Is there any point in 'local press' websites any more?

[Peter Mugridge]

Newsquest, at least, do offer the opportunity to pay a subscription for an almost ad-free website.

It's still going to offer you totally irrelevant news articles relating to things like cats stuck up trees 300 miles away...

 

[Thirteen]

The articles you can tell they just source the comments from Twitter are ones to do with gameshows. Not local news at all.

 

[DelayRepay]

It's still going to offer you totally irrelevant news articles relating to things like cats stuck up trees 300 miles away...

Not quite a cat stuck up a tree, but a riveting read none the less:

https://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/lifestyle/outdoors/cat-rescued-uninjured-after-getting-locked-in-cupboard-at-bletchley-property-3977561

Cat rescued uninjured after getting locked in cupboard at Bletchley property​

Firefighters were called to rescue a cat that become locked in a cupboard yesterday afternoon.
The incident happened just after 4pm in Westminster Drive, Bletchley.
Firefighters used small gear to release the cat which was uninjured, and handed back to its owner.

This 'article' is helpfully illustrated with a stock image of a fire engine. Sadly there is no photograph of the cat.

Amusingly, the other headline today, about a road traffic accident, also consists of three sentences and is illustrated with the same picture of the fire engine.

And if you go to the Bucks Fire and Rescue service website, the two 'latest incidents' are... you guessed it - a cat stuck in a cupboard and a road traffic accident

 

[Jimini]

Not quite a cat stuck up a tree, but a riveting read none the less:

https://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/lifestyle/outdoors/cat-rescued-uninjured-after-getting-locked-in-cupboard-at-bletchley-property-3977561

Cat rescued uninjured after getting locked in cupboard at Bletchley property​

Firefighters were called to rescue a cat that become locked in a cupboard yesterday afternoon.
The incident happened just after 4pm in Westminster Drive, Bletchley.
Firefighters used small gear to release the cat which was uninjured, and handed back to its owner.

This 'article' is helpfully illustrated with a stock image of a fire engine. Sadly there is no photograph of the cat.

Amusingly, the other headline today, about a road traffic accident, also consists of three sentences and is illustrated with the same picture of the fire engine.

And if you go to the Bucks Fire and Rescue service website, the two 'latest incidents' are... you guessed it - a cat stuck in a cupboard and a road traffic accident

Has @Bletchleyite been stashing cats away in his airing cupboard again?

 

[lyndhurst25]

There's definitely a point to local news sites. They're vital. There's just no point to the local news sites we've currently got.

There are quite a few upstarts getting going at the moment. One in Liverpool, another in Manchester. I hear they've got the monopoly worried. Good. If one springs up in your area make sure you support it!!

What is the name of the Liverpool one? We have recently lost our weekly free local newspaper “The Champion” and the paid-for weekly Crosby Herald stopped publishing years ago. The Liverpool Echo website is, like many others, click bait garbage.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Has @Bletchleyite been stashing cats away in his airing cupboard again?

I'm allergic to cats so it can get lost!

 

[johnnychips]

So does this mean that all these hot women in the Doncaster area dying to talk to me don’t really exist? My disappointment is immeasurable and my weekend is ruined.

 

[158756]

Well if people no longer want to pay for journalism this is what you get. Some years ago a really good local weekly paper was launched in the West Midlands but closed down after a few months due to low sales. Just have to stick to whatever mutant form the Meaning Evil has turned into.

Exactly. People get their news for free nowadays, whether that is from ad funded sites, the taxpayer funded BBC news site or the local "news" on the likes of Facebook. People don't buy physical local papers any more, and local papers have never been able to bring in enough money from online ads to support the quality and quantity of journalism they used to have. And once you are relying on online ads for revenue the only thing that matters is clicks, leading to the awful clickbait headlines we see now.

 

[Cowley]

I'm allergic to cats so it can get lost!

That’s why you keep them in the cupboard…

 

[johntea]

Well you could rely on BBC News instead with useful advice on if it is cheaper to shower at home or the gym!

Spoiler : You can probably work out the answer in under a second...

Shower at home vs at the gym: What’s cheaper?

Could getting a gym membership actually save you money in the shower?

All Things Money financial blogger Ola Majekodunmi goes through the numbers - in under a minute.

Could showering at the gym save money?

We investigate if getting a gym membership could actually save you money in the shower.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[gg1]

Well if people no longer want to pay for journalism this is what you get. Some years ago a really good local weekly paper was launched in the West Midlands but closed down after a few months due to low sales. Just have to stick to whatever mutant form the Meaning Evil has turned into.

That one completely passed my by, though if it was print only I'd probably have never even seen it. I don't see the point of paying for national or world news but would happily do so for a decent local news website.

 

[birchesgreen]

That one completely passed my by, though if it was print only I'd probably have never even seen it. I don't see the point of paying for national or world news but would happily do so for a decent local news website.

I can't remember the title now (talking over 10 years ago!), it was print only.

 

[bunty0657]

The local Reach PLC excuse for a media outlet published the attached on its Facebook site this morning, plumbing a new depth. Wales and Ireland are now cities in the UK according to these clowns.

 

[jupiter]

Local news websites, among others, have generated a new genre all of their own:

Clown's Trousers Websites

...flashing and banging like they do.

We'd like to collect and sell your data - No thanks, go away
Sign in for a better experience - No thanks
Would you like to chat with us? - Not really
Sign up for notifications - Are you kidding?

and of course

Before you go... Too late I'm off

 

[Jimini]

Not that I'm defending them, but the crux of it is that no one's really managed to work out how to monetise digital advertising revenues vs. print as consumers switch from the former to the latter. Been going on for two decades and counting now. Ergo, you end up getting spammed to death by online adverts in a somewhat desperate attempt to make some money out of the content being produced. Less revenue = fewer journos = crap / generic content.

There are a few outliers here (WSJ / NYT / Times / Tele for example) who have pretty much full paywalls, but they are only really suitable for a certain demographic who are prepared to pay for their news in digital format.

 

[BenS123]

Latest from the Bournemouth Echo: https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/23236257.power-cuts-reported-parts-bournemouth/

The SSEN website says an outrage was reported in the BH1 and BH5 areas at 12.39pm. It is understood an engineer is on site.

I think that's meant to say outage but I'd understand if there was outrage as well

Edit: it also seems to be a feature of these local newspapers to act as if they hate the local area?

 

[BluePenguin]

This thread has made for the most hilarious reading! Most of my news comes from the television these days, although the MSN website is full of the same sort of articles mentioned above

Kent live generally features articles about weather, traffic on the A2, asylum seekers taking up rooms in local hotels and “shocking” deals in the supermarket

Today’s fascinating headlines feature:

Infamous TikToker tears apart Kent’s coolest town and calls the whole county “hell” - since when was an Internet personalities opinion “news”?

Shoppers stop in awe at Folkestone busker who they think will be “next big thing” - why is that though?

Olivia Colman and Sam Mendes spotted at special screening of Empire of Light in Thanet - Good for them!

New map shows sexual orientation across Kent for the first time - is this supposed to aid LGBT people to find hook ups?

The tiny Kent village that has been lost to the sea - The article talks about a hamlet that has been under water for 100 years already. The title should say “was lost”. Before opening the article I assumed it was about a village lost when the land between England and France disappeared ages ago

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Jan 2023 ==

"Coronation Street cancelled as ITV soap replaced in scheduling shake-up"​

There I was thinking the soap had been fully axed from the schedule not re-timed!!

MSN

 

[BenS123]

Another point to make about these sites is I find, along with a few friends and family members, that sometimes the Bournemouth Echo, a newsquest site, will randomly redirect you to a scam website. This has been going on for well over a year now

 

[jfollows]

Reach news sites are truly abysmal!

We had a thread in the buses section earlier this year that quoted an article from the Stoke Sentinel/Stoke on Trent live. It highlighted the case if a 10 year old girl being refused travel because her pass didn't work. As it turned out, the incident occurred nowhere near Stoke, but in Edinburgh!

The thread link is here:

Driver refuses 10 year old on a bus

Girl, 10, abandoned in dark by bus driver left waiting in cold for 40 minutes https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/girl-10-abandoned-dark-bus-6597213#ICID=Android_StokeSentinelNewApp_AppShare A young schoolgirl was abandoned in the dark after a bus driver wouldn't allow...

www.railforums.co.uk

Caution! If you value your sanity and are using a mobile device, don't click on the link to Stoke Live or you'll be stuck there forever while the adverts load. Is there nobody within this organisation who actually checks that their sites actually function properly? Surely you can't raise revenue from advertising if none of it ever appears!

Private Eye 1595 (31 March - 20 April 2023) reports that the Web sites will be relaunched in the "coming months" starting with the Liverpool Echo.

SORRY SITES

ONE of the more curious business decisions of Reach plc, owner of the Mirror amd Express as well as more than 100 regional titles, has been to render their websites completely unusable.

The plethora of pop-ups, intrusive adverts, sponsored links, auto-playing videos, invitations to subscribe to newsletters and notifications and oiher bells and whistles slow the sites down to the point where most people give up and leave. So bad has the experience become that one user declared last week that for the sake of his own “mental sanity” he had given up trying to open a Reach website on his mobile. He had become so frustrated he had thrown his phone against the wall and smashed it. Who he? Er, Lloyd Embley, group editor in chief at Reach.

The company will be relaunching a redesigned set of websites in the coming months, beginning with the Liverpool Echo, with chief digital publisher David Higgerson assuring staff they will “hopefully” be easier to read. Staff on the technical side of the business are sceptical, saying they are constantly told to improve the sites’ performance but forbidden to touch the adverts, which are what cause the performance issues.

Managers, however, have a new plan: to stuff pages with affiliate links on which readers can click to buy things, bringing in “more than £3m” im commission for the company - a significantly higher return than it gets from “programmatic advertising”. “Every article we publish can make a difference,” managers enthused to hacks - nearly 200 of whom are facing redundancy - in a town hall meeting last week. “If it’s a shopping, TV, consumer, travel or tech story, you can easily add an affiliate link to your story that will make money straight away. For every other type of story, you can put in a ‘Read More’ link to great affiliate content.”

At the same meeting, Embley was asked what he understood by the phrase “quality journalism”. He waffled on for a bit before concluding that “it could mean many different things to many different people”.

 

[Parjon]

Not that I'm defending them, but the crux of it is that no one's really managed to work out how to monetise digital advertising revenues vs. print as consumers switch from the former to the latter. Been going on for two decades and counting now. Ergo, you end up getting spammed to death by online adverts in a somewhat desperate attempt to make some money out of the content being produced. Less revenue = fewer journos = crap / generic content.

If this was true then the local newspapers wouldn't be owned en masse, carved up by conglomerates and operated as a defacto monopoly.

There's plenty of money to be made/being made. Providing news at any quality simply eats into their profit margins. Having bought up any real competition, there's no need to concern themselves with anything other than what makes then the most money at the lowest possible cost.

And any website relaunches will solely be focused on doing just that.

 

[Doctor Fegg]

Bear in mind that the local press are subsidised massively, in some cases via our taxes.

The BBC pays for "Local Democracy Reporters" who cover local council business, so Newsquest/Reach don't have to pay people to do so. Their copy is then made available free of charge to Newsquest, Reach etc. In an ideal world it would be published under a Creative Commons licence, but of course it isn't.

Every local authority is required to pay for "public notices" advertising changes to their statutory functions. Every planning applicant is required to do the same. These, by law, have to be in a local paper. You can't (say) place the notice of your planning population on a community website rather than a newspaper, even if 2000 people in your town read the website and 100 read the newspaper.

Facebook also fund "Community Reporters" who give free copy to local newspapers.

Without all of these, my guess is that a lot of currently published papers would be unviable.

 

[Dai Corner]

Bear in mind that the local press are subsidised massively, in some cases via our taxes.

The BBC pays for "Local Democracy Reporters" who cover local council business, so Newsquest/Reach don't have to pay people to do so. Their copy is then made available free of charge to Newsquest, Reach etc. In an ideal world it would be published under a Creative Commons licence, but of course it isn't.

Every local authority is required to pay for "public notices" advertising changes to their statutory functions. Every planning applicant is required to do the same. These, by law, have to be in a local paper. You can't (say) place the notice of your planning population on a community website rather than a newspaper, even if 2000 people in your town read the website and 100 read the newspaper.

Facebook also fund "Community Reporters" who give free copy to local newspapers.

Without all of these, my guess is that a lot of currently published papers would be unviable.

Not to mention reports from the emergency services, trunk road agencies and courts all ready to copy & paste. Pictures are lifted from social media or sent in by readers so no need to employ photographers or pay freelancers.

 

[Gloster]

The Isle of Wight’s news sites are not to be recommended. Most seem to rely on tip-offs and have sometimes missed genuinely important stories; the County Press seems (in my opinion) to be heading down-market to compete. One site, at least, doesn’t seem to monitor its comments, which has resulted in some utterly offensive comments being left up for several days, or people whose names have been withheld by the courts being identified. And, of course, there is the poor standard of English: bad spelling, using the wrong word, poor grammar and punctuation, etc. If a ‘journalist’ can’t write clearly, how can they do their job?

Two more humorous ones:

An arrest warrant being issued for someone accused of ‘international’ strangling.
A second, which was originally Southern Water’s mistake, but the paper missed it (cut ‘n paste), inviting residents to a meeting in a hotel’s Brassiere Room. (I was tempted to go.)

 

[Lost property]

There's a certain hamlet in Shropshire where the local rag surpasses all others...when it comes to drivel.

Amongst the (many) offerings...."Our Lock Ness visit "..."Man almost drowns in canal ! "....no, he fell into a shallow basin and walked away.

"200 yd traffic jam "...wow !..."Crossing of death "...or words to that effect. A pedestrian crossing had the pavements restructured, which, proved no problem for HGV's or large agricultural vehicles, but, did, for several local residents, in cars, who fell firmly into the "should never be driving in the first place " category, who managed to drive into the new pavement kerbs.

On Boxing Day, the local hunt graciously parades through the town..the rag dictates to the peasants they will line the streets and show their deference etc....the photographs invariably showed the riders " seen here on "..insert name of horse !

Rail related...a local councillor, Tory, whose views were regarded as essential reading, by some, every week, kindly explained why the line from Telford to Stafford should be reinstated and...electrified... for a mere £220m !....this may prove problematic for NR at Stafford however.

 

[Yew]

An arrest warrant being issued for someone accused of ‘international’ strangling.

Is it just me who reads this weird selective quoting in a Dr Evil style "Lasers" voice?

 

[Purple Train]

There would be a point in local press websites if they actually provided a decent source of news. There is a place for them, but whether that place is economically viable I'm not sure.

 

[jon0844]

There would be a point in local press websites if they actually provided a decent source of news. There is a place for them, but whether that place is economically viable I'm not sure.

They don't pay local reporters to seek out news anymore. Many sites now manage multiple areas, so they hire one 'reporter' to sit at home and search Facebook community groups and Twitter etc to find already reported news, which they effectively re-post and re-package into a story. Suffice to say they miss loads of stories, or get to report things that are either non-events, or possibly even made up or very twisted. Do they establish the facts and do additional research? No, they just quote what was said.

Now Reach are laying off even more staff and are excited to be using AI to write many stories, such as reports on road closures or accidents (and then these stories stay up on the site and appear on feeds sometimes days after the incident happened, which makes it hard to tell what's 'current' news and what's archived).

The whole model is dead. Even The Sun uses its online site to just repost things from TikTok, Twitter and Instagram and write them in such ways to encourage commenting - but they now post so many 'Teacher turns up to school and gets told their clothing is inappropriate' which seems to be an excuse to show some flesh and then reveal they've got an OnlyFans site or something, that they don't even get a single comment because most people have given up.

If they want to be titillated with such photos and videos, they'll go direct to TikTok or watch YouTube shorts - the latter of which has probably mopped up a lot of 'dead time' that people may have previously gone to these sites.

It's only going to get worse and worse.

 

[Gloster]

Is it just me who reads this weird selective quoting in a Dr Evil style "Lasers" voice?

It took the paper several days to notice and correct it to ‘intentional’. Or maybe that is how long it takes for the one reader clever enough to notice and stupid enough to be signed in for comments to get around to telling them.

 

[philthetube]

I would love to know how many critics on this thread actually pay for their local news, if not do they have a right to criticize as they are part of the problem.

 

[jon0844]

I would love to know how many critics on this thread actually pay for their local news, if not do they have a right to criticize as they are part of the problem.

Well of course that's the issue, but if people aren't buying print papers anymore (and they haven't for years), the publishers simply cannot replicate things in online form.

It means that, sadly, the whole local news model is unsustainable and they should really give up. What we're seeing is a long painful death, and even attempts to concentrate on creating controversial or sensationalised content that attracts engagement isn't, because there's just too much of that now.