Provincial journalism has been a key driver in helping to deliver democratic accountability for towns and villages across the United Kingdom for at least the last two centuries.
Local newspapers established and then sustained a much-appreciated platform through which to hold power to account, a vital contribution in uniting local communities in their resolve to challenge officialdom.
This combined sense of purpose, nurtured over the decades, has been dissolving at a dizzying pace with a calamitous rate of closures among evening and weekly newspapers and a disastrous cull of local journalists.
All is not lost: up and down the country, especially where local press reporting has all but disappeared, an increasing number of volunteer community reporters are gradually trying to fill the void.
Through a steady expansion in the number of community websites and newsletters these local chroniclers are doing their best to deliver a level of news coverage which goes some way to address a widening democratic deficit.
For an embattled National Union of Journalists, facing a significant loss of members, there is an emerging opportunity to welcome and nurture a new pool of potential recruits who would appreciate NUJ recognition and support.
Perhaps in return for a modest annual fee – and their acceptance of the union’s code of conduct – these volunteers could be issued with some form of press card which could help them validate their presence in their locality and give them a degree of authority when seeking information.
For what perhaps may be a final stint after sixty or more years in journalism, I have been re-inventing myself as a born-again local reporter, an attempt in my retirement to put to good use my journalistic experience for the benefit of fellow residents in Barnet, the outer London suburban town which has been my home for the last 50 years.
Pounding the neighbourhood beat for the last decade, on the look-out for interesting copy, has brought me face to face with what seems to be a catastrophic decline in a sense of community cohesion, the glue which Barnet’s newspapers once helped to generate.
An alarming lack of knowledge about local events is compounded by a minimal understanding of the policies – and local decision-making processes – which impact people’s daily lives and shape their surroundings.
Comments posted on neighbourhood social media sites expose the depth of public confusion and misconception.
At the height of the provincial press circulation wars of the 1980s, when pages were filled with advertisements from estate agents, car showrooms and the like, the town was served by four local papers – Barnet Press, Barnet Times, Barnet Independent and Barnet Local Advertiser.
All that exists today are two free papers with limited distribution which aim to serve the whole of the London Borough of Barnet which has over 400,000 residents and alternates with the Borough of Croydon as having the largest population of Greater London.
Newsquest publishes the weekly Barnet Borough Times, and the monthly Barnet Post is published by Social Spider, a much-admired non-profit community news group which prints free newspapers and run websites serving nine north London boroughs.
Except for a BBC-funded local democracy reporter covering the boroughs of Barnet, Enfield and Haringey – one of three employed by the Social Spider group – I have yet to meet another local newspaper journalist who has been deployed to cover the town of Barnet.
My attendance at local events collecting information for stories for the Barnet Society’s website (www.barnetsociety.org.uk) and newsletter does provoke surprise – and sometimes a degree of consternation in a community which has not had regular dealings with local press reporters or photographers for a decade or more.
The extent of this disengagement has been shocking to behold. I am having to come to terms with a generation of local officials, community leaders and organisers who have had no previous experience of seeing local journalists at work or of having had to deal with their requests.
The sight of me writing down in shorthand what they are saying and lining up photographs to take on my mobile phone can generate consternation, almost suspicion. I regularly get demands for copy and picture approval before publication.
There seems to be no sense or comprehension of what in the past was a partnership, a two-way trade, in which the provincial press promoted and reported local events, delivering a much-valued source of public information.
In return for their shared endeavour, editors and journalists believed there was a responsibility, if not perhaps an obligation, on the part of local officials and organisations to answer questions and have their duties and activities held to account.
Local newspapers can still be formidable campaigners. Their investigations often force the relevant authorities to respond. Backed by a stream of complaints from residents, filling a page or more of letters to the editor, officialdom has nowhere to hide.
Where there are poorly resourced free newspapers, with limited circulation residents seem to have forsaken the opportunity to write to the editor. Letters pages tend to be filled up with charity appeals, promotions, safety alerts and the like.
An absence of local reporters, and a lack of familiarity with the role they once played, is creating barriers for their volunteer replacements.
Increasingly councils, agencies and a host of semi-official organisations and charities use their own websites to exercise the tightest possible control over information released to the public.
Policy statements and announcements have usually been carefully phrased. These pre-determined pronouncements are deemed to be the line to take, from which there can be no deviation. Supplementary questions get nowhere. A standard response to follow-up inquiries is a polite instruction to continue monitoring the website for updates.
All too frequently my requests for information can simply be fobbed off by officialdom: “All our official statements are published on our website…We don’t take questions from community groups…We only deal with journalists from press and tv…You must make freedom of information request” and so it goes on.
If I manage to speak to a communications department, a gentle reminder that I happen to be a qualified journalist – NUJ life member since 2000 – makes no difference.
Important events across the town such as official openings or visits by local and national dignitaries, including ministers, MPs and the Mayors of London and Barnet, go unannounced in advance and are by invitation only.
Companies and organisations insist there is no access for reporters: please wait for the release of a press statement and photographs on the website.
A generation of public relations executives is becoming accustomed to exercising total control over the flow of information.
They have been aided and abetted by the decimation of local journalism. All too often today’s free papers employ only a minimal number of desk-bound reporters who are forced to rely on a supply of news releases and photographs. They have become willing supplicants.
Any seasoned journalists who might scoff at the dire picture which I have painted should have accompanied me when Barnet Council held an emergency meeting at the town hall in Hendon over the last-minute cancellation of a £58 million grant from the Greater London Authority and the collapse of a scheme to build 208 affordable homes.
I was the only reporter in attendance. Along with six residents who opposed the plan, we were directed to the public gallery.
The press bench in the council chamber is now colonised by council officials as the journalists who once occupied it have long gone.
We seven trooped out when the clerk moved a motion to exclude press and public from the call-in session, the first held for 14 years. Conservative councillors had challenged the controlling Labour group over the exercise of their “financial responsibility” in signing a deal with housing developers Vistry.
At an earlier meeting I was informed, almost with a sense of glee by a veteran former Barnet councillor, who had clashed regularly with the local press, that journalists had only themselves to blame for being relegated to the public gallery if they could not be bothered to attend council meetings.
Clearly there was no point complaining but I could not help but think back to my early days in the 1960s as local government correspondent on the Oxford Mail.
Such was their determination to get the fullest possible news coverage that Blackbird Leys Parish Council – to the frustration of the chair – was sometimes forced to delay the start of proceedings until the Mail’s reporter had arrived and was ready to take notes.
Volunteer community journalists are unlikely to ever have the clout of their dogged forebears, but they do deserve encouragement and support.
Many of the websites for which they write are gaining sufficient hits to attract local advertising, an income stream which might help sustain the cost of a minimum level of membership with the National Union of Journalists and a first stepping stone towards securing the kind of status and recognition that would strengthen their efforts to bring back some life to the local news desserts that are emerging across the country.