Charitable funding for local news will soon be reality

Once the money is available, adverts will be placed to recruit staff for the pilot project in the Merseyside region in company with Liverpool's main newspaper publisher, Trinity Mirror.

The idea is that the new team of public service reporters will then put up their copy on a dedicated portal that will allow any news outlet, whether it be a Trinity Mirror title, a national paper or an individual blogging outfit, to publish the content free of charge.

It is an imaginative attempt to overcome the worrying prospect of courts, councils and other public bodies going unreported as traditional news organisations cut back on their reporting staffs.

Judges have been alarmed by the fact that many court hearings are taking place without any public scrutiny. Similarly, inquests are being held without journalists being present.

Local authorities have also registered concern about the absence of reporters at meetings. The failure by councils to communicate, especially with young people, is of growing concern.

A representative of the Local Government Association attended a presentation of the Press Association project last month, and was so impressed that he is reporting positively to his board. "We are supportive of viable local media," he told me, "and I see this as an interesting concept."

At the same meeting was a member of Essex County Council's communications team, and he too was enthusiastic.

Councillors in many boroughs across the UK are worried that residents are not being informed about the nuts and bolts of decisions, especially when there are policy disagreements among the political parties.

Though some councils have launched their own papers and magazines as local newspaper sales have fallen, these publications — by their nature — do not reflect the views of opposition councillors. Their greatest flaw is their overriding propaganda function, which eschews any independent questioning of their own council's activities.

A range of public institutions, such as health trusts and school boards of governors, are not being covered. Instead, papers are relying for much of their information on PR releases. Again, these fail to give a rounded view of internal debates on matters of policy that affect many thousands of people.

Thus far, there is no sign in Britain — as distinct from the United States — that independent digital start-ups are taking up the slack as papers close down or reduce journalistic staffing. There are isolated examples of bloggers doing their best to report on local affairs but there are no outlets yet acting as comprehensive watchdogs.

Press Association executives were among the first to pick up on the implications of this troubling retreat from on-the-ground reporting. That's hardly surprising because most of PA's 27 shareholders are newspaper publishers who have been responsible for instituting the cuts in editorial resources that have led to smaller reporting staffs, many of whom now rarely leave the office.

They may be criticised for their cuts, of course, but their response to declining revenue has been wholly pragmatic. For commercial organisations there is a tension between profit and public service, and survival depends more on the former than the latter.

The withdrawal from the tradition of intense coverage of local affairs has moved Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, to call for public funding for public service reporting. He spoke of his concern that public authorities and courts might operate in future without any kind of systematic public scrutiny, adding: "I don't think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news in the press and broadcasting."

An Ofcom discussion document on local and regional media, issued yesterday, took a similar line in specifically referring to the risk to journalism caused by the destruction of newspapers' business models.

In so doing, it pointed to the Government's hope to create independently funded news consortia. But this interesting idea, itself a recognition of the threat to democracy caused by a depleted community of journalists, is nowhere near getting off the ground.

PA's innovative response, by contrast, could be launched very soon indeed.

There will be detractors. PA is not without its critics, not least because it has also cut back on reporting staff in recent years (although it has more photographers than ever before). But the agency should not be taking flak for its public-spirited response to a genuine crisis.

It is, after all, a not-for-profit enterprise that, at its heart, is designed to restore the virtues of public service journalism. That opens the door to wider questions for the future of news-gathering and its transmission.

Throughout the last century, we took for granted that news was free. Newspapers, local and national, were then relatively cheap and widely available. The BBC, with its licence fee being largely accepted as an uncontroversial fact of life, gave us news for free, as did the corporation's rivals (including Sky News).

But news has always been costly to provide, a fact concealed by the funding of advertising. Now that ad income is drying up, we are finally discovering that news comes at a price.

It is a sobering thought that we may have to rely on charity and, ultimately, State funding to give us the news in future.