Annals of mutual incomprehension: Local newspapers and hyperlocal bloggers

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 10 December 2009 at 12:45
Tags: Newsquest

Patrick Smith from Paid Content went along to the AOP’s Microlocal Forum yesterday and came away a bit disappointed.

There wasn’t much at the AOP’s Microlocal Forum on Wednesday to suggest that either semi-amateur, entrepreneur-led start-ups or big-league newspaper publishers will make real successes of hyperlocal in 2010.

Well, no. But did we expect “real successes” so soon? Not really. As Smith says, we’re in the “foothills” of something new. The context may seem “auspicious”, but out in the real world, larger forces are at work.

Recently, Clay Shirky suggested that cities with less than 500,000 inhabitants in North America could look forward to a future of “endemic civic corruption” because no-one is watching the malefactors who are tempted to skim 5% off the top of everything that comes their way. (Mmm. Civic corruption? It takes two to tango, and the private sector is usually in there somewhere.)

“I think that’s baked into the current environment,” said Shirky. “I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing.”

Bloggers and hyperlocal sites are trying to fill some of these gaps. Hopefully, some of them will gain more prominence as part of the government’s independently-funded multimedia news consortia.

But at yesterday’s event, Paul Bradshaw criticised “one-sided partnerships” in which bloggers get little or nothing.

Roger Green, digital managing director at Newsquest, welcomed Bradshaw and the bloggers to the club. For years, he said, he has been having “joke meetings” with “people from no-name [mostly technology] start-ups who say we should help them start their business and pay them for the privilege”.

Collaboration is difficult. The grassroots translation is just as intriguing as the high politics.

Here in south London, where I live, Jason Cobb runs The Onion Bag Blog, a lively take on life and community politics in Lambeth (”the rotten borough”) and its hinterland.

Cobb has a deep affection for his neighbourhood, its people and history. The barbs he aims at Lambeth council are well-targeted. Local editors should be queuing up to employ him.

But Cobb’s recent discussion of a telephone encounter with a reporter on the South London Press points to the yawning gulf that exists between old and new, traditional and upstart.

The story starts with Cobb’s effort to interest an unnamed reporter from the South London Press in a local oral history project called Stockwell Stories.

Eventually, the reporter put in a call to Cobb. Here, according to Cobb, was his first question:

“Where is the borough of Stockwell?”

This isn’t desperately promising, because Stockwell tube station is only a couple of miles from the HQ of the South London Press in Streatham.

Next question:

“Why would you want to talk to local people?”

Well, OK: perhaps this was a provocative enquiry designed to elicit a passionate response. It’s been known to happen.

Unfortunately, things go downhill from here. Ultimately, there’s this question, which rolls down the copper lines toward Cobb in a manner that suggests it’s still 2002:

“What is a blog?”

Was Cobb talking to a staff reporter? Perhaps not. As one commenter points out, he was probably talking to a teenager on work experience “who may not have English as a first language let alone a familiarity with the geography of South London”.

Fair enough. But as Cobb asks: “Why allow someone to objectively report a local news patch, if by admission, they are unfamiliar with the area and struggle with the language?”

Good question. As Dan Gillmor noted long ago, the collective audience always knows more than the individual journalist. Cost-cutting tilts the balance even further in the wrong direction.

From Roger Green downwards, the dialogue between local bloggers and local newspapers involves vast quantities of mutual incomprehension. It’s there in the “joke meetings” between publishers and “no-name start-ups”. And it’s there on a phone line that connects Jason Cobb with the South London Press.

It’s also there in Cobb’s disdain for what he describes as the “cat-stuck-up-south-London-tree” agenda of Tindle Newspaper Group’s local organ.

Collaboration between local newspapers, bloggers and other “outside” contributors might seem like a sensible solution. Among others, David Montgomery, the chief executive of Mecom, assumes that it’s a natural progression for everyone.

No doubt this looks easy enough from Montgomery’s perch 10,000 feet above the action. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot of work, and big changes in attitude, to make it work on the ground.

(Thanks to south Londoner Adam Tinworth for the link to Onion Bag Blog.)

How the financial markets engineered bankruptcy as a realistic option for Gannett

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 30 June 2009 at 13:50
Tags: Gannett, Newsquest

“Bondholders are saying that they’re hedged and that they basically want the company to die.”

If you want it in a nutshell, that’s the import of a fascinating (and lengthy) piece about Gannett in The Big Deal by Richard Morgan.

Not so long ago, Gannett possessed one of the sprucest balance sheets in the newspaper industry. In 2007, its debts were 2.1 times EBITDA, compared with an average of 4.4 for its publicly-traded peers.

Two years of horrible declines in profitability have made Gannett’s debts loom larger relative to its profits. No-one expects that trend to go into reverse.

Accordingly, Gannett’s bondholders (who own a large slice of the company’s debt) have flocked to insure themselves against loss. They’ve done so by purchasing credit default swaps (or CDSs).

Credit default swaps insure a lender against loss or default, just as a buildings insurance policy insures you against the possibility of your home collapsing into a pile of rubble.

According to Morgan, demand for Gannett-related debt insurance has grown so large that the company — like AIG and General Motors before it — has become a “CDS magnet”. While Gannett owes net debts of $3.7bn, the notional value of CDSs referencing the company is a remarkable $30.9bn.

This suggests the existence of speculation on an epic scale. According to University of Texas Law School professor Henry Hu, it also raises the prospect of so-called “empty-creditor phenomenon”. As Morgan puts it:

An empty creditor may have started out as a traditional lender by making loans and buying bonds. But somewhere along the line, he began supplementing his basic credit transactions with CDSs or other instruments. . .

Hence, the ability of the empty creditor to render himself less economically sensitive to the fate of his debt issuer, who in earlier eras he would have wanted to stay out of bankruptcy.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Professor Hu states the proposition more directly: “Let’s say a creditor lends $100 million but then buys $200 million in CDS protection. . . In this extreme version of an empty-creditor pattern, the lender would actually have an interest in seeing his borrower fail.”

This, Morgan suggests, is precisely what is happening to Gannett.

Gannett may have been laid low by structural changes in its markets. Yet on this evidence, the killer blow may yet be struck by the speculators and financial engineers who have already played such a visible role in the global financial crisis.

In turn, of course, this raises the question of what the market for credit default swaps looks like in relation to Johnston Press, Trinity Mirror, ITV and Independent News & Media.

In the latter case, Denis O’Brien seems perfectly well aware of the potential impact of CDS speculation on bondholders’ negotiating position. . .

The decline & fall of local newspapers, Part 1

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 23 June 2009 at 12:26
Tags: Johnston Press, Media, Newsquest, Northcliffe Media, Trinity Mirror

Local press consolidation: How Lord Carter and the OFT opened the door for the Big Four

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 18 June 2009 at 10:42
Tags: Johnston Press, Newsquest, Northcliffe Media, Trinity Mirror

Two months ago, Sly Bailey of Trinity Mirror told a Digital Britain conference: “All we are asking for is a 21st century merger regime to support 21st century media.”

This week, The Office of Fair Trading published a 105pp annex to Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report. In an accompanying statement, John Fingleton, chief executive of the OFT, argued that the existing merger regime for local newspapers is already “fit for the needs of the media sector in the 21st century”.

If this was intended as a rebuke to Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror didn’t take offence.

Why? Here, it’s probably important to notice that Bailey’s argument has focused less on the law itself, and more on its interpretation. When competition regulators examine markets for unfair competition or monopoly, it matters tremendously how they define those markets.

Here’s Sly Bailey putting her case in an interview with Jeff Randall on Sky News back in March:

“The problem with that is that the Regulator looks at our industry and very narrowly defines us as print markets, and what we are saying is no, we now operate in a much wider competitive market not least with, with online.”

Here she is making the same point at the Digital Britain conference in April:

“Any merger regulation which doesn’t take Google, RightMove or Monster in to account isn’t fit for purpose. Allowing us to merge and consolidate is the only way we’ll be able to meet these threats head-on.”

Reading the OFT’s response, it’s clear that the arguments voiced by Bailey (and submitted by the hastily-convened Local Media Alliance) have had an impact. Here’s the OFT response on the question of market definitions:

There is no binding precedent on the OFT or [Competition Commission] to apply a particular market definition (that is, the economic market in which the merging parties are considered to operate), or to carry out its competition assessment in a particular way, for a merger in a sector which has been looked at before.

This flexibility can result in different market definitions being applied in different cases, with the market definition being determined by the evidence.

Specifically, the OFT’s report suggests that data submitted by the LMA was “broadly supportive of the case for. . . wider market” [definitions] that include both print-based and online media.

Lord Carter’s suggestion that Ofcom could play a role is also be significant. As the OFT puts it: “The OFT will ask Ofcom to provide views, arising from its understanding of media markets, on factors relevant to the OFT’s decision.” Ofcom already performs this role in the case of broadcast mergers.

Yesterday, Bailey also suggested that Ofcom’s involvement might be “could be a clever answer to a difficult problem”.

This raises the prospect of Ofcom operating as a discreet sounding board between the regional chains and the OFT. Significantly, this week’s OFT review mentions that the regional chains are at liberty to dicuss mergers and transactions with the OFT before announcing them publicly. *

It also reminds the Big Four (as well as other Alliance members, including DC Thomson, Archant and Guardian Media Group) that prospective deals can be “fast-tracked” out of the OFT and into the Competition Commission. The OFT advises that by going down this route “a more advantageous outcome could be achieved by merging parties”.

The OFT’s careful suggestion that nothing has changed is designed to maintain respect for competition law in other sectors of the economy.

Beneath the surface, though, the regional chains have cleared some or all of the logjam. Expect attempts at consolidation to start making headlines sooner rather than later.

* UPDATE 18/06/2009: It turns out that the OFT already offers “extra-statutory advice on an informal basis on competition issues. . . arising out of a prospective merger”. Since 2006, however, the OFT has “not been approached in writing for Informal Advice on any potential local or regional newspaper transactions”.

Ofcom wakes up to local news crisis. . . but will probably doze off again soon enough

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 24 March 2009 at 14:22
Tags: Johnston Press, Media, Newsquest, Northcliffe Media, Trinity Mirror

Now, finally, we know what it takes to get Ofcom out of bed.

Cindy Crawford used to demand $10,000 a day. In the case of Stewart Purvis, the absurdly-named partner for content and standards at Ofcom, it’s a 37% YOY decline in ad revenues at Northcliffe Media.

Oh, and 1,000 job losses.

Wiping the sleep from his eyes, Purvis — whose CV includes stints at Channel 4, ITN and the BBC — was all over the news bulletins last night.

What we got was yet more bleating about the role of local newspapers in a democracy. (In case you were wondering, their role is to tell voters what goes on in government “between elections”).

The abiding impression created by Purvis’s soundbite was that of a man flapping his arms in the air and repeating: “Something must be done.”

This is fine so far as it goes. But Purvis has got competition. For months now, culture minister Andy Burnham has been performing this role.

Regrettably, when it comes to taking real action — or any action at all — the minister has proved as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.

But still: let’s not be too harsh. Let’s ask instead what has woken Purvis from his slumber. What, in other words, was so special about yesterday’s announcement from DMGT?

On 18^th March, Gannett announced that Newsquest’s ad revenues declined by 32% (in constant currency) during January and February.

On 11^th March, Johnston Press announced a 36% decline in ad revenues during the first nine weeks of the year. On 26^th February, Trinity Mirror forecast a 37% decline in regional ad revenues during January and February.

The idea of freefall declines in regional ad revenues isn’t new. It’s been staring the industry in the face since last autumn.

Did anyone genuinely think that the 25%-30% YOY declines in regional ad revenues recorded during Q408 were going to be the end of the story?

For the past six months, this government’s response to signs of distress among local media has been consistent: let Lord Carter deal with it.

Carter largely ignored the gathering crisis in local newspapers in his interim report which was published in late January. But he provided a glimpse of his thinking last week.

On Tuesday 17^th March, Sly Bailey –- whose willingness to make waves is becoming admirable — told the FT that regional newspapers face “immediate peril”.

Two days later, a reporter asked Carter about Bailey’s repeated criticisms of him.

The noble technocrat had this to say: “Internet advertising is repricing traditional media inventory. I’m not entirely sure there’s an awful lot you can do about that.”

Carter’s quote got me wondering. What if the bleating of bureaucrats like Burnham and Purvis is actually misleading?

What if the secretary of state for culture, media and sport and the partner for content and standards actually turn out to be minimum-waged employees of the Department of Folding Deckchairs?

Furthermore: what if masterly inaction actually lies at the core of government policy?

Lord Carter may yet emerge as a Shirky/Jarvis-style technocrat who believes that the entire edifice of regional print ownership needs to collapse before a new digital order can be born. (It’s certainly a view. But until a few months ago it was controversial enough to be unmentionable in polite conversation with Big Media types.)

If Carter does hold such views, the Treasury will love him for it. HM Treasury has fought an aggressive rearguard action against any government minister who has dared to suggest that bail-outs should be offered to anyone other than bankers. You’d have to guess that Lord Carter is in agreement.

And then there’s that renowned friend of local democracy, Gordon Brown. I wonder how much priority he places upon the need for voters to stay informed “between elections”?

Of course, it was nice to see Stewart Purvis waking up to what’s been occurring beneath his nose for the past six months.

Sadly, I wouldn’t describe his new-found wakefulness as particularly encouraging. It’s entirely possible that Mr Purvis has just misread government policy in a fundamental way.

Regional press bosses go lobbying alongside the subsidy jockeys of Channel 4 & ITV

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 4 March 2009 at 18:43
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Johnston Press, Newsquest, Northcliffe Media, Trinity Mirror

It’s reassuring to see that the regionals finally mounted a proper effort to lobby Lord Carter in January, shortly after publication of the interim Digital Britain report.

At the very least, this lobbying effort should have been launched back in October, when Carter was appointed as minister for communications, technology and broadcasting. Arguably, of course, the regionals should have started bending the ear of culture minister Andy Burnham last summer.

In the event, Carter’s interim Digital Britain report emerged in late January.

It showed what happens when — as in the case of the regionals –- you approach the prospect of public sector intercourse like a Mormon cast adrift in Las Vegas.

Across hundreds of pages in Carter’s report, the regionals were crowded out of proceedings by the smart alec subsidy jockeys of Channel 4 and ITV and the smooth-talking telecoms operators. Carter mentioned newspapers precisely four times.

Messing about with megaphone diplomacy (Tim Bowdler in the Sunday Times) and blowing your top (Sly Bailey in the wake of Carter’s report) have been poor substitutes for engaging with the government on its own terms. The failure to engage has cost the regionals precious time.

It’s been entertaining, though. In particular, the sarcastic statement that Bailey released after publication of Lord Carter’s interim report voiced the irritation of many in the industry.

Unfortunately, it had the side-effect of making Trinity Mirror — and the regional newspaper industry as a whole — look woefully out of the loop.

For much of 2008, this was the case. Last week, however, Bailey made a strenuous effort to convey the impression that this had changed.

As she presented Trinity’s 2008 results, Bailey was at pains to stress that lines of communication with the government had been opened up. Along the way, however, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror also dropped a few mixed messages into the ether. 

Talking with Ian King at the Times in the wake of her results presentation, she had this to say:

“The old concerns about dominant market position do not apply. Advertisers do not see it that way — the regulator is the only one left who still sees markets in that way. There is an urgent need to change the way regional newspaper mergers are considered.”

This is the standard argument for a relaxation of competition law. But when Bailey spoke to City analysts last week, she seemed to say something different.

Asked whether consolidation would bring “genuinely new opportunities” in its wake (as opposed to more of the same old cost-cutting), Bailey suggested that it would give Trinity Mirror “more clout” in advertising markets.

But surely more clout for publishers must mean less clout for agencies and clients?

This is the kind of suggestion that will cause concern at the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission.

Of course, it might be possible to reconcile these two apparently conflicting positions by arguing that an increase in the regionals’ ad market clout simply doesn’t matter in a world where so much revenue is migrating from print to digital.

This point is easy to argue. But it will be tricky to prove conclusively.

Presumably, this is what Lord Carter has asked the regionals to do. To crunch the numbers, the regionals have engaged the big-brained analysts at OC&C, the strategy consultancy.

It will be intriguing to see what they come up with.

The financial reporting season: A moment of truth at Recession Central

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 9 February 2009 at 14:52
Tags: Daily Mail & General Trust, Independent News & Media, Johnston Press, Newsquest, Trinity Mirror

Have you noticed how bumpy it’s getting?

Yep: we’re navigating the final approach to a series of extremely negative financial announcements from the UK’s consumer-facing media groups.

The coverage is telling us that we’re in for a shocker. As Sir Alex Ferguson would say, it’s squeaky bum time.

Visibly, we’ve reached the point at which struggling media groups concede the need to sell non-core assets for what they can, when they can.

That was the message delivered by Daily Mail & General Trust’s sale of the Evening Standard for £1. This morning, the Times announced that ITV wants out of ITN. So, too, does DMGT, which holds a 20% stake.

Both Johnston Press and Independent News & Media have announced fire sales of assets. INM hung out the “for sale” signs above a collection of “non-strategic core assets” a few weeks back.

The FT did the same on behalf of Johnston Press’s Irish newspapers on Friday.

We can expect more distress signals as we move through the reporting season.

Proceedings will kick off on Wednesday with a trading update from Daily Mail & General Trust.

Trinity Mirror will report its annual results on 26 February. Johnston Press will do the same a week later.

Archant’s annual report should also make an appearance in early March. ITV will report is full-year results on 4^th March. And Independent News & Media will follow in late March.

The most crucial piece of news in each announcement will involve what’s been happening to ad revenues since consumer confidence fell off a cliff last October.

The IPA’s Bellwether Report, published in mid-January, suggested that marketing directors reacted ruthlessly.

Overall, the Bellwether Report implied a “sharp acceleration in the overall rate of decline” during Q4. According to the FT, the report suggested cuts of “one-third” to “main media advertising, such as television and print”.

Arguably, these cuts had only started to filter through when the UK’s consumer-facing media groups last updated the market during November.

Back then, Trinity Mirror told us that ad declines were accelerating toward -20% YOY. Reading between the lines, November’s interim management statement from Johnston Press suggested similar. 

DMGT last offered us a snapshot of conditions on 20^th November. This told us that total ad revenues at Associated fell by 10% YOY during October. The decline at Northcliffe was a swingeing 28%.

Nothing that has occurred in the meantime suggests that ad markets have improved.

Last week, for example, Gannett disclosed a 29% YOY decline in constant-currency ad revenues — classified and display — at Newsquest between October and January.

The read-across from TV markets is worrying. A few weeks back, we reported Zenithoptimedia’s suspicion that Five suffered a 27% collapse in ad revenues during January.

That was an agency view. Sensibly, Campaign followed it up last week by talking with broadcasters directly. What it discovered about their projections for Q1 was worrying. 

According to Campaign, total TV ad revenues (including the cash attracted by fast-growing minority interest channels) are predicted to fall by 17%-18% between January and March.

ITV1 will suffer a 22% YOY hit. And Five is predicted to face a shortfall of 32% on last year’s ad revenues.

Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts. We’re making our final approach to Recession Central. . .

Scandal or the public purse: How to underwrite the cost of journalism?

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 12 November 2008 at 13:25
Tags: Daily Mail & General Trust, Guardian Media Group, Johnston Press, Newsquest, Trinity Mirror

At first, the concatenation of Paul Dacre and Alan Rusbridger at the front of Monday’s Media Guardian looked a bit like one of those combinations the Dulux Colour Wheel warns you against.

Lime green and purple. Or brown and blue.

The extract from Dacre’s speech to the Society of Editors was mostly a rant against the encroachments of privacy law. (Full speech here.)

By contrast, Rusbridger argued that Britain’s local newspapers should join the lengthening queue of industries seeking a government bail out.

Colour is only skin deep. Dacre and Rusbridger were arguing on behalf of completely incompatible philosophies of ownership. But both maintain that society needs to pay a price to sustain the newspaper industry.

In Dacre’s view, society must put up with regular invasions of privacy, and the resulting salacious exclusives, if newspapers are to have a commercial future. He doubts whether mass circulation newspapers can survive if they aren’t free to write about scandal.

The encroachments of privacy law, he suggests, are therefore a direct threat to the “reporting and analysis of public affairs” conducted by the popular press.

Rusbridger argues for another kind of subsidy. He can’t see why local newspapers shouldn’t feed at the trough of public subsidy alongside the BBC.

If ITV no longer wants to adhere to its public service remit, government should think about giving the money to local newspapers.

Who is to say that Channel 4 (not to mention some aspects of the BBC output) is any more deserving of state funding than those responsible for the sometimes humdrum, but essential, task of keeping people informed about what their local councils, courts, police, health and fire services are up to?

If there’s going to be a digital switchover surplus shouldn’t local newspapers be in with a shout, rather than shuffling the money around a limited pool of broadcasters - who are, in any event, rather urgently re-inventing themselves as digital content providers?

The real importance of both these pieces is their timing. Perhaps a real — and long overdue — debate about the future of news media may be about to start.

Unsurprisingly, the recession is going to be the catalyst. That, plus the doings of Ofcom, Mr Justice Eady and Lord Carter of Barnes.

Rusbridger can see it coming: “As the mists clear from the banking crisis it’s not clear if many MPs are aware of the potential for a similar one on their own doorsteps.”

He’s right about that. The real question, however, is whether anyone really cares about the fate of a business whose practitioners regularly rank below estate agents in terms of public esteem.

We might be about to find out.

The pound in your pocket: More bad news for transatlantic media companies

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 22 October 2008 at 15:06
Tags: IPC, News International, Newsquest

So the pound has slumped to $1.62 after Mervyn King’s gloomy speech in Leeds last night.

More bad news for Newsquest, News International, Conde Nast and IPC — just four of the companies whose remittances to corporate HQ in the US have to be transformed into dollars before they can hit the parental P&L.

A few months ago, every pound these companies earned in the UK was worth almost $2.00. Now each of those pounds is worth 20% less. And that’s before we start to consider the effect of collapsing ad sales in the UK.

Or a weaker pound’s effect on consumer behaviour. (For exporters, it’s great news — assuming that there’s anywhere left on the face of the planet that’s importing stuff. But for the consumer economy that props up adland, the news isn’t necessarily good.)

Presumably, however, we’ll reach a point when the collapsing pound doesn’t look like entirely bad news for the UK subsidiaries of US-headquartered companies.

If and when they slip into a loss, the pound’s weakness will presumably have the effect of minimizing the apparent damage.

To every dark cloud, a silver lining. . .

Just a flesh wound? The future of local newspapers in a credit crunched world

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 29 September 2008 at 15:14
Tags: Cumbrian Newspapers, Daily Mail & General Trust, Gannett, Johnston Press, Newsquest, Trinity Mirror

King Arthur: [after Arthur has cut off both of the Black Knight's arms]
Look, you stupid Bastard. You’ve got no arms left.
Black Knight: Yes I have.
King Arthur: Look!
Black Knight: It’s just a flesh wound

– Monty Python & The Holy Grail (1975)

At the Guardian, Roy Greenslade notes that Jane Martinson doesn’t ask “what can be done” to prevent parts of the regional press from collapsing into administration. This, he suggests, is because the question is “virtually impossible to answer”.

Virtually, but not entirely. To some extent, the answer depends on your starting point.

Mine is that the shifting metropolitan populations of our big cities are the exception rather than the norm. The vast majority of Britons still grow up, live, work and die with 10 miles of where they were born. They want local jobs and local housing. However it’s delivered, they also want local news.

The real problem is that large parts of the regional press have spent the past decade driving down the road of quoted consolidation. Today, this road has become a cul-de-sac. The debts, margins and organisational structures of these companies are unsustainable in a post-crunch world.

As Greenslade actually notes in passing, there are at least three routes forward for regional press groups threatened by collapse.

Two of them are not particularly attractive. The first involves someone like Richard Desmond emerging as an asset stripper.

The result would be stasis and the eventual extinction of more mastheads down the road. A deal like this would inhibit the deep-seated restructuring that’s required to give regional media a future.

Alternatively, we may witness the big chains attempting to merge their way out of trouble.

Greenslade describes the prospect of competition regulators approving such mergers as “remote”. Actually, it’s not. The Competition Commission has the power to wave through mergers if the alternative involves the closure of newspapers (something that would be extremely likely if Trinity, Johnston Press or anyone else went into administration).

Most likely, the real obstacles would involve shareholders and bankers. Archant would be reliant on scarce bank loans; Gannett surely isn’t in the market for a deal; DMGT would have a hard time persuading shareholders; and both Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press already possess uncomfortably big debts.

The bottom line is that the newspaper industry doesn’t boast the equivalent of Lloyds TSB, which was able to buy crisis-wracked HBOS at a knockdown price precisely because it had spent the boom years in boring mode.

The difficulty of getting any of these combinations off the ground strikes me as a good thing. Why? Because — once again — such a deal wouldn’t address the industry’s long-term structural problems.

In the case of a Trinity-JP combination, for example, analysts estimate that it would enable approximately £40m of one-off cost savings.

Followed by what? As one newspaper executive put it to me last week: “Next year, you’d be back to square one again.”

The third option involves tough love, the growth of small chains, paternalistic owners and start-ups

A few weeks ago, Jeff Jarvis asked what is to be done about large, failing, US newspaper groups. He suggested that we should all wait until “some of the giants just topple, leaving holes in the ground that’d be easier to fill from scratch”.

This approach would find favour with those of us who like the way in which freelance journalist Guy Kewney described the emerging digital landscape at The Register last year:

Isn’t this a bit like a forest, in which a huge fire has raged? Yes, much that was of value is destroyed; and in its place, there’s an amorphous two-foot growth of shrubbery. But that doesn’t mean that it will still be an unimpressive two-foot high shrubbery in 50 years.

By then, some of the green shoots will turn out to be 100-foot cedars, redwoods, pines. And others will be lost in their shade.

When a company goes into administration, specialist accountants are appointed. They have a responsibility to raise money that can be used to pay off creditors. They do so by selling off bits of the business to the highest bidder.

A fire sale of this kind might enable multiple private bidders to make realistic offers for various newspapers — without the premium required to buy a quoted media company.

Smaller outfits like Tindle, Cumbria and Iliffe could pick up a few bargains and lavish attention upon them.

Roy Greenslade argues that ownership of local newspapers is no longer a game for paternalistic magnates. I disagree. I suspect that quite a few local patricians would also emerge to make bids.

For a century or more, until the 1990s, local paper ownership was incredibly fragmented and diverse. Much of the industry was controlled by families who understood that the local press wasn’t a route to massive riches.

Who is to say that the same appetite to support local newspapers (and therefore local communities) doesn’t exist among today’s regional magnates?

Even if it doesn’t, the appetite for local news would remain. Building something new amid the ruins is a job for start-ups. They would succeed by meeting local needs, rather than following the top-down diktats of the public markets.

At the risk of sounding like The Black Knight, the collapse of a regional newspaper group wouldn’t necessarily mean the death of local news. All it would prove with certainty is that the quoted consolidation model has had its day.

The regional press needs a purge of outdated structures and excess capacity. If it can avoid single-owner asset-stripping and/or the prolonged agony of more mega-mergers, the long-term outcome might actually be rather positive.