ABSTRACT
After a brief historical review, this chapter looks at the current state of one of Britain’s most treasured artefacts – the local printed newspaper – and points the way towards the likely future. As with national printed newspapers, the evidence is overwhelming: rapidly declining sales and radical cost-cutting exercises indicate the daily local printed newspaper will soon be dead. Not only that, but there has been a failure to both prepare and then adapt to the new media landscape. Responding far too late to the online revolution, the conglomerates, who hesitated to invest and still offer user-unfriendly, PR-dominated and print-heavy online sites, face increasing challenges from a new breed of independent local journalism. This does not mean that more considered printed assessments – perhaps a weekly digest and analysis of the last seven day’s events – will not continue and perhaps even prosper. But those who insist upon the continued health of the Evening Herald et al. (and there are many within the industry who do so) are ignoring the evidence.
