It’s no secret that local news publishing is at low ebb. With mass newsroom redundancies, titles closing, and a loss of ad revenue to the likes of Facebook and Google, things appear bleak.
However, leading regional publisher Archant is keen to step up as the David to Facebook’s Goliath with a return to community centred content.
Matt Kelly, the publisher’s chief content officer, argues that local media needs to address a “disconnect” with its communities and reposition itself as a platform for local people to come together – replacing a role Facebook has largely stolen.
“I don’t know if they think I’m insane or not, but what I tell my guys is that I want to be bigger than Facebook in Cromer,” Kelly said at the annual PPA Festival this week.
Cromer, a small town in northern Norfolk with a population of just 8,000, is served by four different Archant titles and multiple local websites, yet – according to Kelly – Facebook is the dominant, most engaging media.
“I think it comes back to that idea about the difference of positioning yourself as serving a community, or building a community – and if you think of yourself as building a community, it inevitably involves allowing people onto the platform.” [advert position=”left”]
To that end, Archant last year launched Enjoy Cromer More, a local news site promising to accept story submissions from the wider Cromer community and feature them as a defining element of their publication:
“Promote an event you’re organising, share your views, give us an update on your team, business, group or organisation or just tell us why you love your area. We’ll post your stories on our website and share them with our Facebook followers.”
The launch follows a fall in revenue for Archant in 2017, with a shift in adspend to Google and Facebook partly blamed in a letter to shareholders. Meanwhile, Facebook’s advertising revenue has reportedly continued to grow strongly at 49% for the financial year, taking in $39.9bn.
“We’re trying to engage the community in a wholly different way, [by] really trying to become again the community noticeboard that I think we’ve become disconnected with,” Kelly says.
Things currently look positive for the project, with Archant reporting that in November 2017 alone stories on Enjoy Cromer More earned over 16,000 views.
Kelly’s local strategy might seem optimistic to some, but he has good form elsewhere in the publishing world. Kelly has made headlines previously for the success of The New European – the pro-Remain national newspaper he is also editor of.
Commissioned for a four week run in 2016, The New European has just published its 94th edition and looks forward to celebrating its 100th in six weeks’ time, having managed to build itself a loyal and paying readership in the wake of failures by such publishing giants as Trinity Mirror – whose attempt to launch a newspaper, The New Day, had crashed and burned a few months prior.
