lively and packed with the most detailed information. So it's pretty obvious which one I buy each week. The plodding, old-fashioned one. It’s much more local.
Who else will hold local councils to account? Who else will carry long reports of those vital licensing subcommittee meetings for which the public is undoubtedly clamouring? God knows, I’ve done my share of councils. I once had to be woken up during a meeting of the Greater London council. (Apparently I was snoring.) MPs say we should save local papers because of their democratic importance - but the real reason people buy local papers is less to do with this, and more to do with being nosy.
There’s a small magazine published in our village that carries interviews with residents of long standing (which covers virtually everybody). The subjects appear to be chosen at random, but it’s very useful in a place like this, where you can wave cheerily at somebody every day for 20-odd years without knowing their name. So it was a surprise to learn that a lady down the road was secretary to Lord Carrington at the start of the Falklands crisis.
Not that local news, however well reported, is always such a selling point. Here, for example, is a selection of recent stories from the website of the Hackney Gazette: “Killer caged”; “Woman beater caged”; “Teens caged for carjacking”; “Paedophile cop caged”; “Skunk user found guilty of stabbing teenager”; and - brace yourself for this one - “Tories select candidate”. Would you want to read that week in, week out? And believe me, that’s the sensitive, new Hackney Gazette, a paper which, years ago, ran a report of a rape trial that you didn’t need to read because two sub-headings told the whole story. One said “Cup of tea” and the other said “Intercourse”.
Newspapers that wish to survive will be mind-numbingly, toe-curlingly, eye-poppingly local. And a bit of charm and personality helps too. I always hoped it was true - but suspected it wasn’t - that Aberdeen’s The Press and Journal reported the sinking of the Titanic under the headline: “Aberdeenshire man drowned at sea”. I can at least vouch for the South London Press’s front-page headline after the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer: “Kennington landowner weds”. I offered it to the editor as a joke; he printed it.
A successful local newspaper should also have a certain swagger and self-confidence. For years, the Skibbereen Eagle quietly served readers in its home town in Cork. Then one day it picked a fight with the tsar of Russia over that country’s relations with China. “The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on the emperor of Russia,” the paper thundered. Go ahead and laugh, but look what happened to the emperor of Russia.
I surely won’t be the only person who’ll miss local papers if they go. There’s no better way of getting the measure of a strange town than through a good local reporter. And nobody will be quite as uninterested in news from elsewhere. A colleague at my first paper answered the phone one slow afternoon to hear the following: “I will say this once, and once only. This is the Animal Liberation Army. As a protest at the degrading treatment of animals by the so-called circus, this weekend we will burn down the big top on Putney Common.”
The caller then slammed down the phone, just as my colleague was blurting out the following apology: “I’m very sorry, but we don’t cover Putney.”
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