There is hope in the wreckage of the local press

The decline of the local press continues. Last Friday, my local paper, the Bristol Evening Post, announced that 19 jobs (out of 56) were at risk.

It’s right across every news group and every publisher. Sales are dropping, advertising revenue has slumped and it still seems elusive to make profit from the digital offering. Daily papers are going weekly, and this won’t be the end of it.

Going, going, gone. Time was, when you got your foot in the door of a newspaper, you had a job for life, or could move on somewhere else, to better things. Now, you might have a job for two or three years at best in a "platform-neutral" newsroom where you’re expected to churn out multimedia content for the web as well as the ink editions – and then you’ll kicked down the Jobcentre with a paltry pay-off and no prospects.

When I worked at the Bristol Evening Post (soon to be renamed as simply the Post), the ominous invitation to a Friday afternoon “boardroom presentation” invitation was a relatively new development; the email from the editor-in-chief telling us what was happening was even written in the jolly Comic Sans font to try and soften the blow. Now it’s happening with more and more inevitability.

For years, newspapers milked their readers and advertisers for every penny they could make. Try placing a death notice in your local paper and you might be almost as traumatised by the price as you were by your bereavement: you might even be paying more for a tiny box in the classified section as a local business would have been for a quarter-page ad somewhere else.

When times were good, local papers made an absolute fortune. There was nowhere else to go to advertise a car or house or thing for sale; there was no ebay, no internet, no other forum – so prices went up, and up, and up, and the punters had to put up with it. A lot of people got very rich, and well done to them. Now the golden teat is running dry, there is no emotional attachment to the business of providing news.

To maintain the glorious era of ever-increasing growth over the short and medium term, something had to give. That something turned out to be that journalism bit of the publications that went above the adverts; the "non-revenue department" as editorial was sometimes referred to. It’s no surprise that when managing directors of the newspaper groups I used to work for visited the offices, they didn’t bother stopping on the editorial floor. They weren’t interested.

What a waste, what a bloody waste. What a waste of all the talent and skill of all those good people who worked their hardest, for miserably low pay, working well over and above their allotted hours just because of some naive sense of professionalism, because they believed in the job they were doing, even if their bosses didn’t. What a waste of it all.

There’s hope, in the wreckage. Some independent journalists are trying to start up small publications and websites, and some are succeeding, just as the print behemoths come crashing down around them. There will always be local news, except that soon it won’t be as attractive to invest in as it once was. Perhaps that’s best for everyone.