{"id":2980,"date":"2009-02-27T13:57:21","date_gmt":"2009-02-27T13:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=2980"},"modified":"2009-02-28T22:29:31","modified_gmt":"2009-02-28T22:29:31","slug":"newspapers-localities-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2009\/02\/newspapers-localities-communities\/","title":{"rendered":"Message to dying newspapers: localities are NOT communities"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span> very long time ago, when I had just moved to London<\/strong> and was still rather excited by the fact that I was worldly, hip and liberal, I asked a gay friend (who was originally from Northern Ireland<\/strong>) what the “scene” was like in Belfast<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

He gave me the withering look my question deserved, and shook his head.<\/p>\n

“What do you f@*$ing think?”<\/p>\n

Indeed. I had come to London to escape the narrow life opportunities of the “community” into which I was born. He had come to London to escape his family’s denial and disapproval, and the contempt and thuggery of his “community.”<\/p>\n

And what has that little tale to do with the future of the news media? Well, it might serve as a reminder that locality is not community. My friend had to travel to London to find a community. Growing up, I read to find one.<\/p>\n

US newspaper gloom<\/h3>\n

The Guardian<\/em>‘s Charles Arthur<\/strong> has a gloomy post<\/a> on the future of newspapers.<\/p>\n

San Francisco may lose the Chronicle<\/em>, Denver has lost<\/a> it’s major paper. The United States will lose an awful lot of these newspapers and – I predict – end up with a stronger, but smaller legacy national news media.<\/p>\n

Nick Carr<\/strong> argues that there is an oversupply of news. Certainly the perceived advantages of ownership (political, social etc.) can lead to uneconomic provision (cf. the subsidies that keep the New York Post<\/em> or Al Jazeera<\/em> in business). But given the amount of agency material clogging<\/a> news aggregators it’s hard to argue that there’s an oversupply.<\/p>\n

Take Great Yarmouth<\/a><\/strong>, where I grew up. Nearly 50,000 people live there. A Google News UK search<\/a> brings up around 250+ stories for February 2008, mostly drawn from local weekly the Great Yarmouth Mercury<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

When I checked, the site had 17 classified ads online. And the top story<\/a>?<\/p>\n

The Co-operative has become the first supermarket to stock Fairtrade Palestinian olive oil – the first Palestinian product to receive Fairtrade certification.<\/p>\n

The Equal Exchange Fairtrade Palestinian Extra Virgin Olive Oil will be available in Anglia Co-operative’s larger stores, including the Rainbow Foodstore in Bradwell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hardly an “oversupply” of news, although that particular story is the news equivalent of a suicide note… It’s true that not enough people search for news about a place called Great Yarmouth<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’ve argued before (despite the evidence immediately above) that news content suffers from a demand-side problem – that there’s little incentive for most people to be well-informed on public policy topics, beyond the social transaction value (and that dictates a lot of news-framing which uses fear or disgust to provoke interest and reaction).<\/p>\n

Still, in the UK, political devolution has not proved a sufficiently demand-side incentive to sustain newspaper readership<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And politics remains committed to geography. Perhaps politicians need that message too: localities are NOT communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A very long time ago, when I had just moved to London and was still rather excited by the fact that I was worldly, hip and liberal, I asked a gay friend (who was originally from Northern Ireland) what the “scene” was like in Belfast. He gave me the withering look my question deserved, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2980"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2993,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions\/2993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}