Taxpayers shouldn't subsidise the enshittification of local news

Our money is being used to make the internet worse

Did you know that British taxpayers are subsidising some of the worst places on the internet?

No, I’m not talking about Andrew Pierce’s twitter feed, I mean the local news websites that are a horrifying mess of advertising, affiliate links, and clickbait that borders on disinformation. The online homes of formerly storied institutions like the Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo and Birmingham Mail.

You know the websites I mean. They look like this:

The aggressive ads, video overlays and other junk are so bad it makes it almost impossible to read the news about what people have been tweeting about BBC Breakfast.

I wrote about these horrors a few months ago, describing them as representing the “enshittification” of local news, bastardising a word coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how online products decay over time.

And not to rehash all of the details, but essentially the reason these sites are like this is a combination of economics (the internet having completely hollowed out the journalism business model) and deeply terrible, brand-detonating choices by the handful of companies that own the vast majority of local news brands.

But you don’t need to read another 2000 words from me complaining about Reach plc, the company which owns the three titles above, again. I did that last time.

Instead, this week I want to tell you about something mad – and share some astonishing figures that I’ve obtained using the Freedom of Information Act.

Because here’s something you might not know: Despite local news websites being almost universally shit, they collectively receive tens of millions of pounds every year from Britain’s local councils.

It’s not an explicit subsidy, as such. There is no line-item in your local authority budget that pays to prop up Reach and other local news conglomerates like National World and KM Group.

Instead, the money is funnelled to them as payments for publishing “statutory notices” – details of planning applications, traffic orders, and a few other similar things – that councils have a legal obligation to tell people about in the local press.

And these fees can add up to some serious cash for the proprietors of these awful websites. That’s why, at risk of sounding like a paid-up member of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, I find it odd that public money is being handed over to a handful of publishers whose output is the closest we’ve come to capturing in digital form what a migraine feels like.

So let’s dig into the figures and try to answer the question… is there a better way?

Statutory Notices

There is no single piece of legislation that obliges local councils to pay for newspapers to publish their statutory notices. Instead, it’s something that evolved over the years as various laws covering different council activities were passed – and unsurprisingly, this all took place in the pre-internet era.