Another nail in the coffin

THE offices of the oldest provincial evening newspaper in England will close after regional publishers Johnston Press announced the creation of a new editorial hub on the outskirts of Sunderland.

Staff at the Shields Gazette were told of the move yesterday. Their paper was first published in 1849, 163 years ago.

Meanwhile, reporters on another of the papers in the Johnston Press north east stable - the Hartlepool Mail - have also been told that they will be affected.

The company expects there to be 15 redundancies in all - six of these will be in editorial and nine in advertising.

Worryingly, this news follows quickly from last week's announcement by Johnston Press that five of its daily papers would instead be published on a weekly basis from next month.

In that case, the titles affected were the Peterborough Evening Telegraph, the Scarborough Evening News, the Halifax Courier, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, and the Northants Evening Telegraph.

Apparently, it is all part of "a major redesign exercise", according to the company executives with their heads in the clouds.

But the reality on the ground is rather different.

For a start, the removal of the Shields Gazette will deny part of the town its identity. Although the town is only five miles further up the coast from Sunderland, it is big enough in itself to have its own distinct sense of community; Hartlepool, rather more ludicrously, is 17 miles away.

In actual fact, the offices to which they are moving - on the Pennywell Industrial Estate - are barely fit for the purpose of reporting on Sunderland, never mind anywhere else.

Some four miles outside the city centre, the Echo moved there from Bridge Street in 1976. So much for the idea that a local newspaper should be at the centre of the action.

And, far from the appearance of Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry this week - in which he told us pretty much what we already knew about his relationships with various Prime Ministers - this announcement by Johnston Press is far more relevant to the state of British journalism today.

It is certainly a matter which is closer to me than the ongoing circus in Westminster: in the past, I have done work experience at the Echo and another of the north east Johnston Press papers, and I also have a few friends who work for the company.

I can only imagine that they will be worried by this news, but no doubt they will continue working as diligently as ever for their respective publications, despite the uncertain background.

Without wishing ill on them, though, it seems rather inevitable that they too will be caught up by the Johnston Press axe in some way before it is over.

This is the real story of modern day British journalism, not Murdoch or Leveson as the rolling news channels would have you believe. Sadly, this story only seems to have losers.

The biggest losers in this case are, of course, the readers of the Shields Gazette and the Hartlepool Mail who will no longer have a paper which can serve them fully.

However, in terms of the industry, the reporters will also lose out - either directly by having been put out of a job or indirectly by facing extra workloads and/or travel times.

And finally, there are the naive many who once had hope of becoming a local news reporter but whose hope then turned to anxious desperation and has now just about run out.

These are sad times indeed for the British newspaper industry.