The downward slide of local government advertising spend
It’s only one council (Manchester) but the direction of travel is clear.
Figures revealed under the Freedom of Information Act show the extent of the drop in council spending on advertising in newspapers over the past three years.
The data shows;
* Trinity Mirror newspapers (MEN and associated weeklies) saw a less steep drop in revenue than the national press and took the lion’s share of the spend with £581,965.81 in 2009/10.
* Just two areas of advertising saw increased budgets over the period – outdoor advertising (billboards etc.) almost doubled from £65,096.04 in 2007/8 to £128, 427.33 in 2009/10 and digital advertising got a budget of £4,655 in the last year after previously having none.
* Online only recruitment advertising dropped to zero in 2009/10.
The full data set for this visualisation of advertising spend in £ is available here.
The figures were obtained by campaigner Zahid Hussain who is seeking to establish how decisions on advertising are made by the council. He has since submitted a further request for information .
Council coverage in local newspapers: Update
The project I started in an attempt to benchmark the current state of play for the reporting of local councils has been running for a few months now, so it seemed timely to give an update.
I decided to look at this issue, using the HelpMeInvestigate tools, following the furore around this issue last year, and especially in response the vociferous comments on Roy Greenslade’s blog where readers were claiming their local papers didn’t carry out this type of bread-and-butter reporting any more.
It didn’t reflect my experience of working on regional and local papers, but I wanted to find out more by involving people from different parts of the country to widen pool of knowledge.
Sadly, the results so far don’t show a very healthy situation at those newspapers which have been analysed, with many seemingly pushing out local authority press releases or inserting the ‘usual suspect’ councillor quotes into stories which originate elsewhere.
Not all of the 31 people who’ve signed up to take part in this project have come to their conclusions yet, so perhaps it’s early days (or I’m an optimist!) but here’s the story so far with the first ten results submitted;
In alphabetical order and with a quote which I felt summed up what were often long, thoughtful posts from the participants;
- It seemed that the investigation at The Banbury Cake found it hard to find much news of any type, never mind council news. Perhaps a worthy subject for a different kind of case study for having quite so much advertising in this climate! “News coverage is by no means extensive, and although within the small space given to news, there are some council stories, they are either adapted from other group titles, or appear to be taken from press releases (not necessarily council press releases, but from other organisations who may have been involved with a council-run or funded scheme).
- Birmingham Post, Mail and Sunday Mercury proved to be a mixed bag. The weekly Sunday paper didn’t prove to carry much council coverage (Just one story) although that’s perhaps not too surprising given it’s off-diary raison d’etre. In general, Paul Bradshaw’s initial impressions included; “There is actually a reasonable amount of the news ‘hole’ that refers to the council in some way, however, almost none of the coverage is direct reportage, or clearly comes out of a council meeting or report” although this weekend he analysed a further two editions of the Mail and noted one 12 page edition with no council stories present.
- The Cotswold Journal appeared to be suffering from the pressures of having a large geographic area and a small staff when the coverage was analysed leading to the conclusion; “Hence a reliance on press releases or short, less detailed, stories. Where there are longer stories, human interest seems to be a factor – profiles are popular. Often, the council perspective seems to be a last minute insertion or an extra quote, rather than being the nub of the story.”
- I looked at the Darlington and Stockton Times and found it to be rude health as far as local council coverage goes. Being a regular reader, I can conclude that council coverage and council stories regularly make the big stories – often to the annoyance of the local authorities involved.
- The Lancashire Evening Post didn’t fare quite so well with little direct council coverage found and a lack of questioning arising in the comments, leading Ed Walker to the conclusion. “Like others I’ve been finding there is little reporting of council meetings, more stories are created from council press releases and then a few quotes from councillors. It’s also not clear when these councillors were saying these quotes, although the councillors title and ward are always attached.”
- The Oxford Times proved to do a lot of local health authority stories and provided a good service in a lot of areas but the analysis found it fell down on the local council: “We were slightly surprised by the findings, as we had been fairly confident that a newspaper of The Oxford Times’ size and status would contain a good amount of council coverage.”
- The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald showed itself to be strong on both the quality and quantity of council reporting with the investigator concluding: “There is a distinct feeling with this edition of the Herald at least, that this local newspaper and its readers recognise the role of local councils and aren’t afraid to write about them.”
- Sussex Express and The Argus were studied over four weeks by journalist Chie Elliot who found results in line with her expectations – about 4% of the content produced being council news (Note:the method of calculation used has provoked further debate, see full posting for more on this). She concludes; “When editors are under pressure to publish stories that sell papers (i.e. gore, crime, deaths, scandals) and move circulation figures upwards, stories about local government decisions, which are not controversial enough to stir a strong response from the reader, are likely to be given lower priority, or, might, at most, end up as a nib (news in brief) in a spare corner of the page.”
- The Wilts and Glocs Standard didn’t impress too much and, although there were quite a few mentions of councils and councillors (press releases?), the whole package lead the journalist scrutinising it to conclude: “There is little evidence, as far as I can see, of monitoring council meetings or writing more in-depth pieces about local politics.”
- The Whitney Gazette likewise appeared to be suffering from staff shortages as far as the journalist assessing it could tell, sadly concluding: “We did think that there might be a higher level of WODC (the local council) coverage in the paper, as the district council is based in Witney itself, and is a major employer in the town. But the Witney office is only open for fairly limited hours, and presumably there aren’t the staff in Oxford available to trek out to cover district council meetings.”
Outside of the work on HelpMeInvestigate, local democracy and access to that information continues to be under the newspaper spotlight in the north west.
- In Merseyside, where Trinity Mirror and the Press Association are working towards a trial of a public reporting initiative, Alison Gow and Emily Pennink carried out a similar survey of titles. You can read their findings here.
- In Manchester, MEN Media pledged to provide live council reporting via reporters using Cover it Live from all ten councils on its patch in 2010.
And away from the mainstream media organisations, the push to open more data and democratise town halls continues apace in towns and cities up and down the UK, so it looks as if the reporting of local decision-making will continue to be a hot issue in 2010.
If you want to join this HMI project, sign up here. If you’ve any news about the reporting of local authorities please feel free to share it in the comments below or contact me direct, sarah@foodiesarah.com.
#TedXlp Liverpool’s ‘social journalism’ demonstrated at tech conference
Herbert Kim gets TedX North started
“With social journalism, the more noise the better,” said the final speaker wrapping up at the first TED X North event in Liverpool yesterday.
Completing a talk, ‘Networked news; the rise of social newsgathering’, the Liverpool Post and Echo’s executive editor of digital, Alison Gow demonstrated how local newspaper reporters were facing up to the challenges, and opportunities, that social media platforms presented.
Using a case study involving a local news story about a crane collapse which had, in part, been covered by the newspaper’s reporters finding and sharing updates on Twitter and Flickr, she said journalists now had to “give back and engage with online communities” before predicting a future which would entail “fewer papers with fewer people doing more in depth investigative journalism”.
(See more commentary from this talk on my FriendFeed here.)
It seemed a fitting end to an event conceived around an offline-online-offline conference – an independently organised series of events across the north of England which involves screenings of online videos filmed originally at the TED conferences.
A heady mix of journalists, tech entrepreneurs, artists, engineers and educators packed into a darkened auditorium in the city’s ICDC To see the films and also to hear the live speakers.
As one of those involved in bringing the TED material to the new venues, Herbert Kim admitted the idea of inviting a group of people to get together to view a film they could just as easily watch at home had been a step into the unknown – see the video for more on this.
Attendees also heard from;
* Microsoft’s Steve Clayton, who showed the audience some of the projects his company is working on including photosynth.net which, among other zoomable features, enables the creation of panoramic photos generated from a bundle of individual snaps and the Surface interactive table top which was available to try out at the venue.
* Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Tinker.it! who is inspired to move away what she identified as a ‘black box’ culture of expertise to innovations where users can see under the bonnet and feel enabled to get their hands dirty as in this example.
The film clips viewed included this criticism of the education system from Sir Ken Robinson and this delightful film experiment with marshmallows which the audience were also asked to participate in – predictably unsuccessfully!
The Ted X North events now move to TEDxLeeds – 10th September, TEDxSheffield – 16th September TEDxNewcastle – 30th September and finally TEDxManchester – 2nd October.
What did you think of the event? Will you be attending the next one? Let me know below.
* The Liverpool Post’s report on the event can be seen here.
Journalists, drunkeness, videos and, oh yeah, readers
A couple of events this week have led me to ponder on the current role of the journalist – firstly I’ve been getting down to the preparation reading for the upcoming New media: Old news debate at Goldsmith’s College in London and secondly, that video.
I barely need to link to it, you’ll already know what I’m talking about unless you’ve been offline for the week. The sight of a very drunk regional hack telling the world how he “cuts and pastes” from the BBC while on an assignment to cover the history-making American election made its way into every newsroom in the country this week after being unearthed by MarkMedia.
One of the most interesting aspects has been the different responses from other journalists. The cringing hilarity it first prompts soon giving way to a range of reactions varying from “well we’ve all done it” to “he’ll never work again”.
Public reaction on youTube is similarly split – some felt the interviewer had taken advantage of the situation, others that his behaviour was really beyond the pale.
Responses tend to lurch from “what a boy, he sticks it to his cold corporate bosses” to “outrageous behaviour which brings journalism into serious disrepute”
But the “R” word is not much in evidence (only one comment I’ve seen so far on One Man and his Blog makes this point).
What about the readers?
All the reaction has centered on whether the reporter was joking or not and/or his bosses’ reaction. The third party in all this seems to have been forgotten.
Those Brummie readers wanted a trusted, personal experience and, although I have no idea how good, bad or indifferent the copy he filed was, it would seem on the video evidence alone that this wasn’t the reporter’s primary concern.
( I see that his bosses have now publically stated no plagarism took place).
Even the apology clip made the day after fails to mention the readers.
What happened to journalists being the eyes and ears for people who aren’t able to be present – the public?
Or is it the case that bloggers have now taken on that role?
Perhaps because they are so much more in touch with their users, bloggers are far less likely to minimise the importance of their audience and feel more of a duty to provide a service.
And of course it’s a lot easier for the audience to hold a blogger to account, to question and to criticise.
Had Adam Smith – aka Steve Zacharanda – had to face an interactive audience whose reactions impacted on his standing in the community, I’m guessing his approach to the coverage would have been significantly different.
In the end, the audience that can bite back was thrust upon Adam by the posting of the video clip. It remains to be seen whether he will come out of this as a hapless hero with his Facebook campaigners rallying behind him, or whether he’ll become another casualty of old-school journalism not getting to grips with the nature of a media landscape which is forever changed.
Update to snapshot of UK local newspaper activity
This is the first post from yesterday’s DEN meeting at UCLAN. As always, it was a stimulating afternoon and evening giving all of us regional online types plenty to think about and the expected controversial moment.
Below is a list of some of the regional activity going on at the moment which in essence serves to update the slideshow I produced way back in May – just without the slides.
I will update this blog soon with a post about the legal briefing and another about the Journalism Leader’s Forum panel which raised plenty of good points particularly about the role (or possible lack of role) for news in successful online communities.
The buzz at the moment is inevitably community and interaction with a strong push on hyperlocal offerings achieved through geo-tagging.
Trinity seem to be storming ahead in these areas with a raft of initiatives including;
* Fantastic live blog across titles to provide truly interactive coverage of the banking crisis. Love the way it just takes the issue to the community in such a medium-friendly way. Sticky stuff.
* Liverpool now geo-tagging all news content in order to offer users hyperlocal content option navigated by a map. We heard that it’s done by subs manually adding postcodes to every story. At the moment they have a limitation of one location per story but will soon do multiples. This is being rolled out across the group. Archant also understoon to be doing the same.
Outside of Trinity;
* Carlisle has launched a series of hyperlocal community blogs including http://www.aspatrialocal.co.ukand www.maryportlocal.co.uk. To see the full range, click on an article and navigate links on the right-hand side of the page.
Snapshot of UK local newspaper activity
There is an update to this following the DEN October meeting, here.
Addition, May 26. The slideshow has now been updated to include a few GMG initiatives.
The presentation is finally out of its wraps having been displayed yesterday. My brief was, well, brief. What local newspapers are doing. The snapshot of that activity is here for you to share, use, add to, comment upon or otherwise consume.
Those present were certainly impressed by the amount of imaginative projects going on in newspapers around the country.
More case studies are always appreciated so I will keep it going as a work in progress. ( Simon Waldman did correctly spot a bit of northern bias so more experiences from the south of the country most welcome! )
I’d also be interested to hear from journos at any other newspaper groups as to whether they recognise the challenges I identified – reaching audiences/advertisers, maintaining relevance, turning print staff onto digital opportunities and helping people – as their challenges. Are there others I should have included?
Thanks to everyone who has helped (intentionally or otherwise) to build this picture so far. There’s one glaring omission of course – all the GMG regional activity across Greater Manchester and Surrey & Berkshire.
My audience yesterday obviously already knew all about those projects but I will endeavour to add some details in at some point in case anyone else finds the need to do a presentation like this and wants it as a case study.
But for now, over to you.
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