Is there any hope of a riot we can all join?

James Whitmore, MD of POSTAR, wants to escape the narrow ghetto of specific media choices…

After 107 years my local paper is on its last legs. Next week it ceases to be a daily; now it will publish weekly. I am not convinced this will be enough to save it from extinction. Publishing less often will mean even less revenue. It will have fewer resources and the brand will struggle not to degrade further. The web snares another victim, gaining strength all the while.

It is progress, although I cannot help feeling sad. The print works and offices were once at the end of the high street. You could pop in and place and ad or tell a tale. They published a number of editions through the afternoon and early evening. When I was a kid, you could even get a football special on Saturday night.

Tastes changed, competition increased and the office got smaller before moving to an out-of-town trading estate. Later on, the publishing and printing went to a big city over one hundred miles away. It was no longer an evening paper but a morning title. The news was less topical as it had further to travel. Each step reduced the power of the paper, the connection to the town and the desire to buy it.

To some extent I can track the progress of my life through its pages. School prizes, sports photos, the ill-advised teenage prank, charitable causes, letters published, campaigns for various things and so on. It recorded achievements, marriages and gigs – even a murder – all of people I knew. One thing is clear, it was a constant and it connected me to my community.

Agency planners used to create elaborate segmentations, splitting the population into clusters. For some reason there were usually seven of them. These analyses tended to look suspect as “Coronation Street”, “News At Ten” and “evening paper” almost always sat in five or six of the groups. It wasn’t necessarily a problem of the segmentation. It just so happened that there were a limited number of media vehicles and many of them were broad in their appeal.

Now each segment (and we have progressed to a bigger number than seven) has its own bespoke media world. You could quite easily live your entire life watching and listening to nothing other than football. This is not peculiar to sad blokes; it works at all ends of the spectrum. I often feel forced into a narrow ghetto of specific media choices. I can’t say that I like this, nor do I think it healthy.

One of the few aspects of the media that did not get a pummelling in the chat show fallout from the riots was “fragmentation”. Someone missed the opportunity to blame Rupert Murdoch for media disintegration and linking this to the splintering of society into a series of non-overlapping groups.

One outcome of the untrammelled free market for media is the unknowable explosion of outlets, from hundreds of broadcast channels to millions of online sources. It is easy for people to pick their group and stay in it. The media planners dream has come true. We can all fit into definable clusters; each one self-contained and uncontaminated by the others. You will imagine the media efficiency of it all.

Now I have the chance, to quote The Clash, I am not so sure I really want “a riot of my own” any more. Frankly, it seems too easy. I’d quite like one where everyone could join. I’d like my local paper back.