Local newspapers
Bourne is a small market town with a population of around
15,000 and yet it is well endowed with local newspapers but whether
these newspapers serve us well is another matter.
Five circulate in our
area and I find their coverage as varied as their advertising for it
is quite obvious that most, in varying degrees, put revenue first
rather than to inform their readers about the events in their
community which in past times was seen as the first duty of such
publications.
Advertising is necessary for a newspaper to survive because this
revenue meets the bulk of its costs while the cover price in most
cases is eaten up by circulation expenses. But publishers should not
lose sight of the fact that although they must attract advertising,
it is the editorial that sells a newspaper, the sugar coating on the
commercial pill, and if the column inches devoted to local affairs
are cut at the expense of advertising, then we must question the
validity of the publication.
This is the main criticism of the Herald and Post,
an advertising publication masquerading as a newspaper, full of
syndicated features and token stories from the locality with little
effort being made to tell us what has really been happening in our
town in the past seven days. It is actually based in Peterborough
and one glance through its thirty or more pages each week will
reveal that its heart in not with the church groups or the voluntary
organisations, the scouts and the guides, the schools, the youth
clubs and the charities, but with the estate agents and the second
hand car salesmen who take page upon page in an attempt to sell
their wares. This newspaper is also given away free, popped through
most letter boxes each week whether we want it or not, and so I
suppose we cannot grumble about something we do not have to pay for.
The Lincolnshire Free Press is an old established newspaper
and part of a large publishing group but it based in Spalding and is
therefore mainly concerned with events in that town and district
although it likes to keep a foot in Bourne. Its pages usually carry
several stories from the area but it is hard to shake off its
Spalding provenance and there is no attempt at a complete coverage
of our affairs. Property sales fill the bulk of the advertising
pages and there are many who buy it while house hunting.
The only evening newspaper that circulates in Bourne is The
Telegraph although this is purely a token appearance as far as
local coverage is concerned. Stories of people, places and events
from the district are rare but it is very lively and extremely
readable and as it covers a large catchment area around Peterborough
of which Bourne is a part, then it is a welcome addition to our
regular digest of news. But do not look here for a wedding report of
the girl next door or for details of a funeral or garden fete
because The Telegraph is very selective in what it prints and
the mundane takes second place to the sensational. You will not find
mention of hatches, matches and despatches in its editorial columns
although like all newspapers, they will be happy to carry such
announcements for a price in their public announcements section
under Births, Marriages and Deaths. This newspaper is based in
Peterborough and as a young reporter in the early 1950's, I worked
for its embryo publication the Peterborough Evening Telegraph,
then just a two-page slip edition inside its big brother which was
published in Kettering but The Telegraph has grown up since
those days and is now a very professional regional evening newspaper
by any standard.
By far the biggest weekly to circulate in Bourne is the Stamford
Mercury, a local edition of Britain's oldest newspaper founded
in 1695. Recent issues have been around 100 pages and although
little editorial extends beyond the centre fold where human interest
collides with commercialism, its size is trumpeted from the masthead
with slogans like "Bourne's Biggest Weekly Newspaper" and
"More than three times the size of some ordinary weekly
papers", the latter an obvious reference to their more puny
rival but then bigger is not always better as we shall see. But it
is produced in Stamford and this is evident because there is a very
strong bias towards that town, something that is always reflected in
the Letters Pages, although the news coverage for Bourne is
excellent, including that from the outlying villages, and the layout
extremely good with many pictures, some of them in colour. Overall
this is a most presentable newspaper and one that we in the trade
would call a very good read.
And so we come to The Local, an oddity when it was launched
as the Bourne Local in October 1989 and one that I thought
would not survive. But I have been pleasantly surprised because this
is a newspaper that clings to the old values of district reporting,
where people matter more than events, and so we find it full of
names, wedding guests and mourners at funerals, club officials,
prize winners, footballers, cricketers and anglers, mums and dads
and children, people, people, people. I started my career in
journalism on a weekly newspaper and the edict from my editor was
that every name used was a reader who bought a copy of the newspaper
and so we should mention everyone and it was a perilous mistake to
leave anyone out.
The Local may only be a mere twenty-eight or, on
occasions, thirty-two
pages, but it is punching its weight and in the short time it has
been on the scene has earned its place on the news stands and is a
favourite in many homes. It certainly gives the most comprehensive
coverage of weekly events in and around Bourne and were more
advertising to come its way, it could afford to expand in size. The
newspaper has far more local business and classified advertising
than any of its competitors and yet no estate agents appear to use
its columns and fewer second hand car agencies than in the others
but then an independent publication such as The Local cannot
compete with the syndicated rates and circulations offered by its
competitors and their companion house publications. If these
advertisers were to overcome their misgivings on this score, they
might well discover that The Local would take their product
into far more homes than they realised and Bourne would find itself
with a sizeable local newspaper that feared competition from no one.
What then would I tell a visitor to the town who asked which was the
best newspaper to buy, the one that would accurately reflect what
was going on in our community? I would most certainly recommend The
Local, because it is crammed with the minutiae of life in a
small town and one issue would mirror a week of our activities. But
in addition, I would suggest buying the Stamford Mercury for
its professionalism and extensive advertising. I would also say
unequivocally that there was no need to read the other three and in
time, if The Local were given a favourable wind, perhaps the Stamford
Mercury may also become redundant although the latest
intelligence is that they are fighting back and may soon open an
office in the town. NOTE: The local newspaper are
reviewed every week in the Bourne Diary.
REVISED AUGUST 2004
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