The decline in local news reporting

The_Lizards_Jumpers

Well-known member
I know this board is particularly critical of what passes for reporting in the Gazette these days, and rightly so. However I think this article in HertsLive (I assume the equivalent of GazetteLive) is as bad as anything Vickers and his gang have come up with.

Talks about celebrities and mentions the likes of Carla Humphrey , Jessica Jensen, Polly Marchant and Samatha Maria (you may have to use Google for all of them - I did). I counted one real "celebrity" in the entire article, Dave Davies from The Kinks.

https://www.hertfordshiremercury.co...-hertfordshire-celebrities-love-visit-3419864
 
A very insightful piece of work providing essential guidance on fine dining in the Hertfordshire area.
 
Hertfordshire Mercury said:
Tom (of McFly) and his wife Giovanna Fletcher have been before and former Made in Chelsea star Louise Thompson has as well.

I won't lie, I'm incredibly jealous.
:D
 
All started to go down hill in 1979 when The Gazette lost it’s highly rated junior reporter :cool:
 
Realistically all these papers cant afford to do proper journalism anymore because no-one is buying them. Just like news websites, they've rapidly learned that what gets people clicking is clickbait titles that don't giveaway the article reveal like "New Store set to open at Teesside Park" - people will click it out of interest but if you put "Charity shop becomes latest Teesside Park store to open", you can guarantee less people will click it because they've already revealed the story. Buzzfeed capitalised on this massively and everyone basically had to follow suit.

Wouldn't be surprised if the gazette stopped doing it's print edition soon, only 12000 copies on average are sold of each issue.For context in 2013 they sold 35000, in 2012 38,000. The company that tracks circulation shows a 10% fall this year during lockdown on the same period to last year. Do they even still have the rough as you like sellers in town like they used to with the blue crates? Used to be you'd get several editions during the day with updated headlines, and I remember the jobs section used to be the go-to place and used to have loads in, likewise the property sales and for sale section. Nowadays everything is online so a lot of the needs that the paper used to fulfil just aren't there anymore. Journalism suffers as a result and as Reach owns many of these regional papers, they can crossover news stories easily which is why we get so many stories on the outskirts of teesside, and why we always have the view from the opposition type stories when we play a team, and theres only so many times you can push out a "remember when" edition.

Lot of the stories get recycled like clockwork, and you can guarantee they will have metrics that shows which articles are the most popular and diarise rehashing them regularly (the most popular seems to be any kind of "here's 20 photos between from a 35 year period in <random venue>- are you in one of them?" as they wheel them out constantly.
 
Realistically all these papers cant afford to do proper journalism anymore because no-one is buying them. Just like news websites, they've rapidly learned that what gets people clicking is clickbait titles that don't giveaway the article reveal like "New Store set to open at Teesside Park" - people will click it out of interest but if you put "Charity shop becomes latest Teesside Park store to open", you can guarantee less people will click it because they've already revealed the story. Buzzfeed capitalised on this massively and everyone basically had to follow suit.

Wouldn't be surprised if the gazette stopped doing it's print edition soon, only 12000 copies on average are sold of each issue.For context in 2013 they sold 35000, in 2012 38,000. The company that tracks circulation shows a 10% fall this year during lockdown on the same period to last year. Do they even still have the rough as you like sellers in town like they used to with the blue crates? Used to be you'd get several editions during the day with updated headlines, and I remember the jobs section used to be the go-to place and used to have loads in, likewise the property sales and for sale section. Nowadays everything is online so a lot of the needs that the paper used to fulfil just aren't there anymore. Journalism suffers as a result and as Reach owns many of these regional papers, they can crossover news stories easily which is why we get so many stories on the outskirts of teesside, and why we always have the view from the opposition type stories when we play a team, and theres only so many times you can push out a "remember when" edition.

Lot of the stories get recycled like clockwork, and you can guarantee they will have metrics that shows which articles are the most popular and diarise rehashing them regularly (the most popular seems to be any kind of "here's 20 photos between from a 35 year period in <random venue>- are you in one of them?" as they wheel them out constantly.

Yep, I realize where the problems stem from I just thought that this was a particularly bad version of that clickbait / trawling social media you describe.

Turns out googling some of the "celebrities" that one is actually a porn star who was a body double in game of Thrones - I'm not sure how much more low rent you can get than that ?
 
Take a look at the Gazette website, it's even worse. Stories from Portsmouth, Manchester, Huddersfield, Rotherham and Liverpool. loads of articles showing photographs of people in pubs/nightclubs/schools from 10, 20 and 30 years ago asking if there's anybody you recognise in them - nice and cheap clickbait, no expensive reporter to pay. Absolute rubbish.
 
I cant stand the adverts either - I see loads that say ***** like "People born between 1941 & 1979 with no life insurance are in for a great surprise!" with a photo of some old bloke or woman holding up their driving licence, and the photo has been sharpened within an inch of its life.

Or when they put a 5 second long video up and it tries to play a 25 second long advert first.
 
As stated, people don't seem to value intellectual property anymore. Everyone complains about the gazette but I bet few subscribe to it.
 
As stated, people don't seem to value intellectual property anymore. Everyone complains about the gazette but I bet few subscribe to it.

Why would you pay to subscribe to it when anything of note (which is very little) is online anyway? You’re still paying for it in adverts and data mining, you’re just not paying an up-front price.

From the figures I looked at gazette had about 2000 subscribers. I’m surprised it’s even that many
 
As stated, people don't seem to value intellectual property anymore. Everyone complains about the gazette but I bet few subscribe to it.


"She couldn't understand why everyone was cheering"

"The crew just kept on filming"

"Anyone born before 1965 should read this"

"Undertakers are furious that people are finding out about this"


Subscribe to a paper full of articles like that? You must be joking. It's like Titbits magazine from the 1960s.
 
It's become a self perpetuating decline. Won't get better until they get more money.... Etc we'll be sad when it goes.
Local newspapers have the potential to do alot of good
 
It's become a self perpetuating decline. Won't get better until they get more money.... Etc we'll be sad when it goes.
Local newspapers have the potential to do alot of good

imo gazette made their own bed which is why numbers have steadily declined. It’s also part changing needs though - as I said earlier people would buy it regularly for the house section, buy and sell, job ads and so on, but all of those are served by better online solutions now which the gazette could have pioneered but instead stuck to the print model too long, so their user base fell away just like the Teesside Times and Herald and Post did before being absorbed into the standard gazette.

teessidelive will make money, as it’s cheap to produce, but dwindling figures for the gazette print will soon finish that off.
 
Is it even really local reporting? Its a huge company, all under one brand, with some localised reporting. People saying it'll be sad when it goes but surely its already gone? Its just been packaged up to look a bit like something we used to have?
 
Is it even really local reporting? Its a huge company, all under one brand, with some localised reporting. People saying it'll be sad when it goes but surely its already gone? Its just been packaged up to look a bit like something we used to have?
Yes, done well local journalism has an important role.
 
Back
Top