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Local Media

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea. I am grateful that the Minister is here to respond to the debate. He and I usually discuss high technology issues, but today we will talk about low technology and local newspapers in print form. I am pleased to be able to talk about the importance of local media to small towns and cities. Stevenage has a number of media outlets, including The Comet, the Stevenage Advertiser and Jack FM—a good local radio station on which I will be holding a phone-in surgery on Saturday, because it has a wide impact in the local community and reaches many people. The importance of local newspapers to small towns and cities lies in community cohesion. They are valuable assets to local communities. In my area, they report everything from Stevenage football club's meteoric rise from non-league football two seasons ago to league one and its furthest ever placement last week against Tottenham in the fifth round of the FA cup at White Hart Lane, where it unfortunately lost, to stories about the Rainbows, the Guides, grass-roots football and other small local charitable organisations that have no opportunity to put forward their message elsewhere. I am pleased to be able to support local newspapers and media outlets. I want to talk about some facts. We know that 33 million people in this country read a local newspaper every year. We also know that there are thousands of titles—well over 6,000—that 71% of adults read a local newspaper and that 14 million more people read a local newspaper than read a national newspaper. Local newspapers have a huge spread in local communities.