This section will look at local newspapers in the pre-internet era of 1979 to1994 to establish a benchmark for later discussion about how local news gathering was traditionally organised and how it has changed. Central to this discussion will be my positionality statement, which represents primary research outlining my experience of local news reporting and production in the final years of the pre-internet era. It will help identify aspects of the ‘parent culture’ which existed during this era that have
subsequently been revived and repurposed by independent hyperlocal operators. It will also contextualise later discussions, in section two, by showing where the ‘mainstream’
was situated at the start of a 40-year period and underpin examples of how it has changed.
The period in question has been selected because it is the era during which I worked mainly as a staff journalist during what has been identified as the ‘newsroom centric’
industrialised era of local news production (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2009; Picard, 2014; Deuze and Witschge, 2018). For a period in the mid-80s I edited my own independent niche magazine, DRESSAGE, so my experience could be described as entrepreneurial journalism (Rottwilm, 2014; Harte et al, 2016: Wagemans et al, 2016; Singer, 2017), yet also encompasses aspects of ‘zine-culture’ or ‘alternative media’ (Worley, 2015). The period in question begins in September 1979 when I started as a junior reporter at the Kent Messenger Group (Now KM Media Group) and finishes in October 1994 in Ayrshire, Scotland, when as a senior reporter/sub-editor I took redundancy following a buy-out of Guthrie Newspapers Ltd by the Romanes Media Group; this group was in turn purchased by Newsquest Plc in May 2015 (Ramsay and Moore, 2016: 47). In a move that was characteristic of the era, my new employers were looking to cut costs by
replacing senior journalists with juniors as part of an ‘economies of scale’ restructure. As Peter Cole remarks: ‘Cost-cutting is not restricted to economic downturns; it is a
constant fact of life …many weekly papers are produced by newsrooms consisting mostly of trainees’ (2006: 82). At this point I would like to state that my redundancy in 1994 was welcomed and I thus have ‘no axe to grind’. I moved back to Kent from
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Scotland, started a family and observed the changes that took place in local news production from 1995 onwards from a safe and detached distance.
The period of my positionality statement offers insight for my research because in many respects the 1980s and early 90s were the end of an era. Media economist Robert Picard states that ‘For more than a century news has been produced within an industrial mode of production’ (2014: 491). This industrial mode of local news production,
epitomised by print media, was the default throughout my career in local newspapers and is reflected in my subjective narrative. Hand-in-hand with this industrial process was a high level of what Seth C. Lewis calls ‘professional control’ (2012: 837). As he reflects:
For much of the twentieth century, both the business model and the professional routines of journalism in developed nations were highly stable and successful enterprises because they took advantage of scarcity, exclusivity, and control.
(ibid: 838)
At that time the route into journalism was controlled and ‘the newsroom’ was the dominant form of employment and organisation (Deuze and Witschge, 2018: 169). In 1979 trainee reporters were employed from the local community, often straight from school, and became ‘indentured’ as apprentices (Mair, 2013: 21- 26). As part of the professionalisation of the role trainees were sent on National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) college courses to learn news writing, law, public administration and shorthand. During the industrialised era trainees learned the trade of reporting from senior staff, initially ‘shadowing’ them to Magistrates court, council, inquests and on press calls; then after the NCTJ training graduating to reporting alone. For most of my time at the family owned independent Kent Messenger Group (now KM Media Group), I worked at the Ashford office which produced two paid-for papers, the mid-week paper Tuesday Express and the flagship weekly title the Kentish Express (KE), which was heavily editionalised with targeted local content; a process that Küng calls ‘zoning’
(2008: 37). There was a large editorial staff: editor, deputy editor, news editor, chief reporter, 10 reporters, four sub-editors, two sports reporters and four photographers, the paper was printed 25 miles away at KM headquarters at Larkfield, near Maidstone. As well as general reporting duties, I also had my own ‘patch’, Tenterden about 12 miles from the KE office. Initially I lived outside the circulation area but then moved to between Ashford and Tenterden. There was also a large non-editorial staff which included
advertising staff. By the time I left in 1983 the number of employees had shrunk by about a third and we had moved to a smaller office.
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Former local newspaper editor David Jackman writes of making ‘press calls’ several times a week either in person or over the phone to police and fire stations (2013: 249), which was customary in local journalism in the 1980s. Peter Cole sums up the vital lessons that were instilled during this workplace training: ‘the importance of accuracy, of knowing and interesting the audience, of maintaining contacts who would tell them things. And they would learn the crucial importance of trust’ (2006; 75). The emphasis on face-to-face reporting in the community during this era cannot be over-stated, offline reciprocal journalism (Lewis et al, 2014) was a daily occurrence. As part of the pre-internet strategy of ultra local coverage, journalists worked in district offices, situated on local high streets where members of the public could walk-in off the street and submit news stories by speaking to a reporter (Jackman, 2013: 247-252; Howells, 2015: 179-185). They could also pay for an advert, buy photographs, bring in a letter to the editor or even complain face-to-face about a published news item. Reciprocal exchanges
between journalists and the community that reinforce mutually beneficial relationships, is a concept that forms part of the theoretical frame work (Lewis et al, 2014; Lewis, 2015;
Harte et al, 2016) and I maintain that during my career there was evidence of these relationships existing at the ultra-local level. Although as Peter Cole recounted such a close relationship with the audience could also backfire, it meant that if a story caused offence there was nowhere to hide:
Unlike their here-today-far-away-tomorrow counterparts on the national press, they [reporters] would know that if they upset a member of the local community by getting it wrong, or sometimes by getting it right, he or she would be on the phone to the editor or at the front desk the next day complaining and saying ‘I’ll never talk to the reporter again’. It was a tough grounding, and while it could hardly be described as glamorous it instilled the basic skills and realities of reporting life. (2006:75)
In her PhD thesis, Journey to the centre of a news black hole: examining the democratic deficit in a town with no newspaper (2015), Rachel Howells found that the closure of district offices was a turning point for local journalism and signalled the withdrawal of journalists from the community (2015: 281- 286). Offline reciprocity appears to be alive and well in internet era independent hyperlocal operations according to Harte et al who discovered that like pre-internet reporters: ‘hyperlocal publishers engage with people offline through embedding themselves in everyday places in their communities’ (2016:
172).
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