by Dirk Gently »
27 Apr 2025 18:07
From Despair To Where? Dirk Gently From Despair To Where? Local journalism's been on its arse for 20 years, mainly because of the internet
Corrected for you
Which leads me back to my edit
Independent bloggers, vloggers and podcasts are able to provide decent content, not sure why publishers can't.
Which again leads back to the original point that why should someone like Huang Kad be considered less reputable than local journalists when he's basically feeding off the same scraps and consistently beats them to the punch.
If Reading4eva can set up an interview with Couhig.....????
It will be interesting to see what sort of relationship BBC Berkshire can maintain with the club given that Couhig has been openly critical of Dellor.
You're missing the key differential in all of this, which is advertising. Local journalism has never really existed to provide quality, relevant and objective news. It had to provide quality, relevant and objective news in order to get people to buy the papers, which were full of adverts - the main business aim was to bring views to advertisers.
But the internet has decimated advertising revenues. No-one's going to spend money in the Evening Post to reach a few thousand pairs of eyes when for the same money they can target adverts exactly to their desired demographic through FB, IG, Youtube etc.
So local journalism is becoming more and more centralised and much lower quality - Reach plc, who own all the "
Placename Live" sites openly say that they value clicks ahead of quality, and pay their writers on that basis. They share content across all their many sites and there's absolutely no value to them of covering stories like Couhig - it won't bring any pair of eyes to their site so won't sell any advertising, so it's seen as completely wasted effort. So local journalism doesn't effectively exist any more - it has no real funding, and is only there to pay lip service to the idea of providing a "local service" - which it doesn't.
That explains why publishers don't give a flying fcuk about stuff like this - so the void is filled by people who do care, and have their "niche" as being in the know. There's no money in it unless they get bucketloads of followers, but there's a type of glory, and many people have launched careers on the strength of their internet presence.
But yes - people who actually care or are building their niche certainly are as good as or better than local "journalists" so I'm not going to argue with your central point.
As for Dellor - he has a track record of backtracking and always trying to take the path of least resistance, so I'd expect him to do whatever he needs to do to be as noncontroversial and inoffensive as possible - at the same time avoiding trying to probe deeply or find out anything interesting or different, lest it upsets the status quo.
