That’s what the Manchester Evening News are proposing to do. They’re using CoverItLive. Here’s their coverage of Trafford Council meeting on the 2nd December.

Now I’ve used CoverItLive a few times and its settings (if I recall correctly) can and usually do pick up anyone’s tweets. How long before Councillors cop on to this? And local pressure groups? And will someone come up with some stupid rule that says that councillors shouldn’t be using council-supplied phones to sent tweets? And will some tedious pressure group say that councillors aren’t doing their job properly because they’re too busy fannying around with Twitter?

Worth watching, I think?

In today’s Guardian, (and here with footnotes) George Monbiot asks:

“I can think of only two local newspapers that consistently hold power to account: the West Highland Free Press and the Salford Star. Are any others worth saving? If so, please let me know.”

His observation ….

“Most local papers exist to amplify the voices of their proprietors and advertisers and other powerful people with whom they wish to stay on good terms. In this respect they scarcely differ from most of the national media. But they also contribute to what in Mexico is called caciquismo: the entrenched power of local elites. This is the real threat to local democracy, not the crumpling of the media empires of arrogant millionaires.”

… is strikingly similar to Helen Swaffer’s line that…

“Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertiser’s won’t object to.”

In no lesser a place than the Washington Post, there are arguments for state-sponsored journalism. Here’s my question: Should local authorities be asking for powers – and the ability to raise funding – to offer subsidies for responsible independent newspapers?

Can this be done in a way that ensures independent reporting?

A hole in the road. From the Digbeth hyperlocal site. Published on a creative commons licence (click for credit).

So: It’s now official. Local authorities are going to be obliged to promote democracy (and the bill is quite prescriptive about the role that the internet will have to play in this). It should make for an interesting seven months.

There is often something of a dialogue of the deaf between those who have spent some time thinking about social media in some depth, and those who are in the day-to-day trenches of local government communications.

Certainly, most of the conversations I’ve had around how the internet will impact upon democracy have been around the use of the council website, the need to capture emails for mailing lists, increase traffic to the council site, how we can get our councillors to tweet or blog or other, understandable immediate questions.

People have a job to do. They are finding that all of these annoying geeks are making it more difficult for them with their FOI requests, their defamatory blogs, and so on. They feel that they’re in an arms race that they can’t win. They want to recruit some of these tools and methods to work in their favour: The most common question is a telling one: “How do we use Twitter to get our message out?”

Social media people, on the other hand, have a slightly different definition of democracy. They talk in abstract terms about the need for open data. The need for net-neutrality and the importance of community building. The potential for crowdsourcing intelligence, the need for creative commons resources and so on. They don’t want to read your website – they want to write it. It’s an interesting twist on the idea that government should do nothing about us without us.

I would suggest that there is a real need for local government policy-makers to engage with this subject a good deal more than they do, and to start to model how it will effect councils and the work they do in the near future. The thing is, doing so may solve all of their problems.

I’ll illustrate this point by looking at the vexed question of local newspapers – the need for them to improve, and the widespread belief that this won’t happen.

As Thomas Jefferson said:

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

Yet councils are often in a position where they believe that they may have to choose the former. Many are beginning to despair of ever having responsible local reporters to bounce off, they are – in the short term – increasing their communications budgets and beginning to print their own. On the one hand, they can deal with overworked / lazy (delete as applicable) local journalists who aren’t capable of portraying local issues in a way that is of any use to local people or politicians.

On the other hand, they have to tread a fine line where they have to present the work of the council in a way that doesn’t compromise their obligation not to spend public money promoting incumbent councillors. They have to get further into this constipated argument the hamstrings so much local government communications (none of this is a new theme here). And its all a problem caused by the perfect storm of declining print-profits and competition from the Internet.

But will this always be the case? Journalistic doyenne, Tina Brown thinks not. She believes that the Internet is about to deliver a golden age in journalism – one that she is hoping to mine with her Daily Beast.

Is this true? Well, firstly, the lack of a business model for The Beast does slightly undermine this claim, but – like Brown – I’m inclined to the view that high-quality news coverage may be facing the death knell that the music industry thought I was looking at when it saw the first Rio Diamond MP3 player in the mid-1990s. I suspect that new ways of financing content may create profits that dwarf those that were enjoyed by print-media in its heyday, and a glance at the rubber newspaper may offer a clue here?

The two big questions for me are these:

1. Will this result in a greater degree of centralisation? Will the big media groups that have the muscle to invest in freemium services rapidly steal a march by focussing on high-traffic offerings (International football instead of Accrington Stanley) – thereby concentrating on the very profitable at the expense of the slightly profitable local coverage?
2. Will this benefit the current local media monopolies? Will it create new revenues that will largely fund shareholders dividends without halting the decline that these (very profitable) businesses have already allowed journalism to decline to?

It’s a hunch, but I’d answer no to both of these questions. But to fully explain the reasons behind this, I’d need to write an essay on net neutrality, open source software, open data, creative commons resources and the crowdsourcing of intelligence.

But as a stop-gap, I’d urge anyone working in local government communications to think about the emerging local information hubs such as those promoted by Talk about Local or Nick Booth’s Help Me Investigate - I suspect that they are far more important than they appear to be at the moment.

It’s been around for a while, but here’s Will Perrin’s pitch here – well worth a look:

Just a few interesting things I’ve seen over the past few days that impact further on this councils v local newspapers issue. The first is that – when councils decide to factor in ad-revenue into their communications budgets, it adds a significant amount of uncertainty – because ad revenue can go down as well as up.

Not only are councils seen to be competing with local newspapers by launching their own, they are giving free ads to local businesses.

Here’s Paul Canning on how councils are likely to start learning from commercial websites about how usability and site-optimisation can increase the effectiveness of their websites. I mention this because it impacts on that question of how council can promote democracy online.

And Paul is really busy with his blog at the moment – here he is on the ‘tea party’ movement in the US.

Then there’s the Local Government Knowledge Hub.

In the latest round of the local authorities v local newspapers saga, Scottish newspapers appear to have regained some of the classified ads that they lost to the MyJobsScotland site (“Local government jobs – all on one site!”).

This is an interesting one. Now that the c-word is out in the open, surely government should simply be advertising all of it’s vacancies on it’s own site and avoiding advertising costs?

A number of right-wing bloggers have – for some time – been urging an incoming Tory government to put all government jobs online in order to shaft The Guardian newspaper Save Taxpayer’s Money.

MyJobs Scotland: Public subsidy for local newspapers reinstated?

Sure, there are equal opportunities issues, and there’s clearly a case for advertising some posts in minority newspapers, but beyond that, it’s hard to see how newspapers can expect the sort of cuts that they’d demand elsewhere to not impact upon them?

The Scottish decision has a whif of political cowardice and special pleading hanging over it – and I suspect that it illustrates the way that press influence can often be used to promote the business interests of press-owners.

There is the question of how local journalism can be made commercially viable – and it’s clearly an issue that needs to be addressed with some urgency in the interests of our democracy. We plainly need more / better local journalism than we have at the moment and a way of funding this needs to be found – this is one of the jobs that ‘Digital Britain’ have been charged with.

But this is, surely, not the same as offering a public subsidy to the handful of near-monopolies that dominate the local news market in such a careless way?

Two very interesting posts – one via Chris Dillow, and one directly from his site. Firstly, Chris signposts this:

“….perhaps it’s “populist” to think political elites always end up in bed with economic elites, but it seems, as a matter of fact, they often do. My opinion is that a certain “populist” enthusiasm for democracy, in the absence of strong legal and cultural constraints on government action, almost inevitably delivers a great deal of regulatory capture–that is, tucks political elites snugly in bed with corporate elites. Isn’t that a cynical vision? Moreover, when the incentives of insufficiently-limited democracies lead to this kind of result, supra-national technocratic institutions can in fact act as a salutary check on governments precisely because they are undemocratic.”

There we have it again: “…insufficiently-limited democracies.” What does this mean? Does it mean the populist mode of democracy as opposed to the model with strong political parties, shortish manifestos and un-mandated politicians? Surely the latter option is really the unlimited democracy?

Secondly, Chris has some evidence – nothing conclusive mind….

Reprising the question of a bail-out for journalism, here’s Martin Bright’s original New Deal of the Mind article from the New Statesman – it’s an idea that seems to be going places.

A few weeks ago, Roy Greenslade picked up on a growing opposition to Council-run free newspapers.

As he notes, the opposition comes both from smaller political parties locally, and from commercial rivals that are being edged out – as they see it.

Elsewhere, we are seeing growing demands for a journalistic ‘bail-out’ – and not just from bug-eyed Marxist fanatics either. Certainly, a lot of the clearly drawn ethical lines that have protected the near-monopolies of some local newspapers are being challenged from many quarters.

On the one hand, a strong local democracy requires a powerful independent journalistic voice, and if the Council does anything to damage this ecology, then it would be difficult to defend.

However, I think that there is an opportunity here. The National Union of Journalists are firmly of the view that some local newspapers are cutting back on journalists – not because they can’t afford them, but because their current business model allows them to make sufficient advertising revenues without much investment in original content.

At a very simple level, the boundaries that newspapers market themselves at are often different from the administrative boundaries of local government. As a result, councils have the choice of spending hefty advertising budgets across a range of titles in order to publish statutory notices or job vacancies.

On this level alone, it is often quite simply cheaper to print a newspaper every now and again, than to spend the expected advertising ratecard costs.

We have to add this consideration into the mix of the democratic arguments: one of the biggest causes of political centralisation has been the retreat from a responsible and energetic standard of coverage of local government.

Under these circumstances, surely councils are within their rights to ask for evidence that papers are employing experienced and competent journalists, and that these journalists are giving a fair coverage of the council?

There’s a fine line between ‘fair’ and ’soft’ and councils need to think about how this is brokered. But simply only employing cub reporters and providing superficial coverage of local issues – and it’s widely accepted now that many local newspapers do this – is very damaging to local democracy, and if councils are to be asked to resist the temptation to go into this space, they should ask for something in return.

Councils could – and in my opinion, should – be challenging local newspapers saying that ‘we won’t compete with you if we think that you are providing a public good’.

Councils can also stay out of that space in return for free / cheap advertising of essential services. Local newspapers could provide citizenship information to local residents. Councils can put pressure upon them to do so.

It’s time to start thinking this through – from a political, journalistic and administrative perspective.The kind of free-market arguments that have traditionally been made against this kind of approach are unlikely to continue to be the staple of any British political party for much longer.

This is interesting:

“Ed Balls has called on councils not to undermine local media outlets by trying to compete for readers and advertising revenue with their own publications and websites.”

I wonder if Mr Balls has any plans to ask the local newspaper groups to pay journalists to cover local news with a bit of enthusiasm, accuracy or fairness.  

Perhaps the lazy reporter who covered the speech couldn’t be botherered to write that bit up?