What News?: The Market, Politics and the Local Press (Communication and Society)

A survey of the role and the future prospects of the local press in the 1990s. The authors also take into account the radical changes the local press have been through with new technology and the proliferation of free newspapers.
From the end of the First World War until the beginning of the 1970s, there was a remarkable uniformity and continuity in the British local press. Young people embarking on a career in journalism in the 1960s were schooled by the older professionals who began their working lives on newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s. Fundamental journalistic practices and news-gathering routines which they learned at that time, however, were not in essence different to those which they passed on half a century later: how to take accurate shorthand notes in a ring-backed reporter’s notebook; how to develop a garrulous but trustworthy source on the local council; the correct form of address for a bishop. In the 1960s typewriters would probably be small, portable, grey Olivettis instead of black-and-gold Remingtons, and there were probably new neon strip lights to illuminate the same dusty, paper-filled, smoky, linoleum-floored offices. Otherwise little had changed. There were some differences of practice. Most reporters no longer had to collect the names of mourners as they left the funerals of local worthies. Newspapers printed bigger pictures, and there were more of them.