Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Another Local Paper Bites the Dust
The Haringey Advertiser is the most recent of many local newspapers to go belly up.
The Crouch End focussed Broadway Express (an offshoot of the Ham and High) is struggling along with weekly sales of just 595. The most recent figures for online views show that the Ham & High (presumably incorporating Broadway data) gets under 6,000 unique views daily (for comparison HoL gets just over 2,000). This doesn't suggest a title in rude health.
To the east, the Tottenham Indy manages to give away approximately 8,000 copies each week (compare that with weekly unique views on HoL of 8,500). No figures for online viewing are available, but my understanding is that by ratio they're less skewed towards online than the Ham and High).
It seems possible that we'll have no local news papers left before long.
Bad news for local democracy.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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I suggest, Alyson, you might find a reason to spend a few minutes more in one of these old style-newsagents. Then buy something and wait for a chance of a conversation with the people running it.
My impression from doing this in my own neighbourhood is that a significant number of customers are spending on the lottery. Others are having various cards topped-up (Oyster for instance.)
The "news" on sale appears to be a range of magazine which have a long shelf life. I get the impression that a lot of the papers delivered to the shop are sent back unsold.
There's an estate agent in High Road Tottenham which has (used to have?) a rack with a pile from one of the weekly freesheets. For taking, not for sale.Not too many years ago people were paid, not very much I assumed, to walk round with piles of freesheets and put them in letterboxes. Some of these deliverers did the job well. But occasionally I found a pile dumped in say, a back alley. To be fair, the administrators at the papers were always helpful and responsive if this happened. retrieving the pile and identifying the dumper. But to me at least, it was not a system with a future.
From my occasional conversations with local journalists in the past it seemed that they were sometimes exploited and frequently left after a short while. I heard about demands on them for filing a fixed minimum of stories both for the online and paper versions. It sounded like a treadmill when the easiest way to fill their quota was to rechurnalise press releases. If you looked carefully at these papers this became pretty clear.
On the other hand, there were and are some excellent journalists who simply did not get the resources to do a proper job. I even heard how on a couple of occasions, awkward questions and critical articles were met with complaints from the local council concerned. Outrageous and undemocratic.
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