In my local market town, Thursdays have long been ‘Pig and Paper Day’. The market and newspaper were synonymous with each other; rewarding and enlivening the time and effort it took to come into town from the surrounding villages. Bustly and lively, it was a mid-week treat day: a little more colourful, a little more cheery and a lot more gossipy.
Though our 156-year-old print newspaper, Newbury Weekly News, and town market remain (still colourful, still lively), both have shrunk. Like so many others, our multi-award-winning local paper’s print readership (and with it, advertising revenue) is fading fast. I’ve been writing its Nature Notes column for the past two decades: weekly for 13 years, then fortnightly for the past eight. I shared the popular and much-loved Country Matters page with respected farmer Andrew Davis. After 884 pieces (and only one week off when I had one of my three children) I have written my last: with genuine regret, the editor informed us the paper could no longer pay.
Local newspapers, particularly rural ones, are a vital service to the community as well as a mirror, and their slow decline is an unquantifiable loss. Online news, peppered with shifting clickbait and distracting adverts, comes minus the letters pages, interviews, reviews, arts, columns and in-depth sports reports sent in from rain-soaked touchlines. That personal, present, long-form witness is lost; the one that pauses in a gateway to chat with its readership, its own community.
With fewer journalists, and around 90% of regional newspapers now owned by a handful of publishers, local news can become homogenised by press releases, spin and brevity; local names are spelt wrong, local history mistold or disregarded and feeling is misrepresented or overlooked. The news becomes sensational, competitive and polarising, rather than informative, reflective and supportive.
Community support
The letters page, however, is as lively as it has ever been, and much more nuanced than online comments. At least a week apart, there is a slower consideration to reading the replies – it’s a long conversation.
Like me, many of the reporters grew up with the county show pull-outs, the faces and names we recognise, know, are proud of and rooting for. Eleanor Gilbert, Countryfile’s Young Countryside Champion of last year, writes for the newspaper’s magazine. Others, new to the area, have found the quickest way to belong is through the local paper, that begins to serve them too.
Local newspapers, particularly rural ones, are a vital service to the community as well as a mirror, and their slow decline is an unquantifiable loss.
When we found ourselves blinking bewildered on the world’s stage, it was the local paper that carried us through, especially in a time of tragedy in our town of Hungerford in 1987. When a farmworker turned a pair of guns on his community, the local paper represented us all, with quiet strength and dignity, against the insensitivity of the national press.
My column has proved the best discipline and training ground, allowing me to represent our nature community: bearing witness, recording change, celebrating nature, mourning and challenging its loss.
There is still a huge demand for high-quality local journalism and digital news is evolving. But the paper is still the place I go to check what is most immediate and proximate to me; not only what affects us most, but how we can affect it. It’s where democracy starts, and otherwise silent country voices are heard. And though I shan’t see myself in that mirror directly anymore, I’ve had the most magnificent run.
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