Is there anybody out there?

Can Tweeps and other social media types see beyond their own limited online worlds, and has this election helped them engage with non-users?

IT’S Local Newspaper Week. You may have missed this, what with one or two other things crowding out the news agenda. But it’s a fact, Jack. Or should that be hack?

There is something of an irony in the thought that the Newspaper Society chose this week, of all weeks, to attempt to draw attention to this most beleaguered corner of the media, some seven days when its plight has surely been drowned out by, well, the media’s attention on events in Westminster.

This is a shame, because the Newspaper Society has commissioned some interesting research that not only helps to place them in a society that continues to change its media tastes at a gallop, but shows that they are managing to keep pace with the times, even if a ongoing splintering in choice continues to contribute to circulation decline.

The poll found that 40 million people still read local newspapers every week, which means they remain the most widely-read print medium in the UK. People also told the NS – perhaps quite surprisingly – that local newspaper websites are 49% more trusted and relied-upon than commercial television, and that they still remain an important resource for those life changing decisions, like a change of job or home.

Away from the sits vac and the estate agent adverts, readers are looking for news of local government and other civic bodies, with 63% saying they are happy with the amount of information their local newspaper provides, while 60% would contact a local newspaper if they were trying to raise awareness of a local issue or problem. By contrast, only 15% said go for they would look to local authority publications – something of a relief, we imagine, for newspaper proprietors, who have complained long and vociferously about the march of council organs.

A local newspaper attends an average of 12 meetings of public bodies each month and publishes around 30 stories from them. In addition, an average local paper will have a reporter covering a criminal court on an average of 2.3 days out of five.

But newspapers are finding it increasingly harder to source that news. Some 63 editors were surveyed by the NS, with nearly one in five (78%) saying their papers had experienced greater problems in getting information from local council, the police and authorities in recent times. Some 35% had reporters that had been prevented from attending or reporting details of a public meeting. Not to be put off, 85% challenged those obstructions.

Most of us have local newspapers, and we all regard them with varying degrees of respect. Concentrating on such a traditional part of our media buffet the week after we were treated to the most hi-tech election yet probably seems a little incongruous. After all, the BBC reported its best ever weekday traffic, with 11.4 million users (only a little way ahead of WalesHome…) last Friday, easily beating a previous record of 9.2 million visitors on the day that Barack Obama won the US presidential election.

In years gone past, the tabloid front pages were an election treat to savour. But what about this time around?

Has online traffic taken a chunk out of newspaper readership? Too early for the ABC figures. But we didn’t hear so much about front pages and scoops this election. Nothing that really caught the imagination. Roy Greenslade summed it up admirably when, after running through the political coverage and opinion from the former Fleet Street titles, he concluded: