Stop the press... and make way for the co-op media

Facing cuts left, right and centre a co-operative model may be the solution to save the local media industry.

Andrew Bibby

After the Fox and Goose, what about the Post and Gazette? The next challenge for communities which have rallied round to turn their local pub or shop into a co-operative could be to rescue their local newspaper.

This at least is the suggestion being put forward by Co-ops UK, which in partnership with Carnegie UK has recently been running a series of workshops around the country exploring the potential for community and co–operatively owned media. The argument is that, just as pubs and village shops have a role in community life which goes beyond that of simply private businesses, so too do effective local newspapers.

It's a role which media companies appear to be struggling to deliver at the present. The National Union of Journalists talks of local newspaper offices closed by the score and of job losses by the thousand. "The local media scene looks like a war zone.

Almost every newsroom has been cleared of at least half, and sometimes more, of its journalistic staff," claimed Chris Morley, the NUJ's Northern organiser. He recounted how the paper he first worked on, the Walsall Observer (since closed), once had a 13-strong journalistic staff. "Now Walsall, a metropolitan borough of 350,000 people does not have one professional journalist working there," he said.

There is no doubt that local papers face an existential crisis, with the traditional business model in tatters as both editorial and advertising move online. But Chris Morley argues the damage has been magnified by the strategy of trying to maximise profits and cut back on resources being followed by the major media companies.

Dave Boyle, who is coordinating the current Co-ops UK and Carnegie initiative Make Your Local News Work, said that new forms of co-operative and community ownership may be the way to make local media viable again.

Making the analogy with the way that village pubs have suffered from ownership by major national pub chains, he said that local newspapers are less able to respond to market changes because they are no longer community focused. "The last thing you want are local media being part of very distant groups, often global media companies," he said. His 2012 report Good News is a call for an appraisal of co-operative alternatives.

Historically, co-operatively-run newspapers and magazines have had mixed fortunes. The London listings title City Limits, established in 1981 by staff at Time Out when Time Out's owner abandoned equal pay and co-operative working, successfully operated as a workers' co-operative for over a decade before finally succumbing in 1993.

City Limits carried forward some of the spirit of the co-operatively run 'alternative' press in the 1970s and 1980s, including magazines such as The Leveller. Less happily, the Scottish Daily News, an ambitious attempt in 1974-5 to save two thousand jobs in Glasgow after the closure of the Daily Express plant there, lasted only a few months.

Scotland is however home today to one of the few employee-owned titles, the West Highland Free Press, the Skye-based weekly paper which has been serving the western Highlands and Islands for over forty years. Founded by five university friends, the paper was converted in 2009 into an employee-ownership venture as part of an exit strategy for the original owners. The buy-out was funded partly by individual staff members and partly from investments by the employee ownership fund Baxi Partnership (now Baxendale Ownership).

The paper's managing director Paul Wood, one of the speakers at the recent Make Your Local News Work workshops, argues that their new structure reconnects journalists with their local communities and offers a sustainable business model. "Making journalists shareholders in their own paper sounds radical, but in fact provides them with stability and motivation," he said.

Dave Boyle argued that hybrid co-operative structures, where membership includes not just staff but also supporters in the wider community, may be an easier way for local media to find the capital needed. He pointed to the example of the Ethical Consumer magazine, originally a workers' cooperative, which in 2008 decided to become a multi-stakeholder co-op as part of a recapitalisation exercise.

Now both investors (those investing at least £200) and staff are co-operative members, and the board includes both employee and investor representatives.

For Dave Boyle, this may be the sort of model which could work for local media – and supporters of a strong independent local press may have to be prepared to put up some of the money to make this possible.

Quality local media – whether online or paper-based - are essential to local democracy and civil society he maintains, and ultimately that means finding new ways to afford the resources necessary. "Democracy demands that it's not done by someone in their spare time," he added. (http://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2013/sep/25/co-op-local-newspapers-journalism)