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Sorry for the lack of exciting updates this week – attention’s been elsewhere, and I’m sure you’ve more exciting things to read than another whine about bins. But I did trot down to Woolwich Town Hall on behalf of greenwich.co.uk to see what was going on at Wednesday’s council meeting.

As you’ll see, Greenwich Time came up, getting a lashing from opposition councillors while the council leader attempted to give the News Shopper a lashing. Except he managed to get the publisher wrong, criticising Kentish Times publisher Archant when its rival Newsquest produces the Petts Wood-based paper.

Unfortunately… the News Shopper wasn’t there to hear itself criticised in the meeting. Its rival, the Mercury, was represented, but despite launching an attack on the council in last week’s paper, it didn’t show to see if anybody made any political capital out of it. Bearing in mind that it’s accepted journalistic wisdom that council meetings and courts are the bedrock of what a local paper should do, it does undermime its attack on Greenwich Time if it isn’t going to follow up the story by attending a council meeting.

I still agree with what it said, but the News Shopper has to raise its game and actually attend these meetings if its attacks on Greenwich Time are to maintain their credibility.

The sad thing is that it is not hard to go to a council meeting and get stories out of them – almost all the things discussed there have direct relevance to the lives of the people of Greenwich borough. Commuters who use Blackheath station may be pleased to hear that councillors spent half an hour discussing the recent cut of services there. There was some roundabout discussion about ice and grit from the snow, and how the council coped with that and its decision to prioritise gritting roads over pavements. There’s a nice story about a 13-year-old getting the council to consider building a skate park in Eltham, a petition about a dangerous road in Eltham (Court Road, should you be interested), fears expressed about asbestos and the Ferrier Estate demolition, and there was a full-blown row about second homes and empty council housing. And a few digs at Bexley, as is traditional. Together with the stuff chosen for greenwich.co.uk, that’s a fair chunk of the paper written.

The News Shopper isn’t the only paper to come up short – the Mercury’s stablemate, the South London Press, didn’t show at the last Lambeth Council meeting – despite the paper being a bitter critic of that council’s house newspaper.

Getting to the nub of how things are decided in Greenwich borough is a tough one. I’ve been directed to council meetings via a fire escape in the past, and the supply of papers to help residents follow council meetings is erratic to say the least, with questions not being published online or being placed in the council chamber. Proper coverage by both our local newspapers would be a step forward, but it’s not one they seem to be willing to take.

Incidentally, Lewisham Council voted on Wednesday to investigate the possibilities of webcasting and podcasting its meetings (a Green motion but one that seems to have had cross-party support). I think it’s a great idea. I hope Greenwich councillors are taking note.

I’d like to take that further – ever seen the BBC’s Democracy Live? It’s a wonderful invention, but seems limited by focusing on national and European government – even the London mayor’s question time isn’t featured live. (It’s little known, but you can also watch all parliamentary committees live on, well, Parliament Live.) It’s never going to beat Coronation Street in the ratings, but if local councils and the BBC could team up, so you could watch your own councillors in action, it’d be a great contribution to democracy.

And who knows, it might even help local journalists cover these meetings too. It saves waiting for the bus outside Woolwich Town Hall in the rain…

As a wiser man than me said, “Where’s the ‘come and get your free money’ headline, eh, eh??”

Incidentally, the boss of the firm which prints Greenwich Time has been, er… slagging off council newspapers. “The abuse of taxpayers’ money to peddle council propaganda dressed up as journalism is an outrage which must be stopped.” I look forward to Sly Bailey ending Trinity Mirror’s contract to print Greenwich Time, then. Proof that not all is simple in this debate.

With apologies to those who are bored to tears with the subject, I’d like to return to local council newspapers again. Sooner or later, a government – either this or the next one – is likely to act on these. Too many arguments on the internet concentrate on the black and white extremes, and not the shades of grey in the middle. This post is an attempt to address those shades of grey.

There’s also been some coverage of this yesterday, with Trinity Mirror boss Sly Bailey attacking what she called “mini-Pravdas” at the Oxford Media Convention. But while Sly Bailey bleats now, it was her own Trinity Mirror which moved one of Greenwich’s local papers, the Mercury, out of its Deptford HQ, in the heart of its circulation area, to far-off Streatham. (The Mercury is now owned by rival group Tindle.) Sly Bailey has only herself to blame if local councils feel her local papers aren’t covering them properly.

Nick Baines, the Bishop of Croydon, no less, responded to her thoughts on his blog:

Local newspapers are in serious decline. This is bad news in itself. Local newspapers have traditionally offered the local population scrutiny of local authority decision-making and spending. They have served the public as guardians of accountability by covering the detail of council meetings and committees and telling the community what is going on and identifying the right questions to ask of their elected representatives.

But this is no longer the case; the world has moved on. My own experience of local government coverage is that only negative stories play – that there is a less-than-intelligent and often ill-informed editorial bias brought to bear on stories involving the local authority. Many public servants simply feel that they are constantly fighting a losing battle in serving their local communities and that any effort to build up the positive image of a local community is undermined by insistent negative image-making.

But, unfortunately, in Greenwich, we can see that this has gone way too far – Greenwich Time is little more than a vanity publication for the council leadership, and as we saw yesterday, is happy to play fast and loose with statistics to paint a rosy picture of life in the soon-to-be-royal borough.

And yes, the situation isn’t helped by weak local newspapers. Twice in the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of covering full meetings of Greenwich Council for greenwich.co.uk. There’s usually someone on the press desk in the town hall chamber – but not once have I seen a story from any of those meetings appear in either the Mercury or the News Shopper. But even with greenwich.co.uk’s restricted catchment area, there’s been at least four short stories out of those meetings. If the News Shopper is serious about its campaign, it should send someone along some day. I could do with the company. Perhaps, of course, the papers can’t afford to send a reporter along any more. Which presents us with a nuttier problem to get our teeth into.

Scrapping or outlawing council newspapers isn’t going to solve the problem in areas where malnourished local papers are failing. Even if councils are compelled to place their advertising in them once again (once upon a time, Greenwich Council had to put all its planning notices in the Mercury), it doesn’t necessarily follow that the newspapers’ proprietors will put that cash into journalism. If a firm like Trinity Mirror cut back on its local papers while the economy was good, why should it be trusted with public funds when the economy’s rotten?

So, I suggest a few guidelines be introduced. A code of conduct, perhaps. Local councils should only be allowed to publish local newspapers if…

• They are governed by an independent editorial board, to maintain impartiality. Perhaps local councillors of all stripes should nominate trustees, maybe other local bodies – and other local media interests – should get involved. No council leadership should ever be able to dictate what goes in and what stays out of these papers. To safeguard impartiality, perhaps these boards should represent more than one borough – so, for example, the same board could oversee local papers in both Labour Greenwich and Tory Bexley. I bet both councils would love that.
• They should not publish more than once a fortnight unless there is a clear and demonstrable case of market failure. Nobody needs to hear from their local council every bloody week. But if local papers are asleep on the job, or unable to cover basic editorial jobs, or if their proprietors are taking money out of journalism and into their shareholders’ pockets, then a council may feel the need to take action – subject to the newspaper being under independent editorial control, as mentioned above.
• Space must be allocated for a variety of political and editorial viewpoints. All the political groups represented on the council must have access to the pages of the local council newspaper. If a council leader has a column, why shouldn’t an opposition leader? If a councillor of another party has a bright idea, why shouldn’t he or she get it in to the council’s newspaper? And what about parties not on the council, or outside pressure groups?
• Any council newspaper must offer training to young people or any other local wanting to pursue a media career. Of course, as we’re all finding out, there’s not much money in journalism – but thousands of young people want to do it. East London Lines is a project set up by journalism students at Goldsmiths College to follow news in most of the boroughs on the revamped rail route from Dalston to West Croydon. Is this a pointer to the future of local news? Why shouldn’t a council offer something similar? Perhaps there’s even a role for the likes of the BBC in this, developing offerings for TV, audio and the web while training new talent.

Those are four ideas. Maybe we’ll end up seeing local councils contributing to local newspapers (but without being able to influence them), or vice versa, and non-profit partnerships emerging. But I think the point needs making that just because Greenwich Time is a fraud doesn’t mean local council newspapers are automatically evil. I don’t think they’re going to go away, and if they’re not going to go away, they need to be harnessed into a force for good. But has anyone got the guts to take them on?

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! Actually, the only thing that’s surprising about this week’s News Shopper front page is how long it’s taken one of the borough’s two freesheets to lay into Greenwich Council’s weekly dose of propaganda on the tax, considering it’s nearly two years since a relatively harmless info sheet suddenly got ramped up into a weekly psuedo-newspaper.

A Westminster debate last week, however, has spurred it into action.

Liberal Democrat MP Paul Burstow told the debate:

Greenwich Time, which is delivered 44 weeks a year to every home in the borough. Again, it mimics the format and content of a local paper. Its cost is £708,000 a year, of which at least £532,000 is borne by local taxpayers. Before it goes to print, every page is checked and approved by the council leader. The council claims that it is not trying to put the local independent paper out of business, but it has adopted the practice of holding back stories for exclusives for its own paper.

If we head west, we find that a similar story applies to Hammersmith and Fulham. The council’s h&f news, which is distributed to 75,000 homes, is a perfect example of what I wanted this debate to be about: pseudo-newspapers. It has lots of news, a 12-page property section pull-out, crosswords and a sudoku, a what’s-on section, advertising from local businesses and even a gardening section. Its counterparts in Tower Hamlets and Greenwich and all such publications are written to look at the world through the tinted glasses of the ruling party of the council.

It’s worth pointing out that while Greenwich is a Labour authority (as is Tower Hamlets), Hammersmith & Fulham is a Conservative one. Mr Burstow also criticised a “newspaper” put out by Waltham Forest – which is jointly run by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. They’re all at it if they think they can get away with it, it seems. It remains to be seen if this government (or the next) will take action.

You know what I think of it, of course, and there’s remarkably similar views expoused by some washed-out fellow with ginger hair on page 3. Reaction to my barnstorming of local newspapers across Greenwich and Lewisham was instant, with one pal instantly offering to take a better photo of me. That’s what friends are for.

Of course, there’s sound political reasons for disliking Greenwich Time, and with an election coming up it’s going to come under great scrutiny. But as a journalist I believe that weekly council newspapers, heavily funded and packed out with features, sports and TV listings like Greenwich Time, stifle free speech and put at risk independent journalism. Now, I don’t think the management of the News Shopper or its rival Mercury over the past few years are entirely innocent in this – indeed, I hope this campaign marks an end to the News Shopper deciding to splash with the witterings of psychics instead of actual, proper news which affects the people it claims to serve.

But happily for the News Shopper, the latest Greenwich Time only goes and proves its point…

Violent crime is falling in Greenwich, the paper trumpets, and up pops council leader Chris Roberts to take credit for it in the huge pull-quote below the headline. He’s actually quoted before police commander Richard Wood in the story. Quoting figures from April 2008-January 2009, and April 2009 to 3 January 2010, it claims that “gun crime” has been cut by 18.6%. The story comes from this Met Police press release.

Except that if you look at the Met’s own crime figure stats, they tell a different story, with a 55% rise in “gun-enabled crime” in the year to November 2009.

Now, the definition of “gun crime” and “gun-enabled crime” may well be different – the latter definitely includes fake firearms, for example. But the figures so approvingly quoted in Greenwich Time are for a different time scale – somehow counting “gun crime” Why was this? Of course, any proper journalist would have queried why, for example, “gun crime” between the months of January and April was not counted in the figures. I’d certainly hope that the journalists at the News Shopper and Mercury would. Indeed, it was a proper journalist who pointed out the disparity to me in the first place.

But Greenwich Time is not “proper journalism”. You’re not going to question the handouts you’re given to tart-up into a punter-friendly news story – after all, you’d be denying the leader of the council his regular appearance on the front page if you knocked the story down. Unusually, the crime splash did not even carry a proper byline, just “by GT reporter”. Are they worried about the veracity of the story?

Changes in technology mean that local journalism now comes in different forms – traditional newspapers, local websites, opinion-led polemics, blogs. All of which struggle to make money. But all of which can add something to people’s lives. Greenwich Time does none of that. It uses your money to crowd out the competition and stifle free speech and innovation. It’s deliberately designed to mislead.

In short, it’s a fraud. And like all frauds, the sooner it’s stamped out, the better.

(UPDATE 1.45PM For the defence, I present an insightful post by Nick Baines on the genre in general: “When you feel you are being misrepresented by not-very-good journalists at local level and find yourselves never put in a positive light for public consumption, what do you do? Just sit back and accept it? Or proactively tell your own story?”)

After giving residents a rest over the holiday, Greenwich Council’s propaganda weekly Greenwich Time is back to box unsuspecting voters around the ears with more good tales of Just How Great Greenwich Council Is.

First up – ah, yes, the announcement that this will be the Royal Borough of Greenwich from 2012. Treat this issue carefully, dear readers, for your children and grandchildren will be itching to see this souvenir issue in years to come.

So, for the front page – a photo of the Queen, perhaps? After all, Her Majesty is the one who is conferring the honour on us grateful citizens. Or maybe not…

Ah, yes. Greenwich Council leader Chris Roberts. Thanks to Greenwich Time, every house in the borough will now have a copy of his portrait. On top of the one they sent us in May. Verily, we should be grateful. And no, it’s not at all like the Daily Mirror when Robert Maxwell owned it.

Indeed, there’s pages of reaction from Mr Roberts and others… but aren’t there other parties represented on the council who might like to have their say? Oh, never mind that, when you can feature a pub in Eltham, the bloke who runs Greenwich pier and a “pensioner poet”. Wave those flags!

So what will you do be doing with your souvenir edition of Greenwich Time, complete with a portrait of the council leader? Fellow Greenwich subjects, please, share your suggestions. I’ve a spare copy to give away for the best idea. Your grandchildren will thank you for it.

So, what is the most important story in Greenwich at the moment?

Is it the thoughts of a spiritualist in Hither Green?

Or is it the possibility that central Greenwich might be pedestrianised?

I get neither paper here, so thanks to Adam for alerting me to the News Shopper’s mad, mad, rush of blood to the head. Every front page like that makes it easier for local councils to justify publishing propaganda papers like Greenwich Time. Shameful.

The poor old Mercury’s not had a decent time of it this decade, being forced to doss down with the South London Press in Streatham, but at least it can still spot an important story from several yards off. Which is a neat way of allowing me to be the last blog to remind you to get yourself down to Devonport House on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, and find out what the blazes Greenwich Council is planning for the town centre.

I’m a little sceptical about the plan – holding the exhibition on the last weekend before Christmas doesn’t fill me with much hope. (Although they could equally argue that they’ll get a load of Christmas shoppers through the doors.) And the last major pedestrianisation scheme in this borough was Woolwich in the early 1980s, which left it an eerie ghost town at night. Plus there’s issues with traffic and just what will be done with all that extra space. And where will the buses go?

But I’m going to take a look and see for myself. And so should you. See you there?

It feels like I haven’t done much on Greenwich Council’s propaganda weekly Greenwich Time recently, which is a shame because it’s been ripe with things to take the mickey out of. Lots of photographs of council leader Chris Roberts always make GT an essential read for any obedient citizen of Greenwich borough. And there’s been a few of those in the past weeks. But my deliveries of GT have dried up lately, leaving me to scour the web version for cheer as the winter nights draw in and the temperatures drop.

Look! Here’s proof Greenwich Council is cleaning up the streets!

Oh, look, it’s the 250 people Greenwich Council has employed to clean the streets! How nice to see them in the pages of Greenwich Time once again! This jolly gang are a regular feature in the council’s propaganda weekly these days. Of course, if the council had actually bothered cleaning the streets properly in the first place, it wouldn’t need to employ extra people to clean up the mess the borough’s streets are in. Actually, I think the more people employed in cleaning the streets, the better. If streets are kept clean, people are less likely to litter them. And, of course, it’s a way of investing in public services and getting people jobs at the same time. My own local streets are a bit less messy as a result, with street sweepers making regular appearances for the first time in some years.

Except these jobs are only due to last 12 months. They’ll make sure the streets are clean up and a little bit beyond the next council election… then what?

Greenwich Council can print as much old guff as it likes in Greenwich Time claiming it’s working to improve the local environment. The trouble is, local people can see with their own eyes that this is cobblers.

Only a couple of hours ago, I came back from a gig in Stepney by Docklands Light Railway. I got off at Deptford Bridge, on the Greenwich-Lewisham border, to hop on a bus back to Charlton. What sight welcomed me back to my home borough?

Nice. If you turned the other way, you’d see a Lewisham Council bin which was empty. In Greenwich borough, sights like this aren’t rare. What kind of council would let a bin at a busy transport interchange apparently go all day without being emptied? The rats of SE8 will be thanking the council for that. It shows what a task the council has set itself, in trying to catch up on the neglect of the past few years in such a short space of time.

Because the attitude of Greenwich Council is more about what makes life easier for Greenwich Council, rather than what makes life easier for its residents. It’s an old chestnut as far as this blog’s concerned, but it’s worth repeating. Want to get down Charlton Church Lane on a Monday? Have a bit of difficulty getting around? On the day the bins are collected, you might as well stay at home.

That photo was taken last Monday, 2 November, in the middle of the afternoon. Charlton Church Lane is not the only street with a narrow pavement left blocked by the council’s bin collection teams. However many times Greenwich Council claims it cares for the enviroment, the Monday bin collection in Greenwich, Charlton and Blackheath shows it couldn’t give a damn, as long as the basic minimum is done.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it needs repeating in the light of Greenwich Time’s constant propaganda assault. Yes, the council has taken on 250 people to clean the streets. But they’re only filling the gaps where it couldn’t do the job properly in the first place.

Taken as a whole, Greenwich Council’s leadership still has a complete disregard for the environment its residents have to live in. And, with the cynicism it shows through the pages of Greenwich Time, it looks like it’s going to carry on treating those residents like idiots as well.

It’s been a quiet week, not much happening, it’s been raining and The Greenwich Phantom beat me to the Only Fools and Horses stuff. But you can always rely on Greenwich Council’s propaganda weekly Greenwich Time to come up with the goods…

Brilliantly, you can now read Council Pravda online, so people across the country can now gawp at just what a load of shameless self-publicity it is. This week is a classic – an Olympics special! The lead is what purports to be a report from the Blackheath Halls meeting two weeks ago which Westcombe Society chairman Gordon Baker barred me from entering on the grounds that journalists weren’t allowed. Interesting.

“Local people were the first to hear of updated plans for the hosting of equestrian and modern pentathalon events at ’stunning’ Greenwich Park in 2012,” it begins. Well, only if they’d “paid their subscriptions”, according to the Westcombe Society’s Gordon Baker.

But the byline-free front page story contains nothing more than what was in the press release Olympic organisers LOCOG issued two days after the meeting (not available on LOCOG’s website, but I’ve uploaded a copy here.) So was GT there? There’s no reaction from anyone there, no attempt to see what local protesters think. Indeed, Gordon Baker told me there were no journalists at all. (The Mercury carried a decent report last week, which looks like it was written after the event – the News Shopper didn’t, although it did run something about a safety barrier going up for the Woolwich shooting.)

Is it Greenwich Council’s job to act as a cheerleader for the London 2012? In some respects, it is because the Olympics will hopefully attract prestige and investment into the borough.

But when dealing with its residents, Greenwich Council’s job surely is to safeguard their interests, to ensure that the area will not be damaged by the games, to explain to people just what they can expect in the summer of 2012, and to make sure the value of holding the Olympics is worth the undoubted inconvenience it will cause. With blatant propaganda like this, the council is failing on all of those points.

We know those who paid to be members of the Blackheath Society, Westcombe Society and Greenwich Society have had a briefing from LOCOG. Greenwich councillors also had a separate briefing the same day. But what about the rest of us? When do we get to meet LOCOG in a hall and discuss things? Or are we only fit to be told edited highlights?

Greenwich Time then rachets up the pro-Olympics heat with a page 3 interview with “respected community champion Judy Smith MBE” – it’s not explained to us why she’s so respected or how she’s a champion and of which community, although it looks like somewhere like Eltham, so we’ll just have to take GT’s word for it. Again. “It’s just as important for the people of Eltham and the south of the borough to have these guarantees about Greenwich Park, because the whole borough uses and enjoys it, not just people from Greenwich.” Well, good to hear it. No comment from people in Lewisham or Blackheath Village who live on the park’s doorstep but don’t live in the borough, mind. Maybe they don’t count?

And then there’s a piece with Greenwich Park’s manager, who’s been a loud advocate of the games all along, and then there’s pieces with local business leaders about the opportunities ahead. Any dissenting voices? Of course not. This is Greenwich Time. Dissent isn’t allowed. And with its newspaper having the widest distribution of any in the area, it’s nothing less than an abuse of power by Greenwich Council.

This is what happens when local media dies – the Mercury a pale shadow of its former self and exiled to Streatham, the News Shopper badly out of touch in Orpington, both hurt by the rise of Greenwich Time – and nobody blows the whistle on this kind of propaganda.

On the other side of the debate, supporters of anti-Olympics pressure group NOGOE haven’t been shy of playing around with the truth either. They’re bound to score a decent amount of publicity for their “ring around the park” on Sunday, and they’re very pleased with their 12,000-strong petition against the equestrian events in the park. But if you didn’t know all the facts about what’ll happen in 2012, and someone came up to you and said A Very Bad Thing will happen to the park, and we all must save it, then of course you’d sign their petition, wouldn’t you? They’ve also released a video – made in August, so it’s dated slightly. But that’s not stopping them…

“None of us know how long the park will be closed for,” someone is seen saying. But we do know how long the park will be closed for in 2012 – four weeks. It is a shame nobody thought to re-edit the video when the facts changed. This does not do their campaign any good.

But on both sides of the Greenwich Olympics debate, facts are the last thing anyone seems to want to deal with. Without a strong, independent local media, and until LOCOG steps up its game in terms of talking to the people of Greenwich, by holding meetings for the public and the press, it’s going to stay that way.

UPDATE 6.30pm: Credit to north-of-the-Thames freesheet The Docklands (which gets a limited run in Greenwich as The Peninsula) for getting LOCOG’s view on NOGOE’s video. “It’s scaremongering as usual,” a spokesperson told reporter Marina Thomas. However, if LOCOG really does want to overcome this, it needs to be a bit more proactive in talking to the people of Greenwich, instead of waiting for journalists to ring them. Because around there, there’s precious few that will do that…

It doesn’t look like this year’s Run to the Beat half-marathon is going to get a warm welcome when it takes to the streets of Greenwich, Charlton, Woolwich and Blackheath on 27 September – with residents once again complaining about not being warned about road closures and how to get around them.

Greenwich Council started off the screw-ups by burying the licence application for the event’s music stages in the back of its propaganda weekly Greenwich Time – later partly corrected by an odd “clarification” in the paper. The licence did squeak through, however – I’m told that some people on the council who usually wouldn’t say boo to a goose actually got rather exercised by the prospect of the race returning to the streets. However, stringent conditions were applied to the race organisers.

Last year’s event was talked up by council leader Chris Roberts, saying it promised to “become a major event in the sporting calendar”. This year, the usually ubiquitous Labour leader is replaced by a generic quote on the council website:

The Council said: “This event stands to raise thousands for charity as well as giving opportunities for runners and local musicians.

“However, there were a number of real concerns expressed by residents over last year’s event and the Council has therefore set clear requirements on the organisers to ensure that traffic restrictions don’t impose undue difficulties on local residents, and that noise levels are kept to a reasonable level.”

I think we’ll class that as lukewarm backing, shall we?

So, how are the organisers doing in their quest to keep locals on-side? Not very well, it seems. Over to a reader of The Greenwich Phantom…

Do you know anything about Run to the Beat? I had a less than clear letter as an East Greenwich resident a couple of months ago which rang alarm bells that we might be stranded on Sunday 27th, and looking at the map on the website I think this may be true.

I’m feeling distinctly grumpy about not being able to get out – and the letter sent home was so waffley it masked that we will hemmed in again. I love marathon day, but am I the only one who feels we shouldn’t have to put up with piss-poor imitations of the London Marathon? RttB’s community engagement is terrible – the info for residents page on the website is “coming soon”. When???

Cue a string of Phantom readers complaining that they hadn’t had leaflets warning them of what to do. I live in an area that’ll also be cut off by the route but have been away, so I checked with my upstairs neighbour. No, we hadn’t had anything. Oh dear. This doesn’t look good.

There’s a comparison here with the London Marathon. It’s actually been pretty rare for LM organisers to directly contact residents – but then again, it’s been running since 1981, everyone knows the marathon route, it takes up a great chunk of a Sunday on BBC1, and the date’s set well over a year in advance (25 April 2010, before you ask). It’s also done and dusted by lunchtime, usually.

But as for Run to the Beat… who knows? Who cares? We just get lumbered with it. And judging by many of the road signs that have appeared, that’s an all-day lock-in we don’t get warned about properly.

So, as a public service, and because Run to the Beat’s organisers clearly can’t be bothered – here is the information you should have had:

The residents’ leaflet (572K, PDF)
Where the music stages are (493K, PDF)
Road closures map (881K, PDF)
Letter for residents (91K, Word doc)

Greenwich Council is, apparently, monitoring Run To The Beat’s performance like a hawk this year. Although since the organisers promise to be “advertising more information about the race in Greenwich Time as Sunday September 27th approaches”, you really have to wonder how serious the council is about backing residents’ interests here.

Anyway, if you think you should have had a leaflet from organisers – and that’s many thousands of people in Greenwich, Blackheath, Charlton and Woolwich – then Matthew Norwell is the council’s officer looking into this. If you’re unhappy, it may be worth dropping him a note (firstname.surname@greenwich.gov.uk).

And as for Sunday 27th… if Run to the Beat organisers are going to ignore local residents, then why should we turn out to support it?

I was flattered the other day to see that Brockley Central had praised this blog as being one of the best providers of local news – which was rather nice as I was having one of those head-up-bum periods where I spent far too much time wondering “what’s the blog for?”, “what am I hoping to achieve?” and “does this just look a bit stupid in the end?”

It followed a call from the editor of the Guardian for public money to be given to the Press Association – the UK’s biggest news agency, which is owned by most of the major newspaper publishers – to fund a revival in local reporting. The first comment someone left at the bottom of the story suggested sites like Brockley Central could be part of the future.

And on Monday came a rare, but welcome thing – an Andrew Gilligan piece I agreed with, rightly tearing into council-run newspapers like Greenwich Time, which he claims costs council taxpayers here half a million pounds a year. How many street sweepers could they employ for that?

Sure, it doesn’t mention how the owners of local papers such as the Mercury have allowed GT to park its tanks on their lawn by cutting their papers back. The Mercury’s past owner, PA shareholder Trinity Mirror, hobbled it some years back by moving the paper from Deptford High Street to the South London Press’s offices in Streatham while its rival, the News Shopper, is based in its Orpington heartland. And naturally, Gilligan’s piece doesn’t mention the Standard’s general ignorance of all matters south-east (which will no doubt become a deafening silence when Gilligan moves to the Telegraph). As Nick says on Brockley Central, there’s clear evidence of market failure – local papers are no longer a product of their community, they’re either owned by big combines and based far away, or run by local councils to dictate to that community. So there’s a gap which needs to be filled.

I think the call for PA to get public funds to cover council meetings and courts is interesting… but I can’t help feeling that it’s another call from the same old busted flushes to get cash to reverse the things they’ve screwed up in the first place. The old Mercury worked brilliantly because it was based in in the communities it covered (Lewisham and Greenwich boroughs – Deptford High Street traditionally was slap-bang on the boundary, and isn’t far off it now), the reporters were local faces, and it had a feel for local issues. It even triumphantly launched a Bexley edition in the 1980s, as its old readers moved out to the suburbs.

Sadly, the people who ran the Mercury in its pomp are now behind Greenwich Time – and probably getting a much better salary for it too, while the paper they used to work for is based miles away, has little nous for local issues, is poorly-distributed, has a ropey website and looks like it’s run on a shoestring. And it has a Bexley edition which now covers absolutely no news in that borough whatsoever. The legacy Trinity Mirror left south-east London is a reason why we should be sceptical of any claim from it for public funds.

And on an issue like Charlton Lido – would a PA reporter from outside be able to pick up that story from a council meeting? Local issues take time to learn and understand. I once spent a day working with a team of journalists at Westminster, and was assigned to cover a select committee about immigration, only to find the story I produced turned on its head by an editor who had the experience to spot a running story I’d not really been aware of. You could stick me in, I don’t know, Wandsworth, but I could only ever scratch the surface of what’s going on over there.

Most local blogs are produced by people with no journalistic training (even if they’re quite media-savvy) and no legal support but end up producing products which are appreciated more by their readers than those made by big firms with hacks who have flogged their guts out to get NCTJ training and the like. It’s a sad indictment on those big firms, the ones who are now crying out for cash. Unfortunately, it’s no good for the local journalists, stuck in the middle, trying to do their jobs on crap salaries, seeing their work undermined by their own bosses and by publicly-funded rivals like Greenwich Time.

So where does this site fit into all this? Well… on its own, it can only play the tiniest of roles. There’s only me, I’m pretty partisan and I can only tell things the way I can see it, by highlighting things that are good/bad/interesting, making a bit of mischief here and there, trying to stick to things nobody else has done, and hoping you pick up the thread and leave interesting comments, because that’s where these things take off. As for journalism as most local hacks would recognise it, there’s been very little of that – blogs tend to offer simple, straightforward opinions while real local journalism involves putting in calls, bothering people and pounding the streets. And unlike Brockley Central, there’s precious little community in Charlton anyway, so the focus is a bit wider and there’s a bit more of a scattergun approach.

In a blog format, just being part of the discussion is more satisfying, I find; although the more I criticise local papers (although to be frank, I’ve not had a regular delivery of either title for many years) and the more frustrated I get with the smothering all-is-good embrace of Greenwich Time (which has vanished from my doormat again), the more I wonder if I should be doing more proper local reporting. And if someone tells me something, I’m more than happy to check it out. But for now, I’m happy to be part of a discussion. That’s all it is at the moment.

But beyond that? If you look at 853, Greenwich Phantom, Plumsteadshire, and Brockley Central regularly, then you probably pick up some idea of what’s going on in this patch of London without having to pick up a local paper (or wonder why it’s not being delivered). I’m sure you don’t get all your news on TV from just one source, and the same works on the web. I think a great part of the future will involve networks of local blogs, co-operating and promoting each other, maybe taking different viewpoints but all with the well-being of their local area in mind. To an extent, this happens anyway – Adam at Tory Troll did some digging around after I made a cheap joke at the expense of Greenwich Labour party and got a proper story out of it.

But what if trained journalists were around to mentor and support those behind local websites? As Nick mentions, how about offering small subsidies to encourage local creative businesses, an idea floated by journalist Martin Bright, which could help encourage local bloggers and others to get involved with their communities?

Like with the Digital Britain report, the thinking still seems to be about trying to save crumbling media combines that long ago neglected their local communities. (Weirdly, on a national level only yesterday the BBC agreed to allow the likes of the Mail and Telegraph – two papers whose editorial lines are vehemently anti-BBC – use its news video for free on their website, presumably so the Mail can concentrate on filling Mail Online with more tits and arse while the BBC does the hard work on its behalf. Yet the Mail owns 20% of an organisation that’s already in place to do this – ITN. But why pay its sister firm some money when the BBC can provide it for free?)

Sooner or later, enough local people will despair of ropey local freesheets edited miles away and crap council propaganda rags, and being patronised and ignored by London-wide media, and will want to club together to get their own networks going. Giving them practical help to do this would be far more valuable to than bailing out businesses which have already failed in their tasks. It’d give local journalism back to local communities, empower people, and ultimately help democracy. After all, what could big media firms and politicians be scared of?