This week I welcome a cross-party Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Select Committee’s report into the sustainability of local news, which calls on the Government to prioritise independent news publishers.
The long-awaited report has dived into the state of local news across the country and has been quite damning of larger publishers stating “some of the approaches of the largest publishers may be reducing the quality of the local journalism produced by their titles”. The report has also found government and industry support for local journalism tends to disproportionately benefit those same larger, corporate publishers at the expense of new titles. That won’t come as a shock to anyone, I’m sure.
A number of recommendations have been made with MPs saying more must now be done to ensure that support reaches smaller publishers of local news, and digital markets legislation must enable news sites to negotiate a fair commercial relationship with online companies that host their stories, such as Google and Meta. There is already something in the pipeline with Google for Island Echo…
This week’s report also states there should be an audit of public money that supports local news and an analysis of whether this could be distributed more fairly. There are also calls for new tax incentives for public interest news and the encouragement of more philanthropic funding.
I have to disagree with the committee’s recommendations for local notices to stay in print though. Significant amounts of public money is being spent to publish these notices in newspapers – such as roadworks, licencing etc. – when they can be published online for free. In fact, Island Echo has published the weekly roadworks list for years!
The Isle of Wight is a good place to start when looking at the local news sector and how the above recommendations should make a difference. The Isle of Wight has a population of just 140,000 but has 4 main news websites, 2 newspapers, 2 radio stations and a plethora of magazines and other printed publications. We’re certainly not a ‘news desert’ – in fact, it’s the complete opposite. That’s great news for Islanders.
We all know where printed publications are heading, the writing is on the wall and it’s unlikely that it will change now the train has left the station and is hurtling down the tracks towards the end of the line. When it comes to digital news though it is a completely different picture. It’s a closely fought market space with a battle over who can break a story first to get that click… but you only have to look around to see that things are changing – and it’s in our favour.
Our long-established competitors are smaller now than they have ever been and it’s really very unclear what the future holds for the makeup of Isle of Wight news, with the situation constantly changing – especially in the past 10-and-a-bit years Island Echo has been around. It is clear to see that Island Echo with its small editorial team is making huge strides forward, despite the lack of Government support and multi-million-pound backing.
I was once featured in an opinion piece labelled ‘do we want it first, or do we want it right?’ which ridiculed Island Echo for its approach to news reporting, an approach that everyone else now seems to follow. And I can see why… it works! We are riding on the wave of another bumper year with over 30 million page views served in 2022, which has put us in a very good position to the point where we are now looking to recruit another journalist. But no matter how well we are doing here on the Isle of Wight, the whole market is constantly shifting and we have to be aware of the bigger picture…
As mentioned above, the report by DCMS has found that many independent news publishers like ourselves argue that corporate publishers overwhelmingly, and disproportionately, benefit from the various forms of industry and government support for local journalism, despite some of them being highly profitable companies. This was most evident during the COVID pandemic when £35million was spent on an advertising campaign entitled ‘All in, All together’ (not a penny of this was distributed our way).
But this new report may finally mean that the playing field is levelled and independent publishers – who, like we are, outperform their larger competitors – get a fair bite of the cherry.
You should be immensley proud of what you have achieved Darren.
If only you knew.
The Echo is a wonderful news provider for Islanders.
Some criticise a few reports which need to be produced at speed to get important info out to the readers as quickly as poss, so a few errors should be expected. It is not as though larger media platform never get it wrong sometimes either.
My ONLY concern is, should you get ‘more funding’ and help, then it is often the case that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Once accepting such, imo it is likely that the pressure will be on by any providers to ‘change’ the format, more adds, curtail and censor even more of your views and more importantly the readers comments, which without censorship give a far more honest view of what Islanders ‘really think’.
Love it as is.