It only strengthens the view here at Media Scrum that this is the year when the shit hits the fan, and this really is shit. It's shit for the journalists involved, for the regions and towns that are now facing zero local media coverage, and for the people who actually like to know what the hell is going on in their area.
Stuff has promised that nobody is really missing out on local news, because it has things like the Neighbourly social media platform, which is completely fucking useless for finding out how things went down at the local council meeting, and slightly useful for things like finding a local babysitter (provided you can find the relevant information in an ocean of spam).
Shutting down a small paper in an area that doesn't have any radio or TV reporters will inevitably lead to a complete lack of any kind of decent and relevant local news. In an era of information overload, entire communities are facing a news void.
But there is also some hope that this could help spark a revitalisation of truly local news in this country, with plenty of lessons to be learned from the past, and a few that are being taught right now.
One thing that media companies are now learning is that the business model of multi-media conglomerates, comprised of a huge number of titles and mastheads and other assets, doesn't really work out well for anybody. The small fish don't make much of an impact on the big companies and are eventually seen as nothing but a drain on the bottom line, while those in the regions found that promises of back-office savings and shared content saw them labelled with the same debt as the big boys, while their pages were soon filled with the blandest of shared stories.
So the only surprise generated by Stuff's latest move came from arseholes who expressed shock that these small towns even still had a paper, because everybody they know gets their news on their phone and who reads print anymore, anyway? (Answer: Quite a lot of people still prefer their news in paper form, instead of endless goddamn scrolling.)
If you only listened to all the talk of falling revenues and the problems of getting money out of digital operations, it would be easy to assume that local news is on the fast-track to oblivion, with nothing to replace them.
But human beings are strange creatures, and actually like to know what is going on in their immediate vicinity. They like the national and international stuff too, and they also love the trivial and silly stories, but people do actually want to know what there local authorities are up to, what local crime is happening, and when local events are being held.
Some of the success stories in local news in recent years have certainly found this out for themselves, and there are examples all over the place, of newspapers that have been bought by staff or locals, or of community trusts being set up to get the news flow going. Here in NZ, the Wairarapa Times-Age was taken back into local hands in 2016, and is chugging along nicely.
The future of local news means a rejection of the big company ethos that has infected the media industry for the past few decades, and a return to the kind of news and reporting that local communities managed to sustain for a long, long time, even with a far smaller population. The explosion in the number of newspapers in New Zealand's earliest days filled a vital gap that no social media platform can match, even if there weren't as many aspirational images of cats.
But to find out what is really going on in your community might actually require a bit of effort from that community, rather than an apathetic 'what can ya do' shrug. Whether that's something private individuals want to get involved in, or maybe even local authorities, the community needs to step up and demand local news for local people.
The news isn't dead yet. The news never dies, and sometimes it just means there are different ways to get that news to the people who need it. But for mass coverage in a particular area, you still can't beat the newspaper sitting in every mailbox.
- Ron Troupe
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