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Local Media

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton, and to give a speech that I did not know I was going to deliver when I entered this cavernously empty Chamber. Given that we have two and a half hours together this afternoon, I would like to use the opportunity to praise the Minister and congratulate him on his appointment. He is a noble and elegant member of the Government, and I am looking forward to working with him when I can, scrutinising him in infinite detail and helping him to do his job to the best of his ability. It is good that he has published the response to the Select Committee's report last year on local media, but I suspect that it has only just gone to the Table Office. He is new to his job, so I shall not be pedantic and complain about that, but he will understand that we have not had time adequately to read the report and respond to it. Perhaps we will have a chance to do so in another forum. The figure that worried me most in the Minister's speech was that from the OECD of a 26% fall in print advertising revenue this year. That illustrates the huge structural problems that local, regional and national media face in the United Kingdom. They are structural because of the internet, which is the most disruptive technology for many centuries. It is hackneyed to say that it is as disruptive as the Gutenberg press, but it is important that we, as policy makers, understand some of the characteristics that the internet gives us when responding to the challenges in local media. I hope to sketch out a few of my concerns in that area. The Minister talked about advertising revenue as a prime example of why advertising models for newspapers are now in such trouble. A great man called Craig Newmark, who invented Craigslist, looked at the classified ads in American newspapers and thought they created an imperfect marketplace because people could not find all the goods that they wanted to purchase, and people trying to sell goods could not find all their potential purchasers. He found a digital solution and founded Craigslist, the vast majority of which offers free classified advertising. Having started his endeavour with no idea of how he would make the model pay, he created a small revenue base, based on advertising real estate in selected American cities. Craigslist is one of the biggest and most successful global websites. Craig Newmark understood the power of network growth, which is killing newspapers' revenue models today. We are almost in a commune of despair when it comes to considering how we can retain a strong, rigorous local news base in the UK. None of us has the answers to the hugely disruptive models that the internet gives us. The lessons that we, as policy makers, must learn is: if we do not have the answers, let us not make it harder to find them. One thing that worries me—my position is probably slightly ironic in my party—is that if one does not know an answer, the regulatory models that are then devised may make the problem worse, not better. I hope that in years to come, the one thing that we can share an interest in is trying not to be too prescriptive with our regulation. The two Front Benches will probably be in despair at my wittering on about the Digital Economy Act 2010, but I believe that if we are honest with each other, it managed the politics of decline for some of the old publishing models that are now completely challenged and almost washed away by the internet. Governments must sometimes step in and protect industries that are transforming themselves, and that is fine, but I suspect that the Act has made it harder, not easier, for publishers to find solutions. The simple truth of the internet is that scarcity cannot be enforced, as used to be possible in print media, and local newspapers have found it difficult to find solutions. There are some things that communities do on the internet from which lessons can be learned. It enables people easily to form groups. They may coalesce around a brand, a journalist or a newspaper group, so that what a newspaper does and its component parts are vital to its future success. A classic example is the Daily Mail's Jan Moir, who chose to write a vicious article that resulted in 25,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission when people uprose digitally and formed a community. I believe that harmed the Daily Mail brand. A good pioneering local newspaper that distinguishes itself in a niche market by being the only creator of local news and has a track record of integrity, honesty and checking facts can manage transformation in the digital space, but it must understand the power of its brand. The Minister referred to the Wantage and Grove Herald, which mistakenly made an editorial decision to put his expenses on the front page. How would a newspaper respond to that? The country's biggest-selling regional newspaper—the Express and Star—is in my constituency. It is—dare I say it?—a classically run newspaper with strong news values, and when one turns a page one knows whether one is reading a news story or a comment piece; it does not have editorialised new pages. Editorially, it backs a political party—the Minister's party—but its news coverage is studiously impartial. It refuses to take off-the-record or unattributed briefings; everything is on the record. When it makes a mistake, it apologises and puts it right. When I appeared in the Express and Star accused of claiming for a 69p pair of rubber gloves and a tree surgeon, it apologised and put the matter right by explaining that it was in fact my neighbouring MP who had made those claims. That is why the Express and Star has managed to stand up against some of the forces that have been unleashed in local newspapers better than others. It has strong values which result in a loyal readership. Another matter that newspapers should understand is the power of communities. They could collaborate with their readership more than they have. We all take part in some form of collaboration. Most hon. Members have columns in our local newspapers, and it is far easier in a digital age to build a more participative relationship with readers. I hope that the Government will play a role in helping to facilitate that. In our report, we did not discuss in depth whether there is a role for the Government to provide not a technology fund, but technology advice to old-school newspapers in the analogue sector moving through the transition to the digital age. Perhaps one of the most worrying parts of the mix in the newspaper industry now is that when it has had to cut back, it has done so on news journalism to such a degree that it cannot cut the staff any more, so it is turning on higher-paid technologists and making it harder to handle the digital age. If the Government have a role in partnership, it could be in the technology sector. I cannot end my rather rambling contribution without referring to the report's reference to the Hammersmith newspaper. What united both wings of the Committee was that we were almost stupefied that a local authority could produce a weekly newspaper containing pizza advertising and—I will not refer to cranky religious advertising—all sorts of dubious advertising without any social policy on that. The only people from the council who were allowed to appear in the pages of the newspaper were the elected Conservative cabinet councillors; the poor Conservative back-bench councillors were not even allowed a voice. The paper had such a dominant place in the local market that it would be impossible for a commercial rival to set up and produce an alternative form of news. It could not possibly have held the local authority to account.