DEADLY RIVALS MAKE PEACE IN THE NEW ERA OF STALE NEWS

I bought my first copy of the West Briton for quite a while this week and was struck by just how much of its editorial content was decidedly stale news.

 

As in, material that had already appeared in various places online anything up to a week or more previously, and with no attempt at an update or new angle.

 

I shouldn’t really have been surprised, of course, as the emphasis has long since shifted to all things online and away from printed newspapers, with consequent dramatic falls in circulation figures for the latter, to say nothing of some long-established titles having closed down altogether.

 

Some of the stale pieces in the Briton had even been very adequately covered in its rival Falmouth Packet in the previous week.  (And the Packet can be just as “guilty,” of course, of seemingly making no effort to freshen up its print edition content.)

 

Indeed, all trace of the deadly rivalry that used to exist between these two publishers seems to have been consigned to history.

 

Back in the day, e.g. when I was the Packet’s chief reporter in the ‘70s and ‘80s, things were very different.

 

Sleep would be lost – no kidding – ahead of the Briton publishing on Thursday, especially if we still hadn’t acquired a strong, and preferably exclusive, page one lead for the Packet, which published on Fridays then.

 

In time, not least in a bid to score against the Briton, the Packet’s publication day was brought forward to Thursday . . . and then to Wednesday, ahead of the Briton, which has stuck to Thursday.

 

But boy, was there trouble if – when it was too late to do anything about it – the Briton came out with a good exclusive that we’d had no wind of.

 

Now, as I say, that sort of thing doesn’t seem to matter any more. 

 

As with small local weeklies, so with the much bigger provincial dailies – and something you certainly wouldn’t see any more now, as few if any cities will still have two evening papers all of their own.

 

Compare and contrast with the way things still were back in the 1950s and early ‘60s.

 

In the later ‘60s, I was a trainee reporter on the Packet under editor Ken Thompson and he would recall the times when the big cities would have not only two such newspapers but several editions for each.

 

In the cut-throat battle for readers, he told me, the papers would routinely bid to out-do each other by repeatedly ramping up their headlines on the placards at their sales points (complete with salesmen shouting the odds).

 

‘It was amazing,” he said, “how the anticipated cost of a big fire in a city could shoot up in just the space of a few hours.

 

“One paper would quote such and such a figure, only for the opposition to hike it up a few thousand pounds more. Then the first paper would come back with a higher figure again for its next edition, and so the process would go on!”

 

And you thought fake news was something new!