What happened to the local news?
Clickbait, pop-up ads "churnalism" and leaderboards for pageviews. Negative stories get views. Stoke and North Staffs are being gaslit. The status-quo is dangerous and must be addressed.
The Sentinel newspaper has delivered news to the people of Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire for over 150 years. It has a vital role in our community. Now, it’s not what it used to be.
It’s print circulation is slowly declining along with the typically older readership, there’s no physical office in the City and it’s sister website (Stoke-on-Trent Live) is full of advertisements that make it barely readable. Crime, traffic and hopeless imagery of deprivation take centre stage.
What happened? What’s next? And why is this so important?
Quality news is critically important for a society to function. Newspapers and media outlets play a huge part in a well functioning democracy. They inform people, they uncover the truth, they challenge institutions and they give people a voice.
The Sentinel still does some of this, yet the journalism and news it does provide are drowned out in a sea of pop-up adverts, recycled articles from across the internet and an un-vetted comments section where racist and abusive comments are given as much space as the article itself.
In the last 30 years the paper has changed hands since Northcliffe Media sold to Local World and then they sold to what was Trinity Mirror Group and is now called, Reach PLC.
Reach is publicly listed with their head office in London and owns a huge array of publications, both in print and online. They own 130 titles including Mirror, Express and Manchester Evening News. According to their 2022 annual report. 38m people read their news, and they have a monthly audience of 48m. They really do have a big reach.
Their business model is to sell print newspapers and to sell advertising space on their digital platforms. According to their 2023 annual report, their revenue was £568.6m with 17% of that revenue as profit. Reach shareholders received £96.5m in profit in 2023. 77% of their revenue is from print, with the remaining revenue created by digital revenue, mostly online advertising.
Stoke-on-Trent Live and The Sentinel in print are a part of Reach PLCs portfolio of print titles and websites.
For The Sentinel in print, their business is to sell newspapers and sell advertising space within those newspapers. An individual is paying directly for the paper, therefore that leaves more room for articles to be read without the interruption of advertisements and provides a better reading experience.
For the Sentinel online, which is known as SOT Live, despite the domain name still being www.stokesentinel.co.uk, the goal is to generate as many page views as possible. Every time a page view is generated on the website, the advertisements that litter the page are bid on through “programmatic advertising”, a sophisticated marketplace of online advertisers who are bidding for that advertising space in real time.
This is why on SOT Live, there could be as many as 30 advertising spaces on the article you are reading, because Reach PLC are trying to maximise the revenue they generate from your attention.
This is also why the page is full of links to other articles too, sometimes from other publications that Reach own, the end goal is to keep you on their website or portfolio of websites for as long as possible. This way they can sell your time on their websites for as much money as possible to advertisers.
It’s hard to accurately estimate the audience size of each publication. According to ABC, the Sentinel print is now around 8,000 copies per issue. Whilst the reporting of audience size for SOT Live from April 2022 on Reach’s website is ~16,000,000 monthly page views and ~2.7m users.
There’s no doubt that The Sentinel both in print and online has a huge reach in this area and retains it’s position as the go-to source of news.
Stoke-on-Trent Live and The Sentinel have a monopoly on truth
In this respect, The Sentinel and Stoke-on-Trent live have a monopoly on what’s true. Other than Local Gazette’s, Instagram pages, Twitter accounts and Facebook groups, there is currently no other source of local news in Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire with paid, professional journalists. Reach PLC does not have a competitor. There is no other option for residents of this region to find out what is going on.
The business model of Reach PLC is not conducive to good, thorough reporting and the people of this region deserve better.
On the day of writing, of the first 20 articles on Stoke-on-Trent Live, 7 are crime, 3 traffic, 2 sport, 6 general news, 1 promoted article (Ad) and 1 on the weather.
Given the business model of Stoke-on-Trent live, articles that are more likely to get clicks will be promoted. This is why crime has such a high proportion of articles, because it generates online traffic. The open comments section that is unmoderated then brings people back for more, again generating more clicks.
The online advertising model is manipulating internet users to give their attention to Stoke-on-Trent Live and subversively, content that is being promoted doesn’t have to be well written, or well thought-out journalism. It simply needs to get your attention.
I believe Stoke-on-Trent live is gaslighting the City of Stoke-on-Trent and region of North Staffordshire. I believe the focus on crime, bad weather and venues closing down are articles that are proven to generate more online traffic and therefore are being promoted more.
The misaligned incentives of this online platform are skewing the truth and providing residents in this region with only one malignant source of information.
Many of the journalists who work at Reach are good. The people I’ve met from The Sentinel are smart, honest and diligent reporters who care about their profession. Yet the model they work within does not give them a platform for their best work.
One former employee of Reach told me how they used to enjoy spending time in the courts, properly reporting on crime. Instead they spent most of their time updating live blogs with traffic updates, copying and pasting information from twitter.
“Churnalists”
Another source joked that they and some of their colleagues referred to themselves as “churnalists”. Simply churning out content to get clicks.
Another spoke of leaderboards in the offices, where journalists are ranked on how many pageviews their articles are getting. It sounded more like the boiler room of trading floor than the office of a newspaper reporting on the truth.
“Our one source of news is drowning in a sea of pop-up ads”
The truth is our one source of news is drowning in pop-up ads with a website that is unreadable. The incentives of its business model lends itself to write more about crime, bad traffic, bad weather and businesses closing down. Fear mongering gets clicks, it plays on our primitive subconscious, this model of news wants us to be in fight or flight.
A one thousand word article on how central government has consistently cut local authority budgets, like this one in The Lead? Or a 500 word article about an arsonist?
An opinion piece on what’s next for our City Centre, like this one in The Knot, or yet another dramatised article about how it’s going to Snow next month?
What do we really need to know? Who owns the news? Who controls what information is given to us?
These are all incredibly important questions that we’ve not been asking. Thousands upon thousands of people read The Sentinel and Stoke-on-Trent Live and take what they read as the truth. A statement of fact.
In a region that is all too often down on itself, with residents that claim where they live is a “shithole” you have to ask yourself. Is that true? Or am I being brainwashed into believing this?
Is a snow storm really going to hit Stoke next month? Do we really need to know about the incident of assault in Bentilee that happened last month? How have I found myself reading the comments section for 15 minutes feeling frustrated?
Is this all true? Or is it a version of the truth designed to grab my eyeballs and sell my attention to online advertisers for fractions of pennies? All the while profiting the invisible shareholders of a huge conglomerate based in London.
It’s time for us to wake up to the fact that the state of local news is not well. There is very little to be proud of and we deserve better.
We need a completely new model of journalism and we need a rival. We need another source of truth. There’s crime, there’s traffic and there’s bad weather, but not all the time.
There’s much more to this place than that.
We need an alternative and that is what The Knot is here to provide. There are big questions to be asked and there are nuanced debates to be had about infrastructure, government, politics and local authority strategy. There’s a general election around the corner and people deserve balanced writing that gives them the whole picture so they can make informed decisions.
At the very least I believe our media should champion and challenge what’s going on in our local area. We need honesty, balance and fairness.
The current state of the news in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire is not fair, balanced or an honest reflection of the place we live and we have to change that.
James Routledge
Maybe we need at citizen journalism site for Stoke-on-Trent?
Great article 👏