There is this rather old gentleman I spy from my office window who shuffles about the streets of North Liverpool.
He is always over-laden with a shoulder bag, from which he delivers door-to-door the weekly free local paper. I watch him from my vantage point as he shuffles out from one street, along the main road a bit and then disappears into the next street and back out again a bit further down.
I fully suspect he gets next to nothing for his efforts.
Liverpool itself used to have two main daily ‘regional’ papers plus a collection of thriving local area papers. The two regional papers got swallowed up into one of those huge publishing houses that owns almost everything regionally, and considerably powerful national titles.
The smaller local area papers were a long time ago swallowed up by the same company and for decades have served only as an advert for the main regional papers and comprised of 95% advertising and 5% actual news or locally oriented articles. I’m sure there’s an identical model regularly being stuffed through your very own letterbox wherever you live.
As newsprint died, and I don’t really have a big problem with it dying, the publishing house reduced its costs by centralising the printing of the regional papers and the local freebies in a place where other regions were also printed. Gone was the ‘local’ printworks.
Restructuring meant that the same Liverpool based news team now dealt with producing copy for both regional papers, as well as the freebies. Gone were the self-contained editorial teams for each paper.
The two regional papers had slightly different audiences at one stage. One specialised in financial and business issues, the other on more down-market general news about who had shot who and which major drug dealers were getting a few months in jail this week. Each was a daily, seven days a week.
To cut costs they became six days a week, and now the business and finance one has given up and is only being published once a week on a Thursday instead of daily.
The more tabloidy one continues to be published six days a week for now, and every Tuesday those versions delivered to shops within inner city areas will now include a pull-out version of what used to be the local freebie weekly. How long before it’s no longer a pull-out but just a few pages with ‘localised’ content on it? Indeed, how long before the separate business and finance newspaper appears as a Thursday pull-out? Or a few pages within the main tabloidy title?
This means that quite quietly and without a fuss the local freebie newspaper has now gone.
It also means the old fella who shuffles around delivering them is now out of a job, a job he’s been doing week in week out for ten or fifteen years.
Of course when the belly-aching over-paid journalists rant on about how the papers they write for are disappearing, their self-centred rants will forget to mention the little shuffling man who come wind, rain, hail or snow, continued to shuffle door to door without fail to make sure the local freebie was carefully delivered. No doubt he did this in exchange for less weekly pocket money than the average teenager gets.
He’s now got to hang-up his reflective bag for the very last time, and his hands will start to recover from the over-exposure to the permanent filth transferred from the newsprint. I wonder what will become of him.
England's England 