Forum Topic

Hammersmith Chronicle to close

Tragic news that the Hammersmith Chronicle will close abruptly at the end of April.http://www.nuj.org.uk/news/three-london-weeklies-to-shut/The Council is nowadays the only major advertiser in the paper, paying over £80,000 a year in a six year agreement to place all its planning and legal notices in a weekly supplement. However, the owners, Trinity Mirror, failed to attract enough other advertising from local estate agents etc. We seem to be getting a lot of regular glossy magazines these days that carry all this advertising which the newspaper plainly could not attract. It may be something to do with its slightly downmarket editorial image compared to the "lifestyle" glossy magazines.The sad decline of local newspapers continues as people move to the internet for their information and use websites and blogs like this one. Sad for all those enthusiastic young journalists to lose their jobs.

Mark Loveday ● 4032d32 Comments

What is actually happening here became a bit clearer this morning. Trinity Mirror announced that they were tripling the amount they needed to set aside for claims relating to phone hacking to £12 million. To pay for this they need to lay of staff and cut the print run of existing titles.

Felicity Caborn ● 3724d

Tindle Newspapers announced today they are setting up three new (actually revived versions of defunct) titles in Kensington, Westminster and Chelsea. Presumably they are doing so because they are on a promise to get these Councils’ public notice business. Potentially this would be good news as Trinity Mirror may keep the Gazette which now would only cover Hammersmith and Fulham and start publishing more local news. As they have a monopoly they can probably put up prices to compensate for lost business from the other Councils.

Felicity Caborn ● 3804d

Just as a follow up on this I think perhaps I was originally a bit unfair on The Gazette. I don't get the paper but there is still a reasonable flow of news available online which I follow through Twitter. It is well down on the coverage levels of a few years ago but there seem to be enough stories to make a local paper worth the effort of picking up.

Paul Corcoran ● 3836d

"The incident is placed in Hammersmith when anyone with a passing acquaintance with the area would know it is nowhere near."That road is right on the border of Brent (north) and LBHF (south), so if H&F police are investigating I presume it was on the southern side.  It's still more accurately Harlesden or Kensal Green, really.Camilla Horrox lives in Kensington & Chelsea, according to her Twitter biohttps://twitter.com/CamillaHorrox

Thomas Barry ● 3942d

There doesn't seem to be anyone local working on the paper anymore. Check out the following item from its web site - http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/news/local-news/man-arrested-after-suspected-stabbing-7394989The incident is placed in Hammersmith when anyone with a passing acquaintance with the area would know it is nowhere near.

Ellen Kearney ● 3942d

You didn't have any choice but to use the new Gazette - you are required to by law.Five years ago we had an adequate local paper. It didn't have a huge readership but people who were interested in local matters could buy a copy. LBHF said it wasn't fit for purpose and launched its own forcing it to switch to free delivery cutting its revenues. When the Government forced you to close your newspaper it was impossible to re-establish the newspaper. What remains is a shell of its former self. I am quite happy to accept Una's view that the paper does have more local content than perceived from leafing through it as she has actually invested 90p in a copy but not many others will. Even if they serve up a weekly diet of anti-LBHF news it can only be a quarter of the paper's news content as they have four other boroughs to cover and very few people are likely to read it because of its limited distribution.

Karen Taylor ● 4005d

Oh come on! To suggest that taking out advertising in an independent local newspaper is part of a Council "plan to destroy independent local media" is ridiculous. The paper wouldn't even appear without that advertising, which is in any event a statutory requirement.The suggestion is even sillier given the fact that the newspaper in question splashed on an article critical of Council traffic enforcement.I know it's election time, but that post was just plain silly.

Mark Loveday ● 4006d

Or else the three young and, I am sure, modestly-paid journalists who badly need the experience and the income, would like their jobs back?!

Una Hodgkins ● 4006d

If the paper is maintaining standards that will be down to the efforts of Michael Russell who edits the new paper as well as the Ealing Gazette. He is now covering an area just about single-handedly that used to be served by four papers. The Hammersmith area alone had three journalists working on it back in 2011. He deserves a really big pay rise.

Felicity Caborn ● 4006d

Dear Karen,What were you reading?On the front page the main article was about "Money box junction" - the yellow box - under the Hammersmith flyover which the Council is "milking" with 55 penalty charge notices issued per day for a year to January 2014.P2: Crime falls in Hammersmith and Fulham etc...p2: Scrubs suicides total worst in the countryp3: Kings Mall Post Office being refurbished..Need I go on?

Una Hodgkins ● 4007d

Wasn't in my newsagent either but I leafed through a copy in Sainsbury's. Very little local news and lots of Council ads. Looks like the plan to destroy independent local media is succeeding.

Karen Taylor ● 4007d

I bought a copy of the "Fulham, Hammersmith, Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster Gazette" yesterday in Sainsburys. The edition was dated 2nd May 2014 and it cost 90p. I noticed that the editor had included reports from Ealing and Acton.

Una Hodgkins ● 4008d

I haven't seen it and my newsagent didn't have it - never used to get copies of the original paper delivered anyway.

Ellen Kearney ● 4008d

I didn't get a copy today and there wasn't one in the newsagent - has anybody seen the new Gazette? Does it actually exist?

Karen Taylor ● 4012d

You will be lucky if it is a proper newspaper. The Ealing Gazette and the Hounslow Chronicle are also subject to cut backs and office closures so it is debatable whether they will manage to provide adequate coverage for their home titles let alone a supplement for another area. Surely, too early to say that this is a step in the right direction as a seriously sub-standard tax-payer funded newspaper would be worse than no newspaper at all.

Paul Corcoran ● 4018d

The latest news on this is that as a temporary measure,  the Ealing Gazette plans to publish a Hammersmith and Fulham Supplement. This will be sold in local newsagents but will be available for free in certain Council libraries and other Civic buildings.We shall wait and see how far this amounts to a genuine local Hammersmith / Fulham newspaper - but at least it is a step in the right direction.

Mark Loveday ● 4019d

Well, tomorrow is the last day. Will be interesting to see what the paper has to say about its own demise.

Paul Corcoran ● 4019d

Una, I don't know any details of ad rates for the papers in those two boroughs but they have always been notoriously difficult for sales due to the relatively small proportion of long term residents and owner occupation. I believe that all three boroughs now come under the same team for communications but K&C and Westminster never had their own in house borough newspapers.

Felicity Caborn ● 4023d

Please note that it is not just the Fulham and Hammersmith Chronicle closing on 25th April: the Westminster Chronicle and the Kensington and Chelsea Chronicle are also closing. Has Mark Loveday had a hand in negotiating advertising rates for these Boroughs newspapers, as part of the "tri-borough" arrangements? Perhaps Felicity Caborn could comment on the advertising rates in these publications and the existence or otherwise of Westminster and K&C versions of "Pravda" - which was the not-so-facetious name given to H&F News until it was forced to close?

Una Hodgkins ● 4023d

The Chronicle was still a good paper at the time it closed. Trinity had put extra resources into it when the contract was signed with the Council. They could easily have just made further cut backs and issued a substandard newspaper to continue to take the money from the Council but chose not to.

Felicity Caborn ● 4024d

This is time for all of us journalists who live locally to get together and amybe produce a local community newspaper. The paper that is closing was run by the awful Trinity Mirror, who just ran it on less and less reporters and money. They took the profit from the council!

Michael Wale ● 4025d

'Why not just let the Council publish these notices on their web site?'There is nothing to stop the Council doing this but it wouldn't fulfill their statutory obligations. The newspaper lobby is quite powerful and they have blocked attempts by local authorities to end their obligation to put notices in newspapers.Whether they could be published online on a third party news site like this one is debatable. Roy Greenslade, despite being complimentary about these sites, doesn't seem to think so as he believes the law states that the notices need to be printed. Other people in the industry think it is inevitable that these notices will switch to being put online nationally but on the newspapers' sites not the Councils'.

Felicity Caborn ● 4027d

Why not just let the Council publish these notices on their web site? No major cost to the tax payer and more people are likely to see them there than ever did in the Chronicle.

Ellen Kearney ● 4027d

Paul, as far as I am aware there is no good legal reason why sites like this couldn't be used to publish Council notices. There is however no precedent for this, just as there is no precedent for a local authority area having no printed newspaper.

Felicity Caborn ● 4027d

Ad rates fell sharply in the borough when H&F News arrived. According to people who were at Trinity at the time the Council paper were offering a full page ad to estate agents for £100. Given the size of distribution, break even would have been at least £300 as it was for the Chronicle. Obviously most advertisers switched to the heavily subsidised council competitor.When H&F News closed the Chronicle's sales people had a product which had a third of the distribution at around three times the cost of the highly subsidised Council paper. Not surprisingly they found it impossible to win back former clients and gain new ones.It is not a silly conspiracy theory to say that the Council may seek to relaunch their paper. It was against Government guidance to publish one when it was launch originally and it remains to be seen how the new rules on the publicity code work. It is currently widely ignored by many Councils. If LBHF can't or won't go down the digital route then the choice is between restarting H&F News or paying an extra £1,000,000 or so on advertising.

Felicity Caborn ● 4027d

Some people will always blame the Council for anything - especially at election time! However, it is ludicrous to suggest Trinity Mirror would take advertising from anyone at below the cost of printing a newspaper - especially when the publishers were/are a monopoly provider. It's a simple fact that the Council's financial support through advertising allowed the Chronicle titles to survive financially for quite a long time.The conspiracy theories (that the Council wants to bring down the local newspapers and publish their own title) are also a bit silly. Apart from anything else, it is now against govt guidance for a Council to do this - which is why the six other Councils in London who publish weekly newspapers are now in deep trouble.As I have said all along, it's a tragedy that we have lost our local papers. Let's hope that some other publisher can step into the void, or we will be one of the few local areas in the country without a local paper.

Mark Loveday ● 4028d

You said on ChiswickW4 that Hounslow Council couldn't use that site as an alternative to the paper because it doesn't cover the whole borough but the sites in LBHF do give comprehensive coverage so why aren't they being used?

Paul Corcoran ● 4028d

A full page ad in the Evening Standard costs £16,800 - it probably cost less than a thousand in the Chronicle. If that ratio is consistent for any size of ad then conservatively the cost of publicity will rise by £1,000,000 per annum. At this level the Council won't take long to start arguing that it would be a good idea to start up their own newspaper again.

Felicity Caborn ● 4028d

The Council are not planning to launch their own paper according to the Press Gazette. They are going to run public notices in the Metro or the Evening Standard which is likely to be a lot more expensive than the local paper was and probably a lot less effective.http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/its-tragedy-trinity-mirror-closure-london-leaves-150000-without-dedicated-local-paper

Paul Corcoran ● 4029d

The Council has had it in from the Chronicle ever since Trinity Mirror launched a campaign against the Council's propaganda paper and forced it to close. There were no other bidders to take over the contract to carry the Council's public notices and although the Chronicle treated the Council with kid gloves, they were never forgiven.I would anticipate that the Council's next move will be to say that, as there is no longer a printed newspaper, they have to be allowed to launch their own paper again.The flyunder isn't a particularly key issue in this regard as that is a genuinely popular scheme across the political divide. It is housing policy where scrutiny really matters - LBHF are turfing out thousands of existing residents to make way for massive luxury flat developments across the borough. I hope Hammersmith Today and the other borough web sites can survive to give us proper coverage of what is going on.

Karen Taylor ● 4031d

Now the council has seen off their local paper, how do they expect their various poor decisions (flyunder, anyone?) and assorted planning skullduggery to be drawn to the attention of the public?  Surely they can't be happy with the lack of scrutiny?

Thomas Barry ● 4031d

That is really sad news and I hope the staff are able to get new jobs quickly.A friend of mine who worked at Trinity told me that it was very difficult to sell advertising in the borough because the rates offered by the Council newspaper were below cost and customers were reluctant to pay higher charges in the Chronicle even though they were, by most standards, cheap. The Council was also more aggressively pushing advertising on their web site.My view is that your local newspaper has closed due to damage done by the Council's attempts to get involved in the business of media.

Felicity Caborn ● 4031d