Out With A Bang

I’ve no idea if this will ever see the light of day. It is, however, worth a ponder.

http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/mediamoney/2008/11/17/guardian-cities-local-sites-for-local-cityfolk/

Worth treating as tiny pebble and throwing into the shrinking pond that is the UK provincial newspaper industry and trying to imagine where the ripples might lead…

Clearly GMG have been happily working that Manchester beat for years. The Manchester Evening News was just AN Other city evening paper – just a bigger version of the Trinity-owned Newcastle Chron, the Johnston-run Sheffield Star, the Northcliffe-managed Bristol Evening Post, Archant’s Norwich Evening News.

Everyone plundered their own little circulation fiefdoms with a passion; everyone knew whose city was whose; whose toes you didn’t tread on.

And then along comes the Internet. And Clay Shirky. Together they smash those local monopolies into a thousand and one pieces and rip up the rule book completely.

Up until the now, the only people who have threatened to rock the provincial apple cart are the BBC with their dastardly plans to send a local video journalist onto the streets of Barnsley and Rotherham once or twice a month – or however long it takes one BBC video journalist to get round the 900,000-odd people on his or her ‘patch’.

For the last six months, hell really has had no fury like the Newspaper Society when they see their age-old local monopolies scorned.

Indeed, Carolyn McCall of GMG was there with her stilleto out just the other week…

“You can’t have a local website without video; it has taken local publishers a long time to get the investment to do video and to actually do video on a return-on-investment basis,” McCall added.

“We are having to go to quite a lot of pain to justify the capital expenditure required to put video on websites, because at the moment websites don’t have return on investment commercially, so you have to take risks.

“The BBC would be able to do local video much more quickly with much more deeper pockets and they would be able to leapfrog the regional press in terms of what they can do and that is going to be unbelievably damaging for local media that might not be able to survive that kind of onslaught…”

And whilst GMG keeps itself to itself in Manchester, it must – presumeably – have been approving nods all round from Ms Bailey, Mr Bowdler and Co.

But what if Pete’s report – and the original from How-Do http://www.how-do.co.uk/rumours-and-conjecture/north-west-media-rumours/is-gmg-set-to-launch-a-local-guardian%11branded-website-for-manchester?-200811134009/ – suggests something else; that GMG are dipping their first, consultative toe in the water about not keeping themselves to themselves in Manchester, but taking The Guardian brand and doing something ‘local’ with it? Creating something for city-folk outside their long-allocated city?

Guardian-local-Bristol? Guardian-local-Sheffield? Guardian-local-Newcastle? Guardian-local-Norwich?

A local market that is, of course, already perfectly-well serviced by the existing local publishers; that, as Johnston’s Tim Bowdler explained again only last week, is one of the reasons that there was no need for the BBC to go poking their noses in… it’s all covered, thanks.

Indeed, it ain’t even bust; we don’t need the BBC thinking that they can swan along with all their Auntie airs and Corporation graces and park a local video journalist on our lawn…

“It’s utterly inappropriate for public money to be used to do something where there’s no evidence of market failure and where commercial enterprises are investing heavily to build these services…” said Bowdler.

What will be fascinating to watch is whether any of the same logic applies to The Guardian; that if Johnston don’t need the BBC walking the streets of Sheffield and launching the kind of onslaught “that is going to be unbelievably damaging for local media” , do they really need a new, local-looking Guardian trooping out of Manchester and into places where they might not belong?

Do Northcliffe need them in Bristol? Trinity in Newcastle? Archant in Norwich?

But Pete’s other point is very, very interesting. For if GMG is, indeed, on the march, then AutoTrader can’t be that far behind; let alone their various jobs portals.

So now, if you are, say, Archant and you’ve been ‘investing heavily’ in Jobs24, Motors24, etc, etc to service the online classifed advertising needs of your EDP and EADT market, here comes GMG with their market-leading motors and jobs sites – suddenly given this new ‘local’ flavour and face by any prospective launch of Guardian-cities-Norwich.

None of which should come as any shock to any provincial newspaper exec – from the moment that How-Do set the ball rolling with the first whiff that GMG might be eyeing up new audiences beyond the confines of the M60, the rest was obvious.

And why shouldn’t they? After all, ‘plurality’ and ‘diversity’ in local news provision is exactly what the Newspaper Society want to see maintained, isn’t it? �