What is the future for regional business journalism?

In a world of 24 hour rolling news where stories are broken on Twitter, reported, shared and re-reported before you go to bed, it is easy to be cynical about the role of local business reporting in today’s world.

This week the Manchester Evening News announced it would stop all business reporting, once considered core to the title’s success. The wisdom of this move will be seen over the coming months. But, before you resign the local paper to the annals of history, take a minute to think about the importance of local reporting.

Local reporting gives local businesses a platform to reach out to their markets. It often champions the issues of readers and provides a valuable conduit to the national media, as stories are picked up and reported.

Where will businesses outside the FTSE 100 and the M25 have a voice when local papers are gone? National media continue to pull back on their regional resource and even the BBC is looking at a more centralised delivery of news.

Marketing dogma would suggest that every business is able to become a self-publishing, content marketing engine that attracts an engaged audience to serve as a pool of prospective customers. It doesn’t happen like that in the real world. Small businesses often lack the resources to plan and sustain a content led digital campaign.

There is no easy solution to this problem. Companies have shifted spend to digital platforms and many traditional media brands have failed to commercialise their digital offers work. There are notable exceptions, such as thebusinessdesk.com, which has grown through tough times.

Northcliffe recently launched its Local World offer, with the stated intent to ‘reinvigorate local media’. It will be interesting to see if the new chief executive, Steve Auckland, can repeat the success he enjoyed at Metro.

Local daily and weekly media titles have levels of brand awareness and passive loyalty that most start-ups envy. Most people would hate to see their local paper go but haven’t bought one in years or, more importantly, spent any advertising  budget. The challenge must be to engage a lapsed audience with the right content on a range of media.

I don’t have the magic bullet for local media, if I did I would sell it to Steve Auckland, but we can only hope that local media brands find a commercial model that allows them to maintain the high quality journalism required to build an audience.

Don't forget the lessons of the past

When you can sit on your sofa watching a live stream of an Austrian guy dive from space, on your phone, it is easy to see why many would think the lessons of the past are irrelevant. 

Living in the North of England the subject of economic regeneration is always a hot topic. Where will the growth and jobs come from? The strategy changes with fluctuating budgets and political dogma, but there is a constant belief in 'build it and they will come'. You can see this belief played out in high speed rail, technology parks or incubator hubs. 

I was a fairly good history student because my lecturer always told me I had empathy. My empathy with the past was built on a belief that the same fears and hopes that drive people today, drove people 300 years ago. 

If you look back to the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand. Artists depended totally on patrons while the patrons needed money to sustain geniuses. Wealth was brought to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia and Europe. 

Today 'money' is angel investors and private equity and 'art' is creativity. If we can create an environment that encourages private money to take a risk on a great idea, big things can happen. We are still looking to expand trade with Europe and Asia. The highest value thing we can export? Ideas. 

Take away the barriers to lending in new ideas and investors desire to back the next big thing and make a pile of money will look after the rest. The UK, the North, Leeds, are awash with big ideas, some will work and some won't. 

Where is the UK's Facebook or Amazon? Probably sat in Starbucks, using the free wifi to write a business plan and wondering where the hell the money will come from.