Local newspapers- worthwhile?

[CampsieGlamper]

Are local newspapers worth it?
Are they striving to represent freedom, local democracy, and the inalienable right to flog cupcakes at the church fete - or an excuse to feature fundraisers for sick children to go for private operations , parochial councils to waggle ineffectively and national charities to flood the letters page?

Yabu - bring on the sick children photos and parochial parrots.
Yanbu - fed up with it.

Ours shamelessly sycophant for the wildly unpopular MP (no WAY she is being reselected, let alone voted in) and print click bait Facebook posts about homeless people. They rely so heavily on ads that their site is unreadable.

It doesn’t matter because they’re all dying off anyway due to lack of advertising. They’re all concentrating on click bait Facebook posts, usually on a National story or something from MN.

I follow the Facebook pages for ours... the traffic information is pretty good (planned closures and accident updates)

Plus the headlines can be very amusing. Last week it was about a pub endangering children by not letting school buses pick up in their car park... with a picture of the fully liviered private school coach so the whole issue could probably be solved the school paying to use the car park.

I read an article in the local one recently as it was about something I'm interested in. The "journalist" had collected very little info and the article was meaningless. I won't pay to have my time wasted with a newspaper full of rubbish like that.

Ours is a hard hitting with a long history of investigative journalism and is award winning. It's the only paper I read regularly, I never buy nationals and never have

Ours used to be a decent read. Then the number of pages started to dwindle.

I was about to pick a copy up last week but realised not only that there were only about twenty pages but they were charging £1.50...

Pointless waste of space now. They don't actually do any "journalism" anymore, and just copy & paste press releases from the police, fire service, courts and local NHS. Add in the odd photo of a school fete or first day at primary school, and that's it really. No decent employer would post job adverts in them. Most of the "tradesmen" type adverts are from scammers and incompetents.

As for their online websites, etc., most aren't even functional due to the sheer amount of advertising forced upon the viewer, not to mention the "headline" stories are often "local" news from hundreds of miles away!

I bought two copies of our local paper yesterday as my mum and I were featured in it after a 10k run at the weekend. £1.60 each! I'll not be buying it again!