As part of Sarah Hartley’s Help Me Investigate challenge to analyse the amount of local council coverage in regional newspapers, we’re today looking at the Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard.
We should point out that due to where we live, we only receive the Cotswold edition of the paper, so we can’t comment on what the main version is like.
Again, this paper is a Newsquest publication, but unlike others we’ve covered, it does attempt to cover the smaller town and parish councils, and not just the first and second tier ones (Wiltshire and Gloucestershire county councils and Cotswold District Council).
Unlike the Cotswold Journal, sister paper to the Evesham Journal, and which contains mainly Evesham news, there is more of an attempt to make the Cotswolds edition of the Standard a standalone publication, rather than a bowdlerized version of an existing paper.
The 3rd December edition of this weekly comprised a 56 page tabloid sized newspaper, with an eight-page broadsheet property pull-out. Due to the difference in sizing, we will take the 56 page main paper as a whole and exclude the property section from our calculations.
The main paper had a main news section of 12 pages, but also had other types of news page – schools and college news (2 pages); business news (1 page); community news (4 pages). There is also a public notices section towards the back of the newspaper. The community news section lists local villages with their volunteers submitting news items for listing.
Council related stories were as follows:
- 1/4 page on possibility of reduced parking charges in Tetbury. Car park owners currently share their profits with Tetbury Town Council but want to stop doing this. Quotes a town councillor on what the impact would be.
- 1/2 page on a planning application, currently with Cotswold District Council, to build 250 new homes in Tetbury.
- 1/4 page on Cirencester Town Council aiming to “provide more” for residents. Sounds like it’s taken from a press release.
- 1/4 page on Gloucestershire County Council aiming to extend free bus pass scheme (if government legislation is changed first!)
- 1/4 page on Citizens’ Advice Bureaux funding: Cotswold District Council decisions are mentioned, and a town councillor is quoted. Again from a press release?
- 1/2 page on a memorial fund for a Tetbury teenager: quotes a district councillor for Tetbury who has helped organised a memorial day.
- 1/2 page in the SCHOOLS section on school performances – quotes both a Gloucestershire county councillor and a Wiltshire county councillor.
- 1/4 page on a Cotswold District Councillor who has organised a Christmas card to troops. Quotes the councillor.
- 1/4 page on changes to a Cirencester roundabout: quotes a Gloucestershire county councillor and the county councillor for Cirencester.
- 1/2 page on potential flooding problems in Cirencester – quotes a district councillor, the former county councillor for Cirencester, and the chief executive of Cirencester Town Council.
- BUSINESS SECTION: 1/2 page on rural areas losing out on economic support which is instead being given to the towns of Cheltenham and Gloucester. Quotes Tetbury councillor arguing for the creation of an Economic Development Officer post at Cotswold District Council and quotes the leader of Cotswold District Council and a Lib Dem councillor. [We were disappointed to find this story tucked away in the business section; the Cotswold edition covers a predominantly rural area, and it would have been good to have given this story about the impact of lack of funding and support on rural businesses given a place in the main news section]
- COMMUNITY SECTION: 1/4 page (generous appraisal): the first item under the village of Meysey Hampton is that the parish council held a public meeting ‘last night’ and that the report of it will be put on the village’s public notice boards. [It's a shame that it couldn't - due to timing - report in the paper what had happened, although it would be interesting to see if anything further is mentioned in next week's paper. It's also interesting that coverage of the parish council meetings is published locally, if not in a newspaper!]
In total, there is 4.25 pages of local council related items in the Wilts & Gloucs Standard, but 1.25 pages of these are found outside the main news section and seen as being of almost minority interest.
Some of these stories seem to be publicity for a specific councillor or ex-councillor; some appear to be from press releases. Only the brief item in the village news mentions a specific council meeting, although it doesn’t report what happened in it.
It does mean that about 1/4 of the Cotswold edition’s main news pages (3 out of 12) at least mention a council or councillor, which sounds positive; but this has to be tempered by the fact that some of the references are brief; or an addition to an existing story; or to satisfy the need for a quick quote. There is little evidence, as far as we can see, of monitoring council meetings or writing more in-depth pieces about local politics.
