Some really good news this week for local papers everywhere – the tories have banned the council newspaper.
Eric Pickles has announced that councils will only be allowed to publish free titles four times a year. They will also have to remove any content that praises the council – including quotes from local residents .
Council newspapers have, long before I worked for a local paper, driven me to distraction. It confounds logic that, in a democratic society that prides itself on a free and open press we have let them carry on as long as they have.
Where I live in Whitechapel the ubiquitous East End Life flops infuriatingly onto my doormat every week. I have no choice whether I receive this pseudo-independent paper and it’s presence in my hallway means in times of desperation, it sometimes even gets read.
Few things in the world anger me more than it though. it makes no attempt to fully declare it’s allegiance to the council and at first or even second glance it looks exactly like an independent freesheet.
This paper does not simply fulfil the valid purpose of letting locals know what the council is spending its money on and the services it supplies. It is filled with crimes stories, feel-good features and ‘exclusive’ interviews and the pages are peppered with adverts that should be in struggling local papers.
Funnily enough the one thing they don’t write about is council cock-ups, wasted funds and dodgy dealings. It is the equivalent of having a free government-run national newspaper delivered to every door in country. They don’t even do that in China.
With an annual budget of an astonishing £1.6bn mainly dervived from advertising East End Life ‘only’ costs the taxpayer £118,000 a year (still a huge amount of money for a piece of council propaganda, particularly as taxpayers also fund a large press office at the council too.)
Last year councillor Tim Archer called for the council to scrap its “propaganda paper” telling them to save £670,000 annually by advertising its vacancies in its local paper, the East London Advertiser. A famous stalwart of the East End which is now struggling to survive after the loss of council. Hopefully it can expect some level of resurgence in advertising revenue – very much-needed in these turbulent times.
n.b. The Ham&High doesn’t have a weekly council paper to compete against, we have the fantastic Camden New Journal, so this post is not simply shadenfreude. I find council papers morally objectionable.
Rag Doll 
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