http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/24/regional-newspapers-lay-offs Another day, another battery of bad newspaper news. Yesterday Northcliffe cut 1,000 journalists from its local newspapers after a 37% fall in advertising revenues. Last week the Guardian Media Group axed 153 from its local newsrooms. The deeply indebted Johnston Press has the Yorkshire Post and Scotsman up for sale. Pick up the phone to call editors and listen to the anguish. Three years ago profits were plentiful: within three months all locals will be deep in loss, most nationals on the same trajectory.
This jackal financial crisis picks off the weakest, so it's no surprise newspapers are early fallers. Their demise has been predicted ever since I first started out but suddenly the end looks perilously nigh. Look across the Atlantic and shudder as great names fall like tombstones - the Los Angeles Times is bankrupt, and the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer in administration, with the San Francisco Chronicle about to follow. Last week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer followed the Christian Science Monitor to the newsprint graveyard.
Serious journalism never paid its way: the model that sustained it has now crashed. Classified ads, once the river of gold, have flowed online to Craigslist and Friday-Ad. Cars, jobs and property ads are credit-crunched away. As Roy Greenslade says, free news on the web has always been parasitic on the ability of papers to generate print advertising. Comment is free, but serious news journalism is phenomenally expensive - and the web has yet to find a way to generate funds to pay the true price.
The circulation of virtually all newspapers is falling; the Guardian's declined by 3.3% last year, the only consolation - such as it is - being that the Express, Mail and Telegraph lost more. It is delightful to see the Daily Sport crashing out, but if the Independent were to follow, it would be a severe loss in a market 80% dominated by rightwing ownership. The London Evening Standard, haemorrhaging cash, was sold to the Russian Alexander Lebedev for £1 as a billionaire's plaything. Though an improvement on the Mail as owner, maverick plutocrats eager to buy power through newspapers may be drying up.
Last week in the Commons one MP after another rose to plead for their local papers in distress, 60 of which closed last year. Ann Coffey begged for her local, the Stockport Express - one of those GMG is rolling into its Manchester newsroom. Papers like this "play an absolutely essential role at the heart of their communities" she said - and she's right. "Under the able editorship of Mandy Leigh", it has "a reputation as a trusted, honest and open community newspaper". It has six district pages devoted to small areas of the town. "People tell me that they feel they know exactly what is happening down their actual road," the MP said. "Each small area has its own dedicated reporter."
But no longer. After 11 years, Mandy Leigh is taking redundancy, the terms of which are in dispute. She says she has no taste for the desk-bound recycling of press releases - dubbed "churnalism" by Nick Davies - that she sees as the only future. It is a bitter tale of an award-winning paper that has bucked the trend with a 1% rise in sales this year. But the cover price accounts for only 10% of costs and GMG says advertising revenue has "fallen off a cliff".
So what would it cost to keep a paper like this going? It turns out to be a difficult question. I asked several local editors in different companies but none knew their own accounts, advertising revenue or true costs. It was a question curiously missing from Ann Coffey's plea, although, as PPS to Alistair Darling, she is a Treasury denizen. The Stockport Express with its 15,000 paid copies costs about £1.2m to £1.4m a year to run (its freesheets complicate the calculations). Neither companies with shareholders, nor the Guardian with its trust can sustain such losses long.
The government talks piously of community engagement - and a newspaper with real journalism is the most vital local forum of all. Before the end of the year, every local paper will be into heavy loss: money unlikely to return in the good times. So how can they be saved, in print and online?
Mention subsidy and the regulation that goes with it, and newspaper groups cry press freedom. But some kind of local trust ownership is the best hope, if no one else can shoulder such losses. A summit in April with the business and culture ministries will draw in key players. But the Newspaper Society, representing the owners, is still in public denial, fixated on deregulation to allow the merging of loss-makers into bigger conglomerates. However, the efficiency savings wouldn't begin to cover the scale of this present crisis. To protect share prices the depth of this disaster must not be admitted.
So real progress may only be possible when many of them go undeniably bust. In truth, while some local papers are excellent, some are dross, not worth saving with a penny of public money. Many never bother to cover council meetings, let alone key committees, when pensioner-scaring crime stories are cheap and PR handouts plentiful.
But creating worthwhile local news is under discussion, using various funds. Bring in the money available from awful ITV local news. Add in some BBC money: their local news is shamingly bad too, partly because the area covered is too wide. Then oblige local councils to stop wasting money on their own Pravda sheets, and to buy space in clearly defined zones in their local news trusts. It might need a small subvention from council tax, too. Roll all this into a local trust with an obligation to good reporting, fair rules and open access, and you could have independent local news across web, print, radio and television offering a genuine community service. It is on the table.
But this is an emergency. Battalions of journalists with local knowledge are being sacked and newspaper expertise lost. Does the government have the imagination and capacity to create an environment where small, locally run independent trusts could flourish?
Meanwhile, the national press risks following American newspapers to the great spike in the sky. Britain without the Mail or the Sun would be a happier place, less biliously nihilist, less miserable, angry and afraid. But democracy without the scrutiny of good journalism is unthinkable. In the end, it's up to you. If you always read this on the web, go out and buy a copy, skinflint. Use it or lose it.
polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
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