Jon Slattery gets with it!

I have every respect for Jon Slattery, a veteran reporter of the media scene, but a recent blog post seems to indicate that he has been inhabiting a different planet for a while.

Where, he asks, is the money to come from to run a good local news website? He notes there is not enough advertising revenue to support such an operation, which is why newspapers are such a good idea.

Err, Jon ...

No more local news from local newspapers

Well, David Cameron's speech warning the BBC to keep its "big foot" out of local news looks more perceptive by the day as local newspapers continue to shed jobs and close down wholesale without appearing to offer anything by way of replacement, online or not.

The latest development is:

Eleven Newsquest newspapers to close

leading the NUJ to accuse the publisher of abandoning communities altogether.

In addition, Trinity Mirror in Wales are about to announce swingeing cuts, including getting rid of all but one training officer and possibly a raft of subs.

Daily Mail HQ comes up with brilliant new online idea

No news yet of the local newspaper online initiatives that bbclocal would have stomped on, but perhaps this brilliantly innovative idea from DMGT HQ is a straw in the wind:

Online shopping pages!

Now that's something the BBC would really have got into, don't you think?

Yesterday I met someone very closely connected to one of the BBC Trust members who was pivotal in the decision not to allow the local video journalism scheme to go ahead. I am now slightly more convinced that the decision was based on a concern that the scheme did not offer value for money (but still not entirely convinced that there wasn't an element of leaning-on somewhere in the process).

This, however, simply reinforces the idea that the Trust members did not give full weight to the long term requirement for local news provision and the BBC's vital role in that.

More great news to convince David Cameron that the Newspaper Society's members really do have local media's best interests at heart:

Newsquest make their Scottish journalists re-apply for their jobs
A good Roy Greenslade blog post on the matter
Alex Salmond gets involved in the issue