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Scrapping newspaper saves council £67,000
GETTING rid of its monthly newspaper has saved Doncaster Council £67,000 without cutting jobs, according to mayor Peter Davies.
The new mayor ditched Doncaster News, the monthly newspaper that had been delivered to every home in the borough since 2002, on his first day in the job.
"It is simply council propaganda and an exercise in distorting unpalatable truths," he said. Instead, he plans to keep residents informed through local news organisations including the Free Press.
He told councillors that 67,000 had been saved but no staff had been made redundant as a result of the decision.
And this week another council followed Doncaster's lead by axing its council paper - less than a year after it was set up.
Your Cornwall, a free monthly publication costing around 400,000 per year, was scrapped by Cornwall Council following a spending review.
Doncaster News was no stranger to controversy during its seven year existence. In 2005 councillors passed a motion calling for the word "news" to be removed from its title, but the change was never enacted.
In that debate, then-councillor Ray Bartlett said: "When we see the word 'news' we expect to be informed, stimulated and challenged." But this was not the case with the content of Doncaster News, he said.
He explained: "In the world it describes, the sun is always shining,"
adding: "It should be accepted that whenever there are winners there are usually losers."
More recently the publication ran a front page article claiming that media coverage of the Children's Services crisis was "hostile and ill-informed".
Nationally, council newspapers have been under the spotlight this year. The Office of Fair Trading issued a report last month that said council publications could threaten local newspapers by competing against them for advertising.
The report added: "While local authority information sheets can serve a useful purpose for local residents and businesses, they will inevitably not be as rigorous in holding local institutions to account as independent local media."
The Audit Commission is also to look into the effect of council newspapers on the regional press.
Earlier this year, then-Culture secretary Andy Burnham said: "There has to be a balance and councils are overstepping that."
He added: "The council issue is for councils to decide but clearly there are hard questions to be asked about whether it is appropriate for their communication or for their marketing."
Staffordshire Moorlands District Council abandoned its newspaper in 2008, the same year that Boris Johnson binned the London Assembly's newspaper, The Londoner.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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