Out With A Bang

Tis now an AOL fault, apparently. They’ve got a recorded message on their helpline admitting as much. Personally, as big a fan of Loddon’s conservation area as I am, I’d not have any objections to a 3G digital phone mast being discretely slapped on top of the 16th Century church tower…

Here we go. Again.

The Newspaper Society is now looking for the regulatory green light to build themselves bigger silos, not better networks…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/13/local-media-ownership-review-launched

That what Trinity and Johnston et al desperately need is for the Sunderland Echo to be consumed by the Valleys of the Tyne and the Tees and to become a super, North-East media hub; just as Archant would love for Johnston to drop the Diss Express in their hands to give them that Norfolk-Suffolk borderland beat…

… dump the Express advertising staff; pull your back office functions into Norwich and leave just a couple of district reporters to work out of the old Diss Express office…

Doesn’t mean that Archant can do Bury St Edmunds; but means their silo now includes Diss.

Phew. That’s them saved, then…

But what’s depressing about this latest offering out of the back of Lord Carter’s ‘Digital Britain’ thinking is the implication that we are beholden to seek the answers from the Newspaper Society. And no-one else?

Where in any of this is someone having the common courtesy to actually sit down with a group of regional news consumers and to ask them what works in 2009?

In their opinion, is the best way for them to find news of their local planning applications to wait once a week for the privilege of paying 60p for the Beccles & Bungay Journal and then having to trawl our way to page 46 of said organ to find out what’s happening in NR14?

And as far as South Norfolk District Council are concerned, what is the point of having a website at all if they’re not allowed to publish information on it?

They are, by default, local information providers.

And as soon as they launched a website, they became publishers.

Local publishers. That challenged other local publishers. Only difference being that South Norfolk District Council didn’t see the need to build a print press hall and employ 100s of kids on bicycles to deliver their local information.

And, you know what, for me as both a local tax payer and a consumer of local information, it works.

If I want to know the swimming pool opening times in Long Stratton, I’ll go there. It suits my 21st Century ‘information-cum-news’ needs.

Of course, there are limits to what I expect my local council website to deliver; if Mark Foster opens said swimming pool and there’s pic of said ‘news’ event on South Norfolk’s website, I don’t mind.

Because if said picture was taken off a mobile phone belonging to South Norfolk District Council’s Press Officer and he/she had just uploaded onto their website, it’s cost them [or rather me, as a local government tax payer...], er, next to nothing…

It’s not South Norfolk District Council’s fault that the Newspaper Society are still [just] employing a local newspaper photographer to do the same job. Nor, alas, is it said newspaper photographer’s fault that technology has all but made him/her redundant.

This is the whole point. This is the stage where King Canute has to call for a towel…

Building bigger silos isn’t the answer. Building better networks is.

And better networks that truly befit a ‘Digital Britain’ don’t stop at Bury St Edmunds.