SPREAD out on the counters of your local newsagent today are ten national dailies, familiar and consistent in their divergence of tone and character. The reader pays his money and makes his choice from the brash and breezy to the upmarket qualities.

And because it is Friday the chances are that there is an eleventh choice on the counter — the local rag, the weekly that in many areas sells more copies than all the nationals put together.

It’s not just that the locals outsell them that gives national editors a mild attack of envy, it’s because, with precious few exceptions, the national sector is in slow and gentle decline, and the regionals, particularly the weeklies and the smaller evening papers, are booming.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations figures for the first six months of the year just published show that more than half the weeklies, which make up about 80 per cent of regional titles, increased their sale.

More than 85 per cent of adults in the UK now read a regional newspaper, and consumer spending on regionals will increase to more than £400 million this year.

With an advertising income of more than £3 billion, the regional press is the only medium to have increased ad revenue every year for the past 12 years. Johnston Press, the fourth-biggest group in the regional press sector has just recorded a 32.3 per cent interim profit on turnover of £261 million, the biggest margin in UK newspaper publishing.

Compare all that with a 2.16 per cent decline across the board in national daily sales and a readership figure of only 70.2 per cent of adults and you must ask if there is anything for the sophisticates in what we used to call Fleet Street to learn from the parish pump brigade.

Local editors have no doubt about the reason for their success. It’s the parish pump itself. An understanding of the readership, its needs and its wants, is the common mantra crystallised by Bryan Denis, editor of the Isle of Wight County Press: “We’re very community minded. We are very island focused. Everything we write is focused on the island.”

But it’s not just serving up local fare that ranges from controversial campaigns that seriously affect the quality of community life to the minutia of the whist-drive results, it is how they are served that should cause a national editor to ponder. Spin is anathema. They tell it like it is on the weeklies, straight down the middle. That once sacred line between fact and comment, now blurred to extinction in national media, is still respected in the weeklies. Accuracy, from correct name spelling in columns of results to the intricacies of local planning appeals, is a given for the local journalist. The result is credibility, trust and respect. The readers may call it the local rag, but it’s a term of affection.

The disparaging cliché “You can’t believe anything you read in the papers” has become disturbingly common and sufficiently justified for the national newspaper industry to be urged to recognise it and address it as a problem. Not so the weeklies. Readers actually believe what they read in their local paper.

At the West Briton, a weekly that has served Cornwall for 203 years, they still tell the story of the lady who failed to conform and draw her curtains as a mark of respect for the death of King George V. She told the deputation of local dignitaries that confronted her: “I know it has been reported on the wireless, but I’ll believe it when I see it in the West Briton.” Two days later it duly appeared in her local bible and she drew her curtains.

The mark of respect for royalty may have long gone, but the level of credibility remains and the West Briton is currently the second-biggest selling weekly in the country and has enjoyed seven consecutive years of circulation increases.

Based on that trust, the paper becomes an important catalyst in creating and improving the local quality of life. This is reflected in the number of Good News stories you will find in all the successful locals. The paper shares and spreads the warmth and well-being brought by individual or community success. Contrast the level of murder and mayhem in the average day’s fare from Fleet Street and you feel less surprised at levels of tranquilliser consumption.

Former editor of the Cambridge Daily News, Bob Satchell, now Executive Director of the Society of Editors, whose membership comprises 320 provincial editors, knows the regional newspaper scene more than most. “These days the editor of the local paper has to become a key mover and shaker in the community,” he says. “He or she and the paper have to play a major part in making the community work, in everything from creating a viable local economy to campaigning for issues that affect day-to-day life — saving the local theatre, improving hospital facilities, fending off parking charges. You have to make the reader feel good about the community.

“In the Eighties, when The Sun was soaring, a lot of local newspapers — particularly evenings — lost their way by trying to ape it. In recent years a younger brigade of highly professional editors have realised the error and re-established their place in the community.”

It all seems rather simple, really. You give the reader what he or she wants and needs, as opposed to what you the journalist think they should read:another lesson for Fleet Street, particularly for some corners of the quality market where a misguided pomposity still insists that readers have a duty to read what the journalist believes they should read.

Last word from Drew Cochrane, long-term successful editor of the Largs and Millport Weekly News: “I know my readers and I know what they want. I see them all in the pub on Friday night.”

Charles Wilson is a former Editor of The Times

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