There are lots of ways of measuring the recession’s impact on Bristol. There
are February’s jobless figures of 9,771 — up from 5,057 in February 2008.
There are the many empty shopfronts, even in the £500 million Cabot Circus
shopping centre, which opened, with spectacularly poor timing, last autumn.
Taxi drivers say that their Friday night trade has slumped.
Work has stopped on a few large construction projects. About twenty homes a
week are being repossessed. Cherie Blair would probably struggle to recoup
the £262,500 she paid for one of the two luxury flats she acquired in 2002
with a discount negotiated by the fraudster Peter Foster (she sold the other
last October).
One of the most accurate barometers, however, is the volume of advertising in
the Bristol Evening Post and its sister paper, the regional Western
Daily Press, which occupy a great brown fortress of a building in the
centre of this lively, cosmopolitan city whose destruction by the Luftwaffe
and Britain’s postwar urban planners has been manifestly reversed during the
past two decades of rampant development and prosperity.
In one recent week the Evening Post property section was 44 pages, down
from 72 in the same week last year. The jobs section shrank from 25 pages to
12, the motoring section from 24 pages to 12, and classified advertisements
from 57 pages to 40. Neither editor would talk to The Times, but
Susie Weldon, the journalists’ union convenor, said: “Advertising has fallen
off a cliff.”
Advertising is a newspaper’s lifeblood, and its collapse has triggered a
crisis at the Evening Post and the Daily Press, as it has at
countless other local and regional papers across Britain. The titles have
just parted company with 40 of their 154 editorial staff, and that comes
after 36 bitterly contested redundancies three years ago. Indeed, there is a
real question mark over the future of Bristol’s long and colourful tradition
of vibrant provincial newspapers.
Bristol gave the world Concorde, Gold Flake, Harveys Bristol Cream,
handcrafted Bristol motor cars and Fry’s Turkish Delight. But locked away in
a musty sideroom of its central library, and sheathed in clear protective
plastic, is one of the lesser-known historical artefacts to emerge from the
city: the oldest surviving copy of arguably the oldest provincial paper in
Britain, quite possibly the world.
It is issue No 91 of the Bristol Post Boy, published in August 1704, a
single sheet of age-darkened paper with stories printed on both sides. The
publisher, William Bonney, could hardly be accused of sensationalism. A
dispatch from the Duke of Marlborough, announcing his “glorious victory” at
the Battle of Blenheim, is buried half-way down the back page.
The Bristol Post Boy was the first of scores of newspapers published in
the West Country’s proud and independent capital over the next three
centuries. John Penny, a local historian, lists 114 of them — Bristol
Chronicles, Gazettes, Mirrors, Journals, Mercuries,
Advertisers, Echoes, Heralds and Observers. In
Edwardian times the city boasted no fewer than three morning and three
evening papers, each vigorously propounding their political views, and
several weeklies.
J. B. Priestley visited Bristol during a journey through Depression-era
Britain in 1933 and recorded how London’s press barons had muscled in on the
city’s newspaper market, using every promotional stunt imaginable. The
result was that three of Bristol’s four locally owned papers went out of
business, while Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail,
controlled the fourth.
Bristolians found that intolerable. They decided to launch an independent
paper of their own. Hundreds of ordinary citizens raised £40,000,
commandeered an old leather warehouse, and in no time the Bristol Evening
Post was selling 70,000 copies.
“Here is one example of the Bristol spirit in action,” Priestley wrote. “It is
good that Bristol should have its own paper, a genuine local enterprise, not
merely some mass publication thrown at it like a bone to a dog.”
Only the Evening Post and Western Daily Press are left, and both
are owned by Northcliffe Media, the regional arm of the Daily Mail and
General Trust, which finally acquired the Post in 2000. (Its slogan —
“The paper all Bristol asked for and helped create” — was quietly removed
from the masthead not long after.) Both have been contracting for years,
largely because of the relentless advance of the internet. The Evening
Post circulation has fallen from a high of about 200,000 in the 1970s to
barely 46,000, and the Western Daily Press’s from 80,000 to 38,000.
They have closed regional offices, stopped regional editions and slashed the
number of pages. The Post, although still called the Evening Post,
is now printed the previous night and sold as a morning paper to cut costs.
But the worst recession since Priestley’s day has brought matters to a head.
After the latest round of redundancies, the Western Daily Press,
where Terry Pratchett and Tom Stoppard cut their teeth, has just four
reporters instead of thirteen, and fills its pages primarily with stories
provided by Northcliffe’s dozen weekly papers in the region.
The Western Daily Press celebrated its 150th birthday last year, but
whether it will see many more is doubtful. Its readership is ageing. It
makes no money. Northcliffe has closed its website, generally seen as the
future of any newspaper.
Some believe that the Western Daily Press will go weekly, while Eric
Price, its legendary former Editor, thinks that it will be amalgamated with
the Evening Post. Ms Weldon, who has worked for the paper for 12
years, volunteered for redundancy “because I don’t want to witness its
demise. I just think it’s a tragedy and I grieve for it.”
The Evening Post is a good paper and will survive, but whether it can
continue adequately to cover events in Britain’s tenth-biggest city, and
live up to its boast of being “at the heart of all things local”, is another
question. Its overstretched journalists no longer have much time to go out,
talk to people and find real stories. There are few resources left for
investigative journalism. Less advertising means fewer pages.
“It is sad. I have been with the paper 48 years and it is a shadow of its
former self,” said John Le Couteur, 64, a reporter whose grandfather helped
to launch the Evening Post in 1932 and has now taken redundancy.
Ms Weldon said: “The only way to build a loyal readership is to give people
lively, interesting, vibrant coverage of the stories and issues they are
interested in. This should have been done a long time ago, though. My fear
is it is just too late and papers are now in such a serious financial crisis
that there is no money to invest in staff.”
What is happening in Bristol is happening all over the country, of course.
Scores of local papers have closed in the past year. More than 1,000
provincial journalists have been made redundant. Across all Northcliffe’s
regional papers, advertising dropped by about 37 per cent in the first
quarter of this year. There is scarcely a title that is not struggling, and
many more will fold.
This matters. Quite apart from announcing who has been hatched, matched and
dispatched, local papers play a unique and vital democratic role. At their
best, they hold local politicians to account, expose incompetence and
wrongdoing, air important issues and give vent to public opinion. Were they
to vanish, they would be sorely missed.
“It is good that there should be a real independent provincial press,”
Priestley wrote in 1933. “People ought to read national newspapers, but they
also ought to read local newspapers too, for England, even now, is still a
country of local government, local politics, strong local interests . . .
The citizens of Bristol had the sense to see this and the necessary enterprise
to act for themselves. For this I honour them.”
