Should local papers have led on Jackson's death?

The sight of regional papers splashing on national and international news always generates a fair amount of debate among journalists. For many, who see localness as our unique selling point, following the national news agenda is something that goes against the grain.

I recall an incident on one of my old papers a few years back when a regional political splash got knocked-off the front page by the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was a hugely controversial decision in the newsroom, but the toppling of that bronze statue in Baghdad in 2003 was one of the defining images of the decade, and it was always going to be a hard call to put something else on the front that day.

Over the past few days, the debate has been put into fresh perspective by the regionals' coverage of the death of Michael Jackson. As we reported on HoldtheFrontPage last Friday, many regional dailies made the decision to splash with the late-breaking story in the knowledge that early editions of the nationals alongside them on the news-stands had missed it.

But some HTFP readers were predictably less-than-impressed. One visitor to the site commented tartly: "Has is not occurred to anyone else that Michael Jackson is from Indiana - not Derby, Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester or Dorset."

The best piece I have so far read about this perennial dilemma for regional editors has come from the Leicester Mercury's Keith Perch. This is what he wrote on his blog:

At the Leicester Mercury, we see ourselves as a local newspaper. We report on Leicester and Leicestershire and rarely stray beyond these boundaries other than to put a local angle on to national or international events. But sometimes, things happen that are just so big that it is impossible to ignore them.

Princess Diana's death, the country going to war, 9/11, the London tube bombings, Lockerbie, the Hungerford and Dunblane shootings - these are all examples of things which are not local, but which are so enormous in terms of public conscientiousness and reaction, that I believe a newspaper not leading on them looks odd.

I don't think Michael Jackson's death comes quite into the same category despite the level of reaction, but, nevertheless, we took the decision late on Thursday evening to lead the paper on the night's events. Why was that? It was at least in part because it happened so late that I thought that it might miss the early editions of the national newspapers, but it was also because I felt that it was a big enough story to mean that it would be the only thing people were talking about the next day.

Was that the right decision? I don't know. Many other regional papers disagreed and didn't change up and it's too early to see what effect it had on our sales figures. However, I would say that when I saw the bills in the streets later in the day, I felt the decision was right.

I think Keith puts his finger on the issue here when he says that not leading on stories as big as the death of Jackson "looks odd." No doubt my old boss felt the same about the fall of Saddam.

Yes, localness is the USP of the regional press - but in this global village we now inhabit, there are times when international = local and local = parochial.

Is the NUJ guilty of scaremongering?

Sometimes the decision whether or not to publish a story on HoldtheFrontPage is not necessarily a straightforward one. One such instance was yesterday's press release from the National Union of Journalists claiming that publisher Trinity Mirror plans to axe eight weekly titles in the Midlands and turn the Birmingham Post into a weekly or bi-weekly publication.

If the story is true, a number of journalists' jobs will inevitably be lost, and there is an argument for saying that the NUJ should have kept quiet about this until the people affected had been informed in the usual way.

That said, once it had put out a public statement on the issue, not just to HTFP but to all our competitor media news sites, it became very hard for us to ignore the story.

It generated an interesting debate in the comments section. While most readers thought the NUJ was simply doing its job, a significant minority thought the union had acted irresponsibly, with one accusing it of having "put the fear of God up people."

The bear facts

Earlier this week, HTFP featured the preliminary results of a survey being carried out by a postgraduate student into the changing nature of press releases. Its key finding was that journalists regard most of the PR material they get sent as irrelevant, and that this has got worse since the invention of email.

A typical example arrived in my inbox yesterday morning from a group calling itself Release The Bears. It informed us that a 'brown bear' has been released into the wild at a secret woodland location to highlight the group's campaign to reintroduce the long-extinct British bear into the English countryside.

If this were true it might even have been newsworthy, though perhaps not for HTFP readers. Alas, the 'brown bear' in question turned out to be a man dressed in a bear suit, who will spend the next week living in a cave and eating only berries, roots, sprouts and fungi.

Given that real wild bears would be unlikely to discover the merits of vegetarianism if reintroduced into the UK, is this possibly the most pointless PR stunt of the year so far?

Snakes and ladders

An interesting little parable on the ups and downs of football and journalism comes from Lee Ryder, sports writer and author of blogonthetyne.co.uk.

A few years back Lee spotted an ad on HTFP for a sports reporter at the Scunthorpe Telegraph. It gave him his first break into journalism.

Back then 'Scunny' were in the basement division while Newcastle United were taking on Juventus in the Champions League.

Next season, the two clubs will be playing eachother in the Championship, and Lee will be going back to Glanford Park as the chief sports writer of Newcastle's Evening Chronicle.

Not-so-hot news from Cambridge

The weekly email bulletin from the Newspaper Society provides an invaluable guide to what our leading regional press industry body is up to, and as such is a regular source of stories for HTFP and other media publications.

But just occasionally, the voice of Britain's local media has been found to be a little off the pace.

This morning's bulletin contained a report on the opening of Iliffe News and Media's new(ish) £9.5m printing facility near Cambridge by Prince Edward.

Sorry to say, but this was carried on HoldtheFrontPage not one, not two, but a full three months ago!

Cards on the table time for would-be merger kings

So, what to make of the government's Digital Britain report published yesterday, and in particular its recommendations about whether the current newspaper merger regime should be relaxed?

Well, at first glance, the government appears to have managed the considerable feat of pleasing both Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey, who had argued for relaxation of the rules in order to allow greater industry consolidation, and NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear, who had argued precisely the opposite.

Mr Dear sees the government's refusal to change the existing law as evidence that it is not going to allow what he calls "media plurality" to be undermined.

But Ms Bailey on the other hand says that legislation is not really the issue, and that the decision to allow communications watchdog Ofcom a bigger role in assessing merger proposals is a "step in the right direction."

So who's right in their interpretation? Well, as our main report on HTFP yesterday may have indicated, we're going with Bailey on this one.

Like many government reports - and as an ex-lobby hack I've read a fair few in my time - this is one where you really have to read the small print rather than simply reading the headline.

By ruling out a change in the law, the government is not saying no to further regional press consolidation, it is merely saying that the existing merger regime is sufficiently flexible to deal with any such proposals.

The clue was in the paragraph that read "there may be some lessons that could be learned from a detailed inquiry into a specific merger or transaction involving the local and regional press." This seemed to me to be tantamount to an invitation to publishers to bring forward a specific proposal which could then be used as a test-case.

There has been intense speculation, mainly in Sunday newspapers, that the big regional press publishers are set to engage in a round of asset-swapping to enable them to achieve greater geographical consolidation.

Without going into details, some of the scenarios that have been outlined seem literally incredible to me, but stranger things have happened.

I think what the government is effectively saying to the regional press in this report is: bring forward your merger proposals, and we'll show you that we're quite capable of dealing with them in a way that recognises present-day market realities.

In other words, the ball is now firmly in the industry's court.

Will 650 local newspapers really close by 2014?

Media analyst Claire Enders made a bit of splash at today's culture, media and sport committee hearing in the Commons by predicting that half the UK's 1,300 local papers would close over the next five years.

Ms Enders claimed that "many titles" were already losing money and were only being kept alive by the "good graces" of their publishers.

Although we at HTFP don't in any way underestimate the scale of the difficulties facing the regional press, I would certainly be interested to hear what evidence she has for this claim.

It hardly seems credible to me that regional publishers would keep loss-making titles going, and her comments don't really tally with recent half-yearly results showing most leading groups are still profitable, albeit at much lower margins than was once the case.

Queen snubs regional press

The twice-yearly honours lists published on the Queen's birthday and New Year's Eve can usually be relied upon to yield a good story for HTFP, with regional press figures regularly featuring among the recipients.

In the New Year's Honours List two years ago the Press Association's former northern editor Peter Beal was awarded an MBE while 12 months later Shrewsbury Chronicle editor John Butterworth was awarded the same honour.

Other notable recent winners include CN Group chief executive Robin Burgess who received an OBE and Press Association executive chairman Paul Potts who was awarded a CBE.

All four gentlemen received their honours for their services to the practice of journalism and in the case of John and Robin, their services to the wider community.

But this year's Queen's Birthday Honours list, announced today, is a rather different kettle of fish. The local and national press appears to have been largely ignored.

In the list we found the odd media type - former managing editor of Budapest Sun Robin Marshall and broadcaster and half-time microphone abuser Delia Smith - but no-one from local or regional newspapers.

Is it simply the case that local and regional press editors and MDs have too much on their plate at the moment to bother about getting themselves nominated for honours?

Or is it that, these days, the industry just doesn't have enough friends in high places?

Wrong Lewis

Northern Echo editor Peter Barron announces on his blog the arrival of new columnist Martin Lewis, who has recently made a name for himself dispensing money-saving tips on GMTV.

I have to confess I initially thought he meant Martyn Lewis, the ex-BBC newsreader who fought back the tears as Tony Blair delivered his famous "People's Princess" soundbite at the death of Diana, and sometime author of that ground-breaking journalistic tome, Cats in the News.

Ex Cabinet ministers tell all to MEN

One of the most enduring frustrations during my time as a regional lobby journalist was the way in which the New Labour spin machine systematically cut the regional press out of the loop when it came to the dissemination of government information, doutbless aware that we tended to be rather less biddable than our national counterparts.

So nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see a regional political reporter scooping the nationals to the big political stories.

David Ottewell of the Manchester Evening News is one of the best young political hacks in the business and he has now beaten the nats two days on the trot, securing the first exclusive interviews with both James Purnell and Hazel Blears since their Cabinet resignations.

The MEN filmed the Blears interview for its sister TV station, Channel M, and then syndicated it to the BBC and Sky News where the story has been running for most of the day. All power to your elbow, David.

Web-first or print-first?

Welcome to The Journalism Hub...and what better subject to kick-off with than the good old print vs online debate.

It is fair to say opinion within the industry on the question of whether newspapers should "give away" their content online for free rather than "force" people to buy the print edition to find out what's happening locally has moved pretty much full circle over the past decade.

I recall being at a gathering a few years back at which one regional newspaper editor declared that stories would be uploaded to the web "over [his] dead body." It got the biggest cheer of the day.

Nowadays, though, websites are seen effectively as editions of the paper, with most breaking news going straight online - although it remains the case that no-one has yet found a surefire way of making money from it.

The debate was highlighted this week in a blog post by Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson on his his decision to go print-first with an exclusive letter from footballer Gareth Barry explaining his reasons for leaving Aston Villa for Manchester City.

Steve revealed that his decision to delay uploading the letter to the paper's website for half a day had generated an extra 4,000 in sales and, confident that this would provoke the kind of debate we love to see on the site, we made it our top story on HoldtheFrontPage today.

For me, one of the great things about HTFP is the fact that it is, increasingly, the forum for discussion about issues facing the industry, and our readers did not disappoint with some fairly trenchant views expressed.

One poster calling themselves 'Edna' wrote: "You mean to say that giving something away for nothing stops people from paying for it...? Astonishing. If only journalists had been saying this for years, I'm sure editors and MDs would have listened."

Steve Dyson, though, had the last laugh on this occasion. As he revealed in a follow-up post on his blog today, he not only got a 4,000 + sales lift from the move, he also got an extra 30,000 web hits - the best of both worlds!

For me, the lesson from that is surely that print vs online is a false opposition. The truth is both have a vital part to play in the future of our industry.