Tories: We'll save your local paper
Thursday, 26 March 2009 2:06 PM
By Ian Dunt
The Conservatives have launched their plan to save struggling local papers, which have been shutting down at a staggering rate before and during the recession.
The party will conduct a review bureaucratic regulations around the ownership of local newspapers and will allow local newspapers to consolidate, both with each other and across platforms into online, TV and radio.
Tory leader David Cameron said: "Local papers are closing and staff are being made redundant in the face of falling advertising revenue and competition from the internet and local authority free sheets.
"That's why today the Conservative party is going to announce plans to sweep away the bureaucratic rules that mean that a rigid law decides who owns what bits of the media in local communities."
The party wants local newspapers to have the freedom to develop new business models which replace lost revenue from a falling advertising revenue with a focus on digital journalism.
"The current rules were established in a pre digital era," said shadow media secretary Jeremy Hunt.
"It is now time to allow new industry models to emerge that will encourage investment not just in local papers but local online services and new local TV companies."
But the National Union of Journalists hit back at the proposals, saying they would do nothing to solve the problems facing quality journalism.
NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: "This looks like a policy that has been rushed out in response to calls by media owners who are simply looking to make even more cuts to our already limping local press.
"These plans fail to deal with the problems facing local journalists.
"Consolidation of media ownership has meant office and title closures; it has meant journalists taken out of their communities, fundamentally undermining their ability to do their jobs well," he added.
"The Conservative response to these problems seems to be more of the same.
"The Conservatives might see media regulation as burdensome red tape - but it is what ensures people have access to varied media and different voices."
The media is being hit hard by the recession, together with the advent of web journalism, free newspapers and a seemingly terminal decline in advertising revenue.
The latest ABC figures for February, which reveal the sales figures of national newspapers, continue to show a severe decline in readership.
Earlier this week, the Daily Mail and General Trust announced 1,000 jobs would be cut this year at its regional newspaper division Northcliffe - twice the number announced in November.
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