Bristol Post: Disquiet on the western front

Bristol's two dailies are being sweetened for sale via fierce job cuts, while local news has all but vanished from the broadcast media. A great tradition of campaigning community journalism is threatened, says Christina Zaba

t's all quiet at the Printer's Devil pub in Bristol these days, where Evening Post journalists used to meet. The grand ballroom is dark and silent at the former Western Daily Press social club. For Bristol journalists, there's nowhere much to go these days.

As a once-great media centre comes to terms with, in effect, the merger of its two distinct and much-loved daily newspapers - one for the city, the other for the country - and the loss of almost half their staff, it's not just tradition that's being demolished. A journalism committed to serving readers and local democracy seems to be being dismantled.

Northcliffe Newspapers, owners of the Bristol Evening Post and Western Daily Press, have put both titles up for sale; two of 112 UK regional newspapers expected to raise £1.5bn for the Daily Mail & General Trust group.

Northcliffe made £102m profits in 2005, or a profit margin of 25 per cent. To raise profits to the 30 per cent desired by shareholders, it is going to have to cut into the muscle of its newspapers, the last spare fat having been pared away long ago. Last Friday it emerged that compulsory redundancies would be enforced, in spite of 42 staff having volunteered to meet a company plan for 36 job cuts. Some were told they were indispensable and others will be sacked instead. Few staff expect either title to survive in its current format.

The editors went first. "They said I was being sacked because I was too familiar with the readers," says ex-Evening Post deputy editor Stan Szecowka, who's using his redundancy money to set up a new community newspaper in the city. "Yet we'd won Campaigning Newspaper of the Year in 2002, 2003 and 2004, and Community Newspaper of the Year in 2004."

Located at Temple Way in the city centre, the Evening Post is neighbour to some of the nation's most deprived schools. "We joined the Education Action Zone forum, and worked with the Arts Council and the Poet Laureate," Szecowka says. "We got the kids believing in themselves; we raised £70,000 for the schools. Truancy levels dropped. And we were engaging readers right across the social spectrum."

The papers' turmoil comes at a time when the entire Bristol media is in trouble. At the local BBC headquarters in Whiteladies Road, they try to come to terms with job losses by speaking of the "wider ecology" of the city's broadcast sector. With 70 jobs lost this year from within the BBC, many staff have joined the city's independents. But with five-and-a-half hours of ITV West regional non-news programming in 2000 having been cut to just 90 minutes per week in February 2005, there isn't much regional work. Only BBC radio carries significant local news now in Bristol. The city has been waiting a year for an Ofcom licence for a community station.

People are concerned. Western Daily Press reader and novelist Jilly Cooper sees Bristol's shrinking media landscape as being "part of the malaise of the diminishing regions, and it's sinister". She says: "Whether we've been trying to save schools or buildings, or appealing about local issues, the local press has really helped us, applying massive pressure. Our local journalists are paid so little, they're working for love, not money. Local newspapers are different from the national press. They're the last bastion of trust in our communities. It's heartbreaking to see that being eroded."

When rural post offices across the nation faced closure in 2000, the Western Daily Press mobilised its 60,000 readers to gather three million signatures, the biggest-ever petition presented at Downing Street. Many village post offices were saved.

In 2002, when five-year-old Lelaina Hall drowned on the Somerset coastal mudflats, readers raised £100,000 in nine months to buy and equip a local rescue hovercraft that has since saved more than 80 lives.

Rural communities are worried, too. "We have grave concerns," says Wales-based farmer David Handley, who chairs Farmers for Action. "We can't see how, by halving staff at the Western Daily, you're going to improve its quality. The paper's very well respected among farmers. There's no one else out there covering our issues in the same way." Market research in 2003 showed that, in its circulation area, the Western Daily Press was second only to Farmers Weekly in getting information to farmers.

Bristol staff are fighting back. Meetings, protests and votes of no confidence have been followed by a ballot on industrial action. "We're doing this not just for our jobs, but for the readers and for quality journalism itself," says chief sub Derek Brooks, who is father of the NUJ chapel. "Someone's got to make a stand."

"It's a bloody disgrace," says former Lord Mayor of Bristol Bill Martin. "The cuts were swingeing before. Now they're draconian. How are they going to report on local affairs if they've got no staff?" David Drew, Labour MP for Stroud, has tabled an early day motion in the Commons recognising both papers' importance in providing a service to their communities and in holding politicians to account, and condemning the proposals to sack further journalists.

A spokesman for the company says Northcliffe still has a "track record" in high-quality journalism. In a letter, Lord Rothermere, DMGT chairman, wrote to staff at Temple Way, saying: "I am a fervent believer in good journalism." In Bristol, few believe him.