Out With A Bang

If it’s a fight for the very soul of provincial journalism you’re after, then I suggest we look no further than the streets and suburbs of Greater Manchester.

It’s there in streets of Stockport, Didsbury, Wilmslow and Hale that two tribes are going to war – the NUJ summoning up the spirit of the Scott Trust to flail into The Guardian Media Group.

It is an increasingly bitter and divided battle as the NUJ goes on the offensive with a series of adverts designed, one presumes, to force GMG into a fundamental rethink of their plans to all-but halve the editorial floor of the Manchester Evening News.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/31/nuj-advert-guardian

For the ‘bosses’, the spirit of CP Scott is a tricky one to combat; it’s either this or no newspapers at all was the line from the boardroom as the one-time cash-cow of GMG’s newspaper operations dies on its legs.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=43450&c=1

It is, of course, a block we’ve wandered round before…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=262

But as the NUJ turns up the heat and Ms McCall points to the forest fire that threatens to engulf us all, this most public – and painful – of confrontations continues to take centre stage.

For as the NUJ rightly point out, if anyone is ever to shoulder the responsibility of keeping the flame of local journalism a-flickering then it ought to be the heirs of CP Scott. After all, the great man never was one to put profit first – comment has long been free…

‘Despite the acknowledgment that The Manchester Guardian under Scott deserved to be considered as a great newspaper, it did not always make profits…’

On all this, the NUJ is clearly on the high ground; it has a morality tale to work with.

But the problem, as ever, comes in the detail.

The ‘How?’

‘Advert asks readers to urge their local MPs to sign early day motions to ‘help keep local newspapers alive’ runs the sub-head.

A noble aim. Buy ‘How?’

For Sly and Co part of that answer clearly lies in throwing their lot in with Johnston; fr GMG it might come in the shape of morphing into some sort of South-East mass that is Northchant – or Archcliffe. Throwing the Reading Bi-Weekly Chron into some sort of M4 massif that features the Ham&High somewhere near to one end with what’s left of the Bristol Evening Post at the other.

And if they can borrow a bit of Newsquest and get the Swindon Evening Adver into the mix as well, then so much the better…

Will it provide any better coverage of Stockport Town Council meetings? I suspect not. Will the Hatters get the kind of coverage that Edgeley Park has been accustomed to? Suspect not.

So if bigger silo-building is just a short-term, patch-it-up-and-pray scenario, what other tricks have the NUJ up their sleeve for HM Govt to work on?

Cos Andy Burnham has already given the big ‘Thumbs down!’ to any notion of a direct state subsidy – not that they’ve got the cash to splash anyway. That’s already been trousered by Fred The Shred and his little venture into Philadelphia Media Holdings.

The other point that, for me, the NUJ needs to bear in mind is the use of the word ’serious’ in that advert.

Because if the implication is that you are only a ’serious’ journalist if you continue to stain wood and see it delivered on the back of a bicycle every night then they need a radical re-think.

Is Linda at www.darwenreporter.com not ’serious’? What about James at TowcesterNews, http://www.aboutmyarea.co.uk/Northamptonshire/Towcester/NN12?

If the NUJ is really, really serious about trying to get the spirit of CP Scott to live on in the streets and suburbs of Manchester then it is, maybe, to the Lindas and the James’ of this world that they should turn.

Because maybe, just maybe, neither Ms McCall or HM Govt have actually got an answer to their increasingly strident and heart-felt pleas.

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