I said this on FB earlier but to add to the wise words of @Paul_A_Foster and others on the paywall situation in local news and readers' response to it - this is very much a personal view (thread)

Even on today’s lower print circulation rates, if you went to Dragon’s Den with a product that was going to sell 20,000 units a day at 50p each, and attract extra revenue through advertising, events, sponsorship etc etc, the dragons would bite your hand off.

The problem is not that individual newspapers are failing. The problems come from them being subsumed by greedy groups whose bosses sat on their piles of cash and refused to look forward.

With its huge income from property advertising, Johnston Press and their ilk could have created Rightmove. For cars, autotrader online. It’s easy to say in hindsight but this was the job of the people at the top - to strategise, set direction, capitalise on what they had.

Instead, we were having endless conversations in newsrooms about policy - should we put this online? How about just the intro to tease? How about putting news online but hold back features for print? How should we use video?

We should not have been having these conversations in newsrooms up and down the land - there should have been a group strategy based on knowledge, risk, investment.

Instead when the bottom fell out of the ads they turned to staff cuts to save money, with the resulting drop in capacity and, despite everyone’s best efforts, quality and value. Now you have tiny teams of dedicated journalists run ragged and getting it in the neck from readers.

Personally
I think if you break up the group and start local news services as their own entities again, without the overheads and poor decisions of the those at the ‘top’, people will realise the quality and value, be willing to pay and there is a business model there.

Not one that makes millions for fat cats, but one which pays journalists for a job well done. These people are working so, so hard and for a lot of them it's a vocation rather than a paid job and they DO NOT DESERVE ABUSE.

I say all this having left the industry, but at heart I’m a hack and I have nothing but admiration, sympathy and support for all those in newsrooms (virtually) today who are having to put up with this shit through no fault of their own. ends. #localnewsmatters