On Saturday Traditional media – use it or lose it...

Read Martin’s column every week in the Western Daily Press

OVER the past week several people have asked me to write newspaper stories based on various woes and complaints they have in their lives.

All are genuine and all their cases could do with a public airing – but telling each of their stories properly would require a lot of research and graft. It’s the sort of work which used to be done by large investigation departments filled with energetic reporters, but those days of massively well-funded journalism are over.

As we all know, the likes of Facebook and Google are the new rulers on the media block and they don’t directly employ journalists or stage any real form of organised news reporting. They’re better at allowing anyone and everyone to shout their own tale from the digital rooftops, with the result that each small individual voice is drowned in the universal din.

Maybe that’s why social media is such a nasty and aggressive place. People think: “Nobody’s listening to me – I need to rant, rave and be more vicious than the rest!”

A few media workers are sponsored by the digital giants. An ultralocal weekly newspaper I read has such a contributor – a person who seems to know very little about the area. Several times recently, for example, they’ve described one particular small village as a town.

No big deal, perhaps – but readers notice this sort of thing. I know they do because I’ve been approached regarding this “village called a town” business as if I personally know the reporter and have some way of correcting their mistake. To many people, newspapers are just newspapers – they all come out of the same hole in the ground – so I must know the person involved.

I don’t. Indeed the paper I’m talking about (and unrelated to this esteemed title I might add) is nowadays edited – not locally by someone who knows the patch – but hundreds of miles away by a person who has never been anywhere near the West Country.

So how could they possibly know a village with no shop or pub is more a hamlet than a town?

“I’m not buying it anymore,” growled a bloke down the pub.

“I’ve been getting that paper every week for over 50 years but if they can’t get something as basic as that right, what’s the point?”

The title has recently been amalgamated with other papers based elsewhere in the county, so its whole USP – its ultra-localness – has been diluted and, to a large degree, lost.

Accuracy is the working currency of all local news outlets. There are national titles which can get away with peddling fables and lies, knowing readers will take stuff with a pinch of salt in the name of being entertained – but such a thing would be commercial suicide for the local press. Local readers know the lay of the land. As the bloke in the pub said – what’s the point in a local news outlet that doesn’t know its own patch?

So, those titles lose readers. And, as the media landscape changes, I have this image of journalists becoming a bit like those rural sewerage engineers who go around fixing people’s cesspits. It’s all regarded as a dirty business which you don’t really want to think about – and most people don’t have to because a good system will work problem-free for years.

But, when you need help from those guys, then you really, really need it. Otherwise you can find yourself knee-deep in the stinky stuff.

Last week someone asked me to write about how he’s on a very long NHS waiting list. When I told him about the difficulties of singling out one person’s NHS woes at a time when it’s a problem affecting the whole of society, he reeled off names of other journalists we’ve both known down the years.

“They’d have done it,” he groaned. I reminded him that none of them – not a single one – has a job in the media anymore.

And I outlined how, in order to cover his case, I’d need to interview other people on the waiting list and also talk to various NHS departments involved. I explained that an in-depth story could take ages to put together and that, as a freelance, I didn’t have all those hours to spare. “Bloody media!” he wailed. “You’re all useless.”

He went quiet when I asked how much his hourly work rate was and (on that basis) told him what I reckoned such a story would cost if he paid a journalist to do it.

“You don’t work for free, why should a reporter or writer?” I said, adding: “And you say you haven’t bought a paper in years!”

I told him that when it comes to the traditional media it’s a case of use it, or lose it.

The more old-fashioned parts of the press represent an efficient and useful tool which every society needs. News stories – those weird and wonderful complexities otherwise known as human affairs – do not fall, ripe-and-ready-to-eat, off trees. They need to be worked on.

The social media companies do not trouble themselves to employ such a facility – they just expect the world to do it for them for free so that they can pick up their vast profits.

Just like you wouldn’t expect the likes of X or Facebook to fix your cesspit, don’t expect them to take up your story when you need the world to know about your woes.

Accuracy is the working currency of all local news outlets... local readers know the lay of the land