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. . .I presume virtually all so–called "local news" sites are now under the same selfish rotten Bauer/Reach Group or something similar, every single one of them has now brought in a "de–facto" paywall under the name of "plus" or similar!
. . .Their excuse being "we've not getting enough revenue from existing advertising to sustain the cost of our independent journalism!"
. . .Is this pure corporate greed pure and simple?
. . .Was local news really in such a parlous financial state when it was distributed on free or low–cost printed local newspapers?
. . .I presume virtually all so–called "local news" sites are now under the same selfish rotten Bauer/Reach Group or something similar, every single one of them has now brought in a "de–facto" paywall under the name of "plus" or similar!
. . .Their excuse being "we've not getting enough revenue from existing advertising to sustain the cost of our independent journalism!"
. . .Is this pure corporate greed pure and simple?
. . .Was local news really in such a parlous financial state when it was distributed on free or low–cost printed local newspapers?
The Manchester Evening News now does it, so indeed I just go elsewhere or don’t bother, most of their articles are clickbait anyway (as in a vague headline requiring you to click to find out what they’re on about) so they won’t be getting the click revenue from me in future either. They can’t save money by sacking sub-editors who know how to write properly because they’ve already done that.
I help deliver copies of my local CAMRA magazine the Oxford Drinker to nearby pubs. Our printed circulation has recently overtaken that of the city's established "evening newspaper" the Oxford Mail, which surely can't stagger-on for much longer.
It's the clickbait headlines that annoy me most, especially when it relates to a trivial story. e.g. "major chain closes all stores in March and April".... when it's one store in that paper's coverage area and the closures are due to the bank holidays. (this will be copied and pasted across all of that company's papers, of course)
I would be ok with ads if they were early 2000s style static images or low-animation GIFs. I have no time for tracking cookies and auto play videos that take up most of the screen and cause my normally very competent computer to wheeze
With my local paper. The paywall does not work fully. Some of the stories, you can get the details from the website of the Police and Fire Brigade, as the newspaper has copied it word for word.
Any place is described as beloved. This description applies to any old dump.
Yes, one of the stupid superfluous meangless adjectives. “Beloved restaurant forced to close” - yes, perhaps the reason was that it wasn’t “beloved” at all. Add “horror” and “thug” and the article is half-way written.
Just turn JavaScript off for those sites. It's an option available in all major browsers out of the box, and stops the vast majority of their popups, cookie prompts, auto play videos and speak-ur-branes comment sections.
Is it the same across the country where police are always reported to 'descend on' or 'flood an area'. You mean like the SAS breaking a siege abseiling from the roof / helicopters or a dam bursting.
Except it hasn't been stolen, she just hasn't looked bothered looking for it. It's two doors down. The accompanying photo will have her in her dressing gown and slippers with a sad compo face.
The Rossendale Free Press was £3.00 for a handful of pages of local news then dozens of syndicated puzzles and lifestyle guff.
. . .I presume virtually all so–called "local news" sites are now under the same selfish rotten Bauer/Reach Group or something similar, every single one of them has now brought in a "de–facto" paywall under the name of "plus" or similar!
. . .Their excuse being "we've not getting enough revenue from existing advertising to sustain the cost of our independent journalism!"
. . .Is this pure corporate greed pure and simple?
. . .Was local news really in such a parlous financial state when it was distributed on free or low–cost printed local newspapers?
I once tried to place a standard obituary notice in a local rag, they wanted £480,
My response was 'see ya, bye!'
The girl on the phone couldn't care two hoots, some sort of national call centre I guess.
. . .I presume virtually all so–called "local news" sites are now under the same selfish rotten Bauer/Reach Group or something similar, every single one of them has now brought in a "de–facto" paywall under the name of "plus" or similar!
. . .Their excuse being "we've not getting enough revenue from existing advertising to sustain the cost of our independent journalism!"
. . .Is this pure corporate greed pure and simple?
. . .Was local news really in such a parlous financial state when it was distributed on free or low–cost printed local newspapers?
Reach plcs local media outlets have largely given up on local news reporting. Instead they spew out (maybe that's why Private Eye call them Retch plc) mindless celebrity clickbait, whilst angrily denying that their clickbait is clickbait.
The small amount of local news reporting that they still do is provided by the Local Democracy reporters, who are funded by the BBC and whose output is not supposed to be put behind a paywall.
It's the clickbait headlines that annoy me most, especially when it relates to a trivial story. e.g. "major chain closes all stores in March and April".... when it's one store in that paper's coverage area and the closures are due to the bank holidays. (this will be copied and pasted across all of that company's papers, of course)
I would be ok with ads if they were early 2000s style static images or low-animation GIFs. I have no time for tracking cookies and auto play videos that take up most of the screen and cause my normally very competent computer to wheeze
I've noticed the same and I find it irritating that Google News frequently recommends local news sites from up and down the country which you can almost tell without looking it's a local new site because it will have some clickbait headline usually intended to anger people. There was one here recently where the headline was something like 'Scotrail cancel ALL trains between Inverness and Perth' making it sound like they'd had some colossal screw up but it was simply engineering work on that day. The depressing part is it's likely quite effective as my Mum made a comment she couldn't believe they'd cancelled all the trains because she must have seen the same article so I pointed out it was just engineering works.
Ads are unfortunately often making sites completely unusable as well to the point I can barely even read the article, I have a phone with a 7.6in screen but hilariously I can often only see one or two sentences because of the header ad, the ads at the side, the ads at the bottom, the auto play video ads, the inline ads and that's after the cookie prompts, the newsletter popup, wanting to send you notifications, wanting to know your location etc. While I could use an adblocker I prefer to try and support sites that need the revenue and remain usable whereas others where the ads are so bad I just don't use the site.
For some where I actually have an interest in the article, I just use a paywall bypass website like smry.ai. I don't begrudge paying for news, in fact I have an FT subscription, but arsed if I'm paying £5/month for some random local news site I read an article from maybe twice a year.
And even then a lot of these sites require adblockers even with subscriptions because it's almost impossible to read some of them on mobile with all the crap getting in the way and ruining the responsiveness.
Local papers are screwed. People will moan that they miss the local news, but they've not really had that for years now. Everyone I know who was involved in local press has moved on to something else because the money just isn't there.
Advertisers don't pay enough to fund the journalism. There's no photography budget, minimal travel budget (to actually go out and report on news in an area), no sub-editors to make articles read properly, with decent headlines and quotes. There's no design budget because web pages don't allow for interesting designs and layouts to make things more enjoyable to read.
The papers that still do print are nothing like they were, and circulations are tiny.
As such, people now cover multiple local paper areas and syndicate news (hence the examples above) and the news is regurgitated from what people read on local Facebook and other community pages. As such, you are probably creating a story based on your own post along the lines of 'Does anyone know what happened last night in town? There were police and ambulances everywhere'. You want the answer? Sorry, you just get a vague story about police and ambulances in town - but they just re-wrote what you did. Perhaps the police were asked for a comment, perhaps not.. who cares, who is reading it anyway?
Clickbait and ragebait is what gets the engagement but EVERYONE is doing that and AI has made it easier than ever before for some random to set up an account on social media platforms to produce dodgy AI photos of immigrants running wild in a town centre, with a story along the lines of 'these people are being given mansions and cars that you pay for.. what about the veterans?'.
What's the answer? I have no idea (but paywalls almost certainly won't work). People expect news for free. They're going to miss it when it all goes, which it probably will. They'll never have a clue what's going on unless someone has paid for a story to be written. It will be all led by advertisers and paid influencers.
I live in Newsquest territory. It really is dismal quality, if I can spot the multiple errors in subjects I know about, how many are there in things I'm not so familiar with? A lot of it is AI slop, and they have this obsession with motoring clickbait "drivers could be fined up to £1000 for [insert obscure law that they have misinterpreted]".
They also can't frame photos properly. They are either published upside down, or just show someone's forehead.
Would I pay for this? No way. Firefox reader mode seems to solve that problem.
This one does my head in. Not necessarily because of current laws even, but they'll say something like, "Drivers issued major update on '80mph speed limit' on motorways in England", when the update is that, as the DfT has said for years - it's not happening. In this particular example it was a survey conducted by a car website most people had never even heard of. Other times it's because some rando MP has raised an early day motion about banning drivers wearing flip flops or something, without any real chance of it becoming law.
I live in Newsquest territory. It really is dismal quality, if I can spot the multiple errors in subjects I know about, how many are there in things I'm not so familiar with? A lot of it is AI slop, and they have this obsession with motoring clickbait "drivers could be fined up to £1000 for [insert obscure law that they have misinterpreted]".
They also can't frame photos properly. They are either published upside down, or just show someone's forehead.
Would I pay for this? No way. Firefox reader mode seems to solve that problem.
Yes, I'm in Newsquest land as well. Abysmal isn't it? They also use exactly the same website template for all of their sites. I block javascript in my browser for the website, as it stops all the excessive pop-ups and paywalls.
I live in Newsquest territory. It really is dismal quality, if I can spot the multiple errors in subjects I know about, how many are there in things I'm not so familiar with? A lot of it is AI slop, and they have this obsession with motoring clickbait "drivers could be fined up to £1000 for [insert obscure law that they have misinterpreted]".
They also can't frame photos properly. They are either published upside down, or just show someone's forehead.
Would I pay for this? No way. Firefox reader mode seems to solve that problem.
Same here, the quality is attrocious. The letters page seems to be the same (probably not real) people writing in. What i find funny isbthat nearly every business, venue etc. Is described as "popular".
Least they got out of the habit of putting a "miserable face" picture with most stories.
Same here. They recently moved to 'accept cookies or pay'. As there is still some useful local news, I opted for cookies*. Since then, the advertising has gone from annoying to zero. Very curious.
My pet hate are the 'On this day' items where they recycle trivial news from previous years.
* Can we please skip yet another repeat of suggested workarounds.
Same here, the quality is attrocious. The letters page seems to be the same (probably not real) people writing in. What i find funny isbthat nearly every business, venue etc. Is described as "popular".
Least they got out of the habit of putting a "miserable face" picture with most stories.
I consider my local "evening newspaper" here in Oxford to be a hate-sheet. They hate low traffic neighbourhoods, they hate the congestion charge and they hate the forthcoming traffic filters. Cyclists, without whom the city would grind to a halt, are referred to as "they" and "them". Reporting on the Botley Road bridge replacement project and its delays they proclaimed "heads should roll!" Did they really propose that the project managers, for all their faults, be decapitated?
Maybe it was Popular for the wrong sort of reasons, like popular for those who like walking out without paying, or popular for the toilet area making for good drug taking
I'm blocked from their facebook page for making one joke too many about their obsession with celebrities called Amanda. Or maybe it was the bingo card containing 25 of their silly obsessions.
I've often wondered what happened to the unpopular cafes.
The editor of Reach plc's Huddersfield Daily Examiner aka Yorkshire Live, who angrily denies that his clickbait is clickbait, is one Wayne Ankers. I am not going to make fun of his name.
Sometimes happens to be fair, e.g. the owner retires, family don't want it and they don't want the hassle/potential reputational risk that comes with selling it as a going concern. The superb and very well-patronised (and much missed) Alpine Cafe at Betws station is a great example, and Reach Media did report it in this vein. Sometimes small business owners actually do like to go out on a high rather than wait for the business to fail when they no longer feel able to give it their all.
To be fair, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Physical paper sales have died, so online revenue is their only option. Which means ads.
To increase ad revenue you need clicks hence lots of these turning into clickbait farms, which obviously people will complain about (yet still click on).
Also people hate ads, and often block them etc. But that obviously hits revenue and so they have to add more ads for those who don't block them. Which just leads more people to block them.
So you end up here where paywalls are the only real way to survive, but with what these have turned into with clickbait etc, nobody in their right mind would pay.
If you still had real quality journalism, I could defo see a paywall working in some way. But that also costs money so that paywall may have to be prohibitively expensive.
It is sad because there is defo a real need for quality local journalism. And you do see it in pockets even at some of these publications. But it just doesnt make money which sadly in our world is the important thing.
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I mean theres plenty of reasons popular places, even ones that are often full, have to close down.
Retirement of an owner, the sale of their building from underneath their feet (often for "redevelopment"), the building owner deciding they want charge more rent which would make the business financially not viable, other factors (e.g
energy bills) increasing costs to the extent that it isnt financially viable, etc etc.
I'm involved with a lot of live music stuff, and small grassroots venues are often very popular and full most nights, but they arent a type of business that make a huge amount of money, so anything around costs going up will often cause problems.
To be fair, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Physical paper sales have died, so online revenue is their only option. Which means ads.
To increase ad revenue you need clicks hence lots of these turning into clickbait farms, which obviously people will complain about (yet still click on).
Also people hate ads, and often block them etc. But that obviously hits revenue and so they have to add more ads for those who don't block them. Which just leads more people to block them.
So you end up here where paywalls are the only real way to survive, but with what these have turned into with clickbait etc, nobody in their right mind would pay.
If you still had real quality journalism, I could defo see a paywall working in some way. But that also costs money so that paywall may have to be prohibitively expensive.
It is sad because there is defo a real need for quality local journalism. And you do see it in pockets even at some of these publications. But it just doesnt make money which sadly in our world is the important thing.
The thing is, I would pay a monthly subscription to a local news outlet if it was reasonably priced. My local paper wants £50/year for digital only though. I read a handful of articles a year in it. Arguably I might read more if I had a subscription but it just seems steep for what it is. For context, a subscription to The Independent digital is £66/year.
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