Staff at Johnston Press face an uncertain future, following an uncertain past. It certainly is ‘business as usual’.

Johnston Press told staff at its 200 or so newspapers that it was ‘business as usual’ this week, when it announced the company was being put up for sale.

The announcement was the latest twist in a dramatic and unstable year for the company, which has so far seen shareholder pressures and in-fighting, followed by the departure of its CEO of seven years.

But it’s not just 2018 to blame for the troubles faced by the publishing company; instead, a legacy of mismanagement and poor decision-making laid the foundations for a fragile future.

As I come to the final year of my PhD project, which is analysing the impact of digital tools on production, identity and jurisdiction of regional newspaper newsrooms in the UK, I look back on the uncertain past and uncertain future of Johnston Press.

Two of Johnston Press’ top titles are the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post.

When Ashley Highfield was appointed CEO of Johnston Press in 2011, he made it his mission to move the local newspaper company firmly into a digital format, while still making print a top priority.

At the time of his appointment, a move he made from Microsoft, Highfield told The Herald newspaper that ‘print was not dead’ and that his vision was to move JP into an all-singing-all-dancing print and digital dream.

By anyone’s standards, this was going to be a tough job to pull off. Digital was still treated with mistrust by those in the industry and it was clear fewer people were buying newspapers – how could the future be rosy?

And he had a mountain to climb. As one rather restrained voice wryly commented on Hold the Front Page: ‘The first step towards the digital age for JP papers is admitting the current websites are not doing the job from any point of view.’

And they weren’t wrong. Up until that point, the vision and focus of the company in terms of digital had been confusing at best and cak-handed at worst. In the run-up to Highfield’s appointment there had been a rapid succession of top bosses trying desperately to navigate the challenges posed by the internet. This included a series of flash-in-the-pan attempts to make the company succeed in a quickly evolving online environment.

There was heavy investment in exceptionally expensive camera and editing equipment for most newspapers, including Sony video cameras, mics, tripods and Avid editing software – and yet no proper training or support was provided to help journalists with the skills they needed to shoot and edit videos.

And the infrastructure of newsrooms, the continual loss of staff who weren’t replaced and the hand-to-mouth production of news for a regularly printed product meant there was very little time for individual editors to mobilise staff who had the skills into producing video content.

And where was the money in video?

The question remained unanswered – because the answer was unknown.

In many newsrooms the heavy camera bags gathered dust, the editing equipment went untouched.

Twitter started making headlines, but staff were told not to give news away for free on social media. Then, in the space of about a year, newsrooms were told they had to become multimedia and put everything on the website and to promote it all on Facebook. There was very little guidance, policy or training. Journalists felt their way, making mistakes, getting to know the online audience, falling foul of trolls, fake news (usually rumour spread by the online audience), making mistakes and learning from them and stretching resources to the limit in order to run a daily news production unit with the same number of staff who had previously been working on a once-a-week printed title.

But where was the money online?

How could free online content make money? Especially when it was the same content as included in the printed, paid-for product. In newsrooms, the question went unanswered and the mistrust of digital methods deepened.

In the meantime, JP was letting staff go at an alarming rate – not just because of the rise in digital, but because of a debt the company had accrued in 2005 when it purchased a series of titles in Ireland for £96m.

The crippling debt was a struggle to pay back and the interest racked up. In JP’s 2011 financial report, produced shortly after Highfield became CEO, it was reported the company had generated an annual revenue of £373.8m – not bad, until the company debt of £351.7m was taken into account.

And, of course, there was additional burden due to the ongoing challenge posed by free or cheaper space online and the resulting decline in print advertising.

Titles merged or closed, print runs dropped, staffing continued to decline and newspapers became thinner. Circulations melted away.

Centralisation of journalists and sub-editors meant staff working on a weekly news title might be producing it from a number of locations, and often without setting foot in the locality being served by the title.

Content was shared and local columnists and reports were replaced by more generic features and news, often provided by PA or syndicated news agencies.

There was a significant step back from the front line of the communities being served, with offices closed and the buildings sold off or tenancies terminated.

Reporters had less time to leave the newsroom and titles turned to more contributed content, including press releases and photographs (many newsrooms had lost their photographic staff and had to rely on reader pictures, freelancers and the occasional staff photographer loaned from a larger sister title in the area).

To manage its resources JP trialled its Newsroom of the Future project in 2014. The project, which was rolled out company-wide the following year, saw formal centralisation of news teams and the division of ‘news’ and ‘community content’. Community content was produced by desk or home-based journalists who would work with contributed content like press releases and letters.

‘News’ was produced by another bank of journalists. The project later evolved to mean the jack-of-all trades expectation originally placed upon staff was reduced, with individual journalists taking responsibility again for specific tasks such as social media management, digital and website management and print.

During this time, newspaper websites significantly improved, especially for those titles which were still considered to be the best of JP. The daily and larger weekly titles which drew an audience saw heavy investment with their online offering – including a bank of digital staff, social media editors and investment into social media platforms like Facebook in order to offer the audience a better online viewing experience.

Online content became king. It drove news agendas, with viewing targets and audience figures becoming as important as print ABCs. Journalists were expected to use algorithms to determine their news agendas and to respond to popular online stories by producing more of the same.

And the investment was working; while print sales figures for JP continued to dramatically plummet, the online audience figures continued to rise healthily and steadily.

But, still, where was the money?

The eternal question of how to make money out of online was one of the key panic points prior to Highfield’s appointment. Was it through video? If so, how? How could online advertising generate the same cash as print? (it can’t). Could content be charged for?

In 2010 JP had tried introducing a paywall on the websites of some of its smaller titles. The pilot was a disaster. The sites chosen for the experiment were rarely updated prior to the paywall introduction and their audience figures were low. The paywalls failed and the experiment scrapped.

Advertising on stories and video was making some money for the company, particularly as online viewing figures increased. And when the audience was of an enviable standard in terms of size, the company launched a project to sell space on its social media platforms and websites to customers via the JP Local Business Plan. Essentially the project monetised content which would have previously have been used in a news capacity. Press releases were no longer used if they were seen as potential money-makers for the company (the Facebook story below is an example of this in action).

The company also rolled out other marketing and business solutions at different sites owned by the company.

By the time Ashley Highfield waved goodbye to JP in August 2018, the company was increasing its revenue and profit online via advertising and paid-for content.

But it still was not enough.

The story of the demise of Johnston Press is a sad one. It seems a bad decision was made at a spectacularly bad time and the company and its staff and customers have been paying for it ever since.

When JP announced it was putting itself up for sale yesterday the loan debt was standing at £220m.

JP has some wonderful titles. Titles which campaign, hold power to account, shout out for the underdog, connect audiences and people and which make a difference to local democracy. It has also lost some wonderful titles. And driven others into the ground by removing investment, staff and relevant content. Unsurprisingly those titles have lost their print sales hand over fist. And their online offering is a randomly updated mixed bag of content from larger sister titles, with the occasional locally relevant news story. It is not the fault of the journalists, editors or production staff, who work horribly hard with little reward.

Those lesser titles, the smaller ones, the uninvested in, are those at most risk from the JP sale. Who will want to buy a newspaper which is almost at the point of losing money?

And that’s where the problem lies.

The established flagship titles, which have enjoyed investment and are heralded as the jewels in the JP crown – the Scotsman, the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post, the Sheffield Star and the i – will be snapped up.

It’s the Pontefract and Castleford Express-type newspapers – which are already suffering due to a lack of dedicated staff, no presence in their towns, no investment and shared content – which will be left on the scrapheap.

It is sad and worrysome.

My prediction, for what’s it’s worth, is that the larger JP titles which have seen investment and done well in steering the tanker round to meet the company’s digital plan, will be sold off. The smaller ones will not. The company will be broken up and significant parts of rural England and Scotland may well find themselves without a local newspaper.

The buyer is unlikely to be Reach Plc (formerly Trinity Mirror), which has set up its own digital-only news platforms in some of the cities which already play host to legacy JP print titles (Edinburgh and Leeds). Reach continues to invest heavily in digital, whilst simultaneously pulling back from print publishing and investment – it is unlikley to want a series of print titles. However, Reach may offer to buy the digital-only part of the company in order to continue its roll out of ‘Live’ products, using the already established JP audience.

If this happend, it would be interesting to see what the Competition and Markets Authority made of the bid – after all, if Rupert Murdoch is not allowed to monopolise UK national news, should a publishing company be allowed to do the same in regional news?

The buyer is unlikely to be Newsquest, the smallest of the ‘big three’ regional publishing companies in the UK. Newsquest still seems to be struggling with its digital master-plan and its titles continue to close.

It is an uncertain past, followed by an uncertain future at Johnston Press. When the announcement of the sale was made this week staff were told to carry on and that it was ‘business as usual’. Sadly, following a decade of change and difficulty, this statement isn’t far from the truth.

October 12, 2018 1

Changing voices, attitudes and focus – Mojocon 2015

Authenticity over authority, consumer power over journalism qualifications and the importance of being there – three themes which were revisited again and again by speakers at the first ever Mojocon – mobile journalism conference – which was held in Dublin in March 2015.

Rather than this being an academic conference, at which theories, papers and research was presented, this was an industry event which explored the realities of mobile journalism in newsrooms across Europe, the USA and even further afield. But while there were representatives from countries as diverse as Norway, India and Australia and from news units including newspapers, television and digital start-ups, the themes which returned again and again were the same. The industry across the globe has been united by the same change caused by the same factors – technology development and availability, advertising revenue cuts, global economic downturn and dilution of impact due to myriad news providing options. No longer do journalists find themselves in a hallowed position, choosing and creating the news. Like it or not, as so eloquently phrased by keynote speaker Richard Sambrook of Cardiff University, ‘the consumer is firmly in charge”. And to be honest, the word ‘consumer’ was probably only used in that phrase due to a lack of suitable noun to describe the role now taken by that person – they are news gatherers, documenters, historians, sharers, seekers and consumers. They have the same technology needed to capture and upload breaking news as the journalist, and, being in the right place at the right time, they have the authenticity which whets appetites. Like it or not, journalists are finding themselves moving from being the news providers to being news curators by choosing and honing information provided by a much more authoritative audience. Michael Rosenblum hit the nail on the head when he said: “We make it you watch it is an old model,” adding: “Everybody participates”.

None of this is news to people who have been keeping tabs on journalism in recent years. But what was interesting about Mojocon was the impact and effect of this change – rather than pining for the past, delegates at Mojocon were looking to the future, sharing ideas and, it has to be said, salivating over shiny new apps, technology and toys. Long has this change been a painful process, a difficulty in acceptance, a denial and a doomful prophecy of an industry in crisis. But Mojocon showed the light at the end of the tunnel – at least for this particularly difficult stretch of the journey – with practitioners innovating and sharing and showing how brilliant things can be done with just an iPhone and a couple of handy apps.

Perhaps the presentation which best illustrated the path of change and things to come was that by Shadi Rahimi, a producer for Al Jazeera network AJ+. Her work documenting the Ferguson riots was not polished, it was raw, emotive, fast, immediate and utterly captivating. No voiceover telling the viewer the news and delivering edited sections to back up that choice, but instead voices of the event telling the story and carrying the viewer with them. It was obvious it had been filmed on a phone and similarly it was obvious why it had been filmed that way; no video camera crew would have had such intimate access to the action. This was the kind of footage which would captivate the longed-for youth which has so long been the target of news outlets across the world – it wasn’t dictatorial, it was truth.

What was missing from Mojocon was perhaps the evidence of curation of consumer material – while it was talked about significantly, the demonstrations of it happening were less present – perhaps at the next Mojocon we will see more of this in action.

April 7, 2015 1

Despite the BBC forecast, regional news is not dead

The BBC has been making headlines this week after publishing a report into The Future of News, in which it analyses the possibilities of news-making, opportunity and the direction that news provision and consumption might take over the next decade. It’s interesting and insightful but not altogether original and, dare I say it, shockingly smug.

In fact, the self-satisfied tone of what’s been produced almost makes me want to stop paying my licence fee altogether. Within the document, which sets out the importance of mobile devices, data journalism and quality community reporting, the BBC sticks a great big knife into the back of regional newspapers… and then stands back to watch with glee while its suffering rival splutters for life on the floor. Take this patronising paragraph for instance;

“Devolution and the decline of the regional press are creating a real need for local news coverage: the BBC is going to have to do more to provide local news that properly serves all parts of the UK. And the BBC has always been an innovator in news. The opportunities of the New Journalism are plain to see – in data journalism, personalised news services and engaging our viewers, listeners and users so we have genuinely activated audiences – and it’s time to do so again. In the internet age, the BBC’s job is to be the place people come to for the real story.”

Gone is the charade of a potential partnership with regional newspapers it seems – after all, why would the Beeb want to bother with that when it could simply step into the still slightly warm shoes of all the dying newspapers it is now trampling across?

I don’t disagree when the report states that: “The economic issues facing the newspaper business are not of the BBC’s making, nor will they be alleviated by the BBC standing aside.” The problems being faced by regional newspapers have little to do with Auntie; instead it’s a complex mix of digital technology, changing audience, lack of investment from publishing companies and devastating cuts – much of the decline of newspapers is down to the management at the very top.

However, the BBC has too quickly written off regional newspapers, they are not quite dead yet. What the report has failed to address is the online work being done by the depleted regional newspaper teams; while many papers have gone weekly they are producing good quality, up-to-the-minute news on their websites. When the report says:

“In 2012 Johnston Press announced it was stopping daily publication of the Halifax Courier, Northampton Chronicle and Echo, Peterborough Evening Telegraph, Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph and Scarborough Evening News, a newspaper which started its daily reporting in 1882.
Today in Scarborough there is a small commercial radio station, no daily newspaper and perhaps surprisingly, very little local or community blogging about the news. Considering the town
hit the national headlines earlier this month as its hospital declared a major incident, there were very few news boots on the ground to hold those responsible to account. Where did local people go to find out what was happening at their hospital?”

Erm, the Scarborough News website? Let’s have a look shall we…

Now I can’t go back in time, but a quick Google shows me the news surrounding the Scarborough Hospital major incident. Unsurprisingly the story was covered by several news outlets; the BBC and the Scarborough News being two of those.

While most of the nationals made it a major story once, both the BBC and the Scarborough News broke the story on the same day, returned to it the following day and then continued to revisit the story. While the BBC has since done an online feature about the situation at the hospital, the Scarborough News gave the most recent ‘news’ update; that an investigation was being held into what had happened. This demonstrates that the local ‘weekly’ paper did just as well as the BBC in covering the news as it happened, but also that it stayed with the story after the others had gone – continuing to inform the Scarborough readers of what was happening to their hospital. Just as you would expect a regional news provider to do.

So, thank goodness for the BBC, without it we would be living completely in the dark about what’s happening on our own doorsteps. Or perhaps not.

To explore the point further I went onto the BBC”s home page for Leeds and West Yorkshire just after 10am today and then went to have a look at a couple of daily newspaper sites so see what comparisons could be made.

This was the BBC’s home page:

Of the three top stories on the page, none had been published or updated today. In fact, the most recent thing on there, ironically, was the twitter feed which displayed a story from weekly Johnston Press title the Pontefract and Castleford Express which had been tweeted at 10.13am.

Let’s look at two daily regional titles for West Yorkshire, what was on their home page at this point in time?

The Telegraph & Argus, covering Bradford, was packed with stories from the day – including which schools were closed due to snow and a story and video of a runaway van which had caused chaos in part of the city that morning.

And the Yorkshire Evening Post – covering Leeds and West Yorkshire – had three top stories, all of which had been broken or updated that morning, two of which had video accompanying the words. Laughably, the video on one of the stories was preceded by a paid-for video advert for the BBC’s iPlayer (see below).

Now, coming from a weekly and daily newspaper background I know I could be a little over-sensitive to its content, but I also can’t help feel like the BBC is not only smug in its assessment, but also just downright wrong. Rather than kicking regional newspapers when they are down, perhaps more acknowledgement and credit should have been given to the good work that is being done and that could be complimented by better provision from the BBC in the future. Competition is healthy and good. Monopoly – even if it is dressed up as ‘saving the day’ – is not.

This report was about the future of news – and with the licence-fee not going away anytime soon, despite people using their televisions, laptops, smartphones and more to access news from myriad places – often NOT the BBC – and many paying subscriptions to other content providers as well, the corporation is perhaps being a little complacent in its ‘vision’.

We are paying for the BBC’s future whether we like it or not. But the future of newspapers is not as cut and dry; the revenue stream is still not nailed on, print circulations are declining and it’s likely many more will close in coming years. But some of the regional newspapers that exist today will continue to provide local content in new ways, reaching a growing audience through various platforms and continuing to try, despite the difficulties, to provide the best service possible. And I for one know they will continue to give the BBC the run for its money that it deserves.

January 30, 2015 3

How fast is valued over foundation in the world of social media news

This tweet made me laugh, and then it made me stop and think about how social media has changed the way news outlets respond to breaking news.

In the olden days (just a year or two ago) news organisations would get reports of an explosion from people on the phone, on email and perhaps on Twitter and Facebook too. The old mantra was to get as much information as possible, then phone the police and find out if the reports could be confirmed. As soon as that information was granted we would write a report for the internet which we would then share on social media. We would then update that report as the news changed. In an ideal world, the publication of this first report would take no more than ten minutes. But, in reality, it could take much longer, depending on the response from the authorities and how lively our website was feeling that day.

The old mantra also used to be ‘no point in publishing if you haven’t got anything to say…’ with the idea that established news organisations were better be late and informed, than rushed and flimsy.

Oh, how times have changed.

Now, the people using Twitter are the eyes of the world. As proved by this tweet, people on social media report a noise like an explosion in Manchester. Give the BBC ten minutes to get the story online and that’s ten minutes where people interested in finding out more have been searching, retweeting and clicking on any accounts of said loud noise. It doesn’t matter if those tweets being retweeted are from people who have sought to establish if the explosion has happened or not. Twitter doesn’t care if information is correct as much as it cares about information first. By the time the BBC tweets out its factually accurate news report, it has missed out on hundreds of hits, clicks and retweets and already it looks ‘out of date’.

So, what to do instead? If every cough, sneeze and loud bang that was tweeted was then picked up and reported on by traditional news sources then people would soon tire of the scores of mistaken explosions being reported inaccurately and would rightly accuse the BBC, or whoever, of trashy journalism based on flimsy sources. From experience, I would say this is a deciding line based on individual circumstances. The newsdesk has to make a snap decision about the ‘quality’ of the original report source before deciding if it’s worth pursuing. Usually there will have been at least three tweets from different people before calls are put in to the authorities and, depending on the potential severity of the situation, that’s when a decision will be made to put a ‘we are aware of a breaking news event, check here for more updates’ tweet and story online.

Where that story then goes is up to Twitter and the people using it (including other news providers, as proved by this tweet) – but the point is, if it’s a big tale, you were the first to break the story (even if it was a non-story at the time) and your tweet and tale will have people following you for the story rather than a rival.

Journalists are being forced to learn and adapt with the changes that social media throws at them and mistakes will sometimes be made along the way. It could have turned out these explosions were the start of something life changing. It in fact developed no further than a storm in a Twitter-tea cup – a prime example of how In the melee that is social media, traditional news sources are fighting to keep their place as the ‘go-to’ providers of information and more and more emphasis is being placed on speed over substance.

November 25, 2014 0

No ifs, no butts, Kim Kardashian is never going to break the internet – she IS the internet

Above: A meme parodying the Break the Internet Kim Kardashian Paper magazine cover

Anyone who has been online, or who, let’s face it, has stepped out of the house in the past couple of days, will have seen THAT picture of Kim Kardashian and her gigantic, shiny bottom (except my office room mate it turns out – but let’s gloss over that).

Just in case you have been elsewhere over the past couple of days though, the image I’m referring to is on the front of Paper magazine. It’s a cheeky picture (so to speak) of Kim Kardashian looking knowingly over her shoulder at the camera, wearing nothing but a pearl choker, long black gloves and a bottle and a half of Johnson’s Baby Lotion. Her famous derriere is on full display and seems more enormous than can be humanly possible on a woman whose waist is probably only the circumference of my head.

Beneath the image are the words: Break the Internet Kim Kardashian

It reads like a command. And we know it’s never going to happen as Kim is the internet. While some live or die by the sword, Kim lives or dies by the world wide web. And at the moment it is holding strong under the millions and millions of tweets, retweets and shares of this image and the thousands of memes which have been inspired by it.

If it wasn’t for Twitter, or the Daily Mail website, most of us wouldn’t have seen or heard of this image. Much less be talking about it. Most of us wouldn’t even know who Kim Kardashian is. Or care. The only reason we are talking about it (including me) is because everybody else is. It’s a self perpetuating cycle and an excellent illustration of the power of the internet and digital technology and the way that it has changed the way news is delivered – with readers and their appetites driving the news, rather than the news being prescribed to its audience by journalists. The one-way channel of news delivery is no more. And if you don’t believe me, check out these reports on the Kardashian bottom by respected industry titles including the Telegraph, the Independent and the Guardian. I don’t think any of these titles would have covered Buttgate if it wasn’t for the audience appetite for the story.

In a world where news and information fights to be seen alongside other news and information – important things; news of conflict, hope, death, human crisis, frailty, happiness and love – there is Kim Kardashian’s bottom and all that it stands for.

UPDATE: As an experiment to demonstrate the power of the subject, I measured the number of views I got on this page over the 24 hours from publication, with the prediction that it would be my most viewed post to date. Here are the results:

On publishing this post I promoted it in the way I have promoted all of my other blog posts – by uploading the link and a picture to my Rebecca Whittington Media Facebook page which I then shared on my personal Facebook account as well, tweeting about it twice on Twitter at the time of publication using appropriate hashtags and sharing the blog link on Linkedin the following morning. I deliberately didn’t promote more on social media than I have with any other posts so I could measure the impact of the story and keywords.

On Twitter the tweet reading ‘#KimKardashian #breaktheinternet a prime example of how digital has turned the tables on traditional news sourcing rebeccawhittingtonmedia.com/2014/11/13/no-…‘ was favourited, retweeted and replied to by one follower who himself had 1,810 followers. It was also retweeted only by another follower who had 587 followers. I have not looked to see if it was retweeted from either acccount – but if I do later I will update here.

On Facebook the post on my Rebecca Whittington Media page reached 201 people and the post link had 36 clicks on it. Two Facebook users (one being me) shared the post from the page. There were two likes on the post link from the page and two likes on the shared posts.

I can’t see the stats for my Linkedin profile as I’m too tight to pay for premium, so I will have to factor that non-result into the mix.

On returning to the blog today just before 4pm I found ‘No ifs, no butts’ – my sixth blog post to date – had enjoyed a total of 141 views. Previously my most popular post was You know it’s significant when you change your Twitter handle which had 57 views in total, followed by Board will strengthen the voice of newspapers – now time to start work on diversity with just 16 views. These are views of the individual posts alone – my blog page as a whole has had 45 views – suggesting the majority of views on the Kardashian post and some views of the Twitter handle post had come from either direct links from Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin or specific search terms which in turn had seen the post listed in the search results.

On the day of publication there were 129 views on the blog alone and 152 on my website as a whole. The views on my site were from the following countries:

Country	Views
United Kingdom	131
United States	12
Germany	3
Australia	3
Canada	1
South Africa	1
France	1

Out of those views 53 came from Facebook and 15 from Twitter with a further 10 coming from a Facebook source. Only one view came from a search engine term (term could not be identified).

Today there were 12 views on the post and 17 views on the website overall. The views on my site were from the following countries:

United Kingdom	13
Netherlands	1
Republic of Korea	1
United States	1
Singapore	1

Out of those views 3 came from Facebook and 1 from Twitter. Only one view came from a search engine term (term could not be identified).

CONCLUSION

Overall it’s definitely fair to say this experiment lived up to the prediction that this would be my most popular blog post by a country mile. As predicted, the inclusion of hot search terminology and popular subject (Kim Kardashian, butt/bottom) meant strangers from far and wide were flocking to see what the links had to offer. What did baffle me was how few people seemed to arrive through search terms. In fact, it was not fully clear from the data offered by Wordpress what the method was for 50 of the visitors to the page on the first day – only 79 were accounted for. This is something I would possibly be able to find out if I paid a subscription to WordPress, but, as I don’t, unfortunately it remains a mystery.

I was also quite surprised by how many of those visitors were from countries other than the UK. It’s obvious Kim Kardashian’s bottom knows no international boundaries.

Since the experiment I have enjoyed a raise in the number of daily visitors to my site, particularly from the US. However, what is interesting is that it’s not this post catching people’s attention, but instead is The Will Cornick dilemma which seems to be gaining the most individual visitors.

This has been an interesting experiment which has inspired a study I am now working on as part of my research project – I’ll update on this blog when I can reveal more.

November 13, 2014 1

Hyper-local: While the online debate continues, Made in Leeds marches onto our screens

Work has been going on behind the scenes between regional newspaper publishers and the BBC to allow all parties a satisfying slice of online hyper-local video sites. Well, according to Johnston Press CEO Ashley Highfield, that’s the case anyway.

Highfield said this week that JP had been in talks with the Beeb to come up with a solution to a problem that’s been lingering like a bad smell for several years now. The conundrum up until this point has been that in launching hyper-local sites the BBC would use its vast resource to monopolise a market which really belongs to someone else, thus probably putting already impoverished and super-stressed newspaper journalists out of a job. The fear was that Auntie would squash the work of regional newspapers in her mighty wake and really, it just wasn’t fair. The BBC, wanting to play nice did back off from its hyper-local plans (they were going to cost too much anyway) and then the bid was thrown out entirely.

But the Beeb still needed to do better, as did newspaper sites which were growing audience but not meeting the expectations of quality. Cue, a lot of behind the scenes jiggery pokery with exec types (and probably quite a few corporate lunches) to come up with a brand spanking new idea which would be just the ticket for everyone involved: shared content and platforms. Rather than the BBC setting out a lot of very expensive hyper-local sites which it would then have to grow an audience for from scratch, why not instead use the audience already provided by well-established local titles and their existing online visitors? This will allow newspapers with struggling staff and equipment resource but with well-established online audiences to share that valuable asset with the BBC in return for production-quality broadcasts made by the corporation being screened on their websites. And most importantly for business, both parties get to claim the shared audience as their own. The bosses will see this as a win win for everyone. But it’s likely that the journalists on the ground will have a different opinion – with questions over product identity and voice being just some of the hot topics up for discussion.

While everyone’s back has been turned focusing on hyper-local video something completely new has snuck into the mix. A hyper-local television station. Made in Leeds – a television channel made for, well, Leeds, launches today. The channel, which has been lauded on my own freeview set as ‘coming soon’ for a number of weeks now, is available to watch on Freeview 8, Virgin 159 and, later this month, Sky 117. But it has to be said, that is pretty much all I know. Despite having worked until last Friday for the Yorkshire Evening Post – the newspaper for Leeds – I have seen or heard very little of Made in Leeds. While the channel has been in the planning for at least three years, I don’t really know who the actual people are behind the production. I also don’t know what to expect aside from a 24 hour daily schedule or where it slots into the market. It appears Made in Leeds is doing a soft launch, presumably to iron out any immediate problems before the flock of vultures descend and start picking over its potential carcass.

Competition is not a bad thing. And Made in Leeds might be just what viewers in the city are looking for. It’s got a great studio and has, so I hear, employed a lot of young talent, many of whom will be fresh, enthusiastic and throwing themselves into every opportunity the channel provides. But I struggle to see where Made in Leeds fits into the existing mix. Is it pitching itself at students and culture vultures – like a televised The City Talking – or is it going up against big hitters like Calendar, Look North or BBC Leeds? Is it spreading itself too thinly with a 24 hour offering rather than focusing on eight hours of specifically targeted programming? And what about online? Much of the information I have found out about it so far has been via Google rather than its own website. It has an exceptionally large twitter following (6,232 at last count) but doesn’t seem to really have set out its stall. In this world of millions of media offerings vying for a limited audience’s attention – an audience which is more and more watching online rather than over traditional television sets – has Made in Leeds done enough to get people to sit down, switch on and stay tuned? I’ll certainly take a look when I get home tonight, but I’m yet to be convinced I’ll still be watching in six months’ time.

November 6, 2014 0