LOCAL newspapers are a vital part of communities the length and breadth of Britain.

Here in Worcester, local newspapers have recorded the fine detail of life in and around the city for more than 300 years.

The city is home to Berrow’s Worcester Journal, the oldest newspaper in the world – first published in 1690 and still going strong today.

The newspaper I have the privilege of editing, the Journal’s sister daily title the Worcester News, has been around for more than a century.

The coverage provided by the Worcester News – and hundreds of other local daily and weekly newspapers across the UK – is more comprehensive than that provided by any other part of the media.

That is not a criticism of television or radio. Broadcasters even on local stations tend to cover larger areas than local newspapers and inevitably (and quite rightly) they will concentrate on the bigger stories from that area.

Our pages are full of information specific to our main circulation areas in south Worcestershire – at least 100 items of news and sport every day for six days every week – and you simply cannot find that level of detail anywhere else.

We report every day from the courts. We report every day from council meetings at which vital decisions are made about how your money is spent. We campaign against injustice and decisions that are bad for our readers.

School fetes, parish council meetings, village cricket teams, charity nights, and a host of other events, organisations and people receive coverage in our newspaper. Without us they simply would not receive the oxygen of publicity they need.

There are plenty of bad news stories around about local newspapers at the moment. Some industry “experts” are all too ready to predict the end of the local newspaper. We cannot survive, they say. People do not want to pay to read what we produce, they say. The Internet has done for us, they say.

In 25 years as a local newspaper journalist I have heard all the doom mongering before.

Here is the reality. The media world is changing fast. Newspapers are changing with it rather than being left behind in the digital world.

Sales of newspapers have been falling for 50 years. But local newspapers today are about far more than just the number of copies they sell.

Add the number of people who read the print version of the Worcester News to the growing number of users of our website at worcesternews.co.uk and you get an audience figure bigger than it has been for many years.

There is still a huge demand for local news – but it needs to be delivered to readers in the ways they want it.

Some people want the traditional newspaper, others want their news on the Internet; some want to read local news on their mobile, others prefer it delivered to their e-mail inbox.

The Worcester News – along with the majority of local newspapers in the UK – provides all these methods of delivery.

The recession has hit the newspaper industry hard. There are very few businesses it has not damaged. We have seen significant downturns in advertising revenues across the industry.

Some newspapers will not survive, particularly those that are second or third in their market places.

But those that adapt to the changing needs of their readers and customers will survive and prosper.

Local newspapers have a bright future. It will be a future perhaps radically different to how we do things today, but that is the nature of our business – change is the only constant.

After all, when I began my career as a reporter I wrote my stories on a typewriter and the newspaper I worked for was printed in black and white.

What hasn’t changed is what local newspapers do best – report and support the communities they serve.

Places like Worcester would be poorer without their local newspaper.

  • mobile.worcesternews.co.uk offers a simplified version of this site, with news, business and the latest travel reports at the top of its agenda. Click here for more details.

Worcester News: follow us on twitter