Thursday, March 19, 2009
Free Tonbridge Press....
I was speaking to my mole at the Courier yesterday and it seems that they are having big problems over at Courier HQ. In last weekend's paper you may have noticed that the management sneaked in an announcement about job cuts and more office closures and that they are folding the Focus free sheet as of next week (not that anyone will miss that three minute read!) It seems that there is more to it and that the office in Sevenoaks for the Chronicle is to be closed and much of the sub editing, design and backroom staff are to be moved to new offices in Chelmsford. So the Sevenoaks Chronicle is to be written from Tunbridge Wells and designed and edited in Essex. Ditto the Tonbridge edition of the Kent and Sussex Courier. (Make that the Kent, Sussex and Essex Courier and the way they are going on Surrey, Suffolk and Hampshire!) Surely this has all gone a step too far; how can these papers be local papers any more. Don't local papers need a constant ear to the ground in the town which they're reporting on. Even the best of their reporters won't be able to achieve truely local stories of any depth by holding a weekly "surgery" in the library. It just won't work. What they'll end up doing is going more and more down the well trodden route of relying on stories coming to them. By the nature of things these stories tend to be PR led. Have a read through the so-called "stories" in the paper (any paper for that matter) and see how many of them mention some company, charity, event or organisation. That usually is the main source of the story; quite a scarey prospect if you think about it. It's called lazy journalism, they get their stories by sitting on their backsides and the PR companies feed them information to get exposure for their clients. It's not how it should work, but the reality is that this is how it increasingly does work and the Courier's short termist strategy only serves to exacerbate this process. TonbridgeBlog has said this before but isn't it time to bring back the Tonbridge Free Press? Actually the Courier group still own that brand name but I'm sure they'll sell it to someone for a few pence. After all they clearly have no further use for it!...
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5 comments:
Chelmsford is not to bad: It could have been India, at least there are some jobs left in the UK.
With todays technology it probably does not mattere where the back room is.
It is a shame but then they never really improved.
The paper just has got worse, not the fault of the journalists but the people in charge. It is hard to get into journalism anyway and not everyone wants to move. As you say, it's mostly PR journalism cribbed from a press release. I expect like a challenge but weren't allowed to leave Tunbridge Wells much due to time/costs.What I did like were their 'campaigns' so they could do a bit of investigative journalism. I think lots of people don't read much anyway so even if they put something interesting in the market isn't there so much. I would also say that most broadsheets seem to be 'the same now', same stories but a different writer, sometimes they even have the same Headlines, same top story. It is all very lazy. I expect eventually they will all go online.. and perhaps the journalists would write from India about Tonbridge.
Petrolstationvillage -still struggling with Blogspot
I wrote that when I was tired.. so lots of typos! It is late at nite and I should be curled in bed in jimjams. I should not be ranting on Tonbridgeblog!
Petrolstationvillage/hildenboroughblog/anonymous: I think all you have to do is log on first before you try to comment. Try that and report back....
I stopped buying the Courier several years ago, as apart from the Letters Page there was precious little of interest in it. I'm not surprised at the recent moves within the group, Meridian TV have done something very similar.
Incidentally I would have thought that shutting down local news-offices contravenes the conditions of their original franchise, which was supposed to provide local news for each of the three aeas witin the Meridian region (Kent & Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire). As ITV themselves though are in a bit of a mess I don't suppose much will happen about it.
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