Strike It Lucky

So, the cookie crumbles. An apt metaphor, but even more apt if you were to replace the word ‘cookie’ with ‘regional newspapers’ and ‘crumbles’ with ‘lost in a painstaking shit storm.’ And you know who’s fault this is, don’t you? It’s you, you moron, reading this, for free. Maybe you’ve borrowed someone’s iPhone to read this and connected to a wireless router at Heston services with no intention of contacting your nearest ISP to negotiate a drip feed of standing orders, freeloading broadband while you scope out Google’s latest apps while leaning on the news stands. Of course, it’s me too, writing this. I don’t get paid for this. Oh no. Because that’s a major part of the problem too, and where I share the sentiment of those Yorkshire Post staffers who have just started one of two four day strikes because of Johnston Press’ decision to enforce compulsory redundancies at two of Yorkshire’s most treasured institutions - one of which being the Yorkshire Post itself, Britain’s first daily newspaper which dates back to the middle of the 18th century.

Of course, they didn’t know a blog from a banana in those days, and if those first burgeoning journalists were paid it was probably only in recompense for catching a sniff of Pitt the Elder’s hair piece. The fact is, nowadays, you don’t need to spend your pocket money on regional news when you can open three separate Firefox tabs and read about death and taxes on any number of up-to-the-minute, non-committal and, yes, free websites. And there are too many trainee journalists who are quite content to type on a voluntary basis to ‘expand their portfolios,’ and not receive a penny. If I was a cigar-chomping media tycoon pitching copy from my own swivel chair, particularly in such testing times (no more MFI, like, what the hell is going on?), I’d tap up every university this side of the River Aire, get freshers in as errand monkeys, ditch the editorial staff altogether and sell, sell, sell…

There’s a problem here, of course, because if you downgrade the quality of an already established, trusted and, above all, local institution, particularly one with an honest reputation of journalistic integrity dating well over 250 years, then you’re merely producing a substandard, down graded product which would never be able to compete with the constant Twitters and serial bloggers that caused this bloody panic in the first place. The Yorkshire Post looks set to lose some brilliant, hard-working and experienced local journalists as a result of this, and it’s sad, because despite what you may have read (online, probably), regional media is not dead. Heavens, no. It just needs some new apps.