The only local newspaper reporting on Shepherds Bush has announced large scale cuts as they cope with declining income and circulation. While expected the departure of journalists like Rebecca Kent, who previously covered issues in W12, and other departures from the news team will inevitably raise questions about the continuing viability of the paper. They are even having to close their offices on April 24th, presumably because they can't afford the rent.
As it is the coverage of the W12 area is only ever one or two pages at the front, followed by loads of stuff about far flung areas of Ealing which is of little or no interest to us, so you may feel this is no big deal. In fact the last online article recorded on this paper about W12 is from February 23rd - that tells you all you need to know.
But I think it is a big deal. At the moment, assuming the H&F Gazette eventually has to close or at least stop its coverage of W12, this will leave the Council’s propaganda magazine H&F News as the only means of accessing local information in print. This is of course only information that the council want you to see, and not what they don’t want you to see. So there is a problem of local democracy.
The only independent online community that reports on W12 issues is a sad joke, as is evidenced by the very lacklustre and hardly used ‘community forum’.
So what do we do? This blog is only ever going to be my personal musings so this isn’t a bid to make this place an alternative source of news although I do my best. When I posted the recent accident involving a cyclist and a lorry it received a huge number of hits, many of whom coming from local people who had simply googled words like ‘accident on Uxbridge Road’ – they had nowhere else to look.
So there is a gap – who can fill it?
I have no good answer to offer you but definitely applaud you for bringing this problem up. Speaking as someone in the know, even council employees refer to the H&F news as the propaganda rag...
ReplyDeleteI will definitely be bookmarking to return for more local content!
Thanks! and do feel free to pass on any stories you think should see the light of day since you are 'in the know'! Anonymity guaranteed for all sources...
ReplyDelete[...] media outlet carrying any news on these whatsoever. This reminds me very much of this posting where I decried the very poor standard of local news reporting, in which we have a pants [...]
ReplyDelete[...] 13, 2009 by chrisunderwood I have written about the poor state of our local media before, and warned what would happen if the area is only really served by a council propaganda rag. [...]
ReplyDelete[...] an independent local media in the Borough which their own Pravda-style publication has helped to destroy. He dodged the question and simply said that the independent media had been in terminal decline for [...]
ReplyDelete[...] you wonder why I think the lack of an independent local media, to show us the true picture of what our Council is doing instead of a one sided propaganda sheet, [...]
ReplyDelete[...] the lack of any widely read local independent media they have chosen this blog. Somehow I doubt the Council’s own freesheet would have carried [...]
ReplyDelete[...] by the excellent Dan Hodges who writes for the Ealing Gazette. Despite all of that paper’s problems at the moment Dan is a great local journalist and we are lucky he has survived all the cuts – [...]
ReplyDelete[...] tax-payer funded propaganda sheet produced by H&F Council? Trinity Mirror, which publishes the long-struggling Hammersmith & Fulham Chronicle, has followed the lead of many other papers in London and will [...]
ReplyDelete[...] the same Cllr Greenhalgh who could stop hoovering up all the local advertising revenue that nearly forced the Chronicle into bankruptcy just a year or so [...]
ReplyDelete[...] one subject that excercises me more than most, and that is our money being spent by this Council on party political propaganda dressed up as impartial news. The practice is thankfully rare in the UK and reminds you more of eastern Europe in the 1980s yet [...]
ReplyDelete