The whole media industry is watching what happens in three small market towns - Selkirk, Alnwick and Whitby - where a story is happening, writes Victor Noir on his blog. 

Johnston Press (JP), Britain’s second biggest regional newspaper group by sales, is dipping its toe in the water of charging for online content. Readers will have to pay to subscribe to the content of the Southern Reporter in the Scottish Borders, the Northumberland Gazette in Alnwick and the Whitby Gazette on the North Yorkshire coast.

It’s a timid enough experiment: just three small county weeklies out of its touted 286 titles. But everyone will want to see what the uptake is from readers.

Today those three websites must be enjoying their heaviest traffic ever, as media noses poke around to sniff them out. What a pity they won’t pay and stay.

I took a peek myself, and to be brutal the prospects don’t seem too bright. This is certainly the view of the JP journalists who’ve been posting frantically on media sites to warn people.

The reason is not so much that readers won’t pay, which is what we are always being told, but that they won’t pay for rubbish. The Southern Reporter site has nothing but stories from the last paper – the top story being that four bagpipe-playing local school students are to play at a concert in Edinburgh. Lacking updates, it doesn’t (at least it didn’t at 2.30 pm) even have any premium content for sale!

At least the other two have got announcements of the new policy. But the sign up/register page is simply the free sign-up for the whole JP group. Useless. Who in Peebles wants to know what’s on in Chichester?

The two Gazette sites have also got decent stories even a few ropey videos, but the sign-up is the same. All the sites are heavily branded as part of the JP group, as if that meant anything at all to local readers.

This is the corporate-think that has been the destruction of the local press. It’s not just JP but all the regional chains that have sacrificed everything to the need to feed the national group and its investors. Not only have they bled the papers dry to make quite fantastic levels of profit, sacking thousands of journalists along the way, but over ten years now they have failed to invest in strong local websites to pick up the sales and advertising revenue as the news industry gravitates online.

Group profits are all they can think of. Even last year, JP was still racking up an astronomical 24 per cent on turnover, with a company source telling the Press Gazette when the results were reported earlier this year: “Although the regional media industry is facing severe challenges, it is still profitable, and generates a lot of cash.”

Obviously the figures will be lower for this year – profits were down by 56 per cent for the first six months – and things won’t improve if they try simply to squeeze yet more revenue from the websites, instead of investing in them.

Everyone else in the world knows that the way to generate income online is to make dynamic, well-designed, well-signposted, frequently updated interactive websites that hold the visitor’s attention; everyone except newspaper publishers.

I suppose the reason is that they’d have to employ considerably more, better trained and better paid journalists.

* Headline is one of those too-clever Metropolitan cultural references, the Prospect of Whitby being a once-very-trendy riverside pub in east London.

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