The latest Metrica Numbers benchmarking report shows that regional media are important for the PR industry.  With more than a third of coverage that we analysed in 2008 coming from regional newspapers, the media type continued to feature very strongly for our clients.  And not just in terms of overall volume, but regional newspapers tended to be more favourable and featured the strongest message delivery of all media types.

But over the last decade there has been a steady decline in the percentage of coverage coming from regional newspapers and this has accelerated over the last couple of years – replaced by the exponential rise of online coverage

This is reflected in the ‘real world’.  All print newspapers are facing problems, but regional newspapers particularly so. In the last couple of months there have been swathes of redundancies – Manchester Evening News has cut 78 journalists from its staff and Trinity Mirror (owner of the Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail) has lost 70.  Although many newspapers have their online versions, the problem is monetising this to pay for their teams of editorial staff in the middle of a deep recession that has slashed advertising revenue.

So, given that there is still a demand and a need, what is the future of regional news?   The BBC had proposed to fill some of the hole with an investment of £68m into a web based local video service.  However this has been rejected by the BBC Trust who said that it would not improve services enough "to justify either the investment of licence fee funds or the negative impact on commercial media".

What about leveraging the opportunity of social media?  Indeed the number of local community sites is increasing.  David Jackman, after he was made redundant from his job as editor of the Epping Forest Guardian set up EverythingEppingForest.com a website featuring news, events, jobs and business listings that the local community can contribute to.  Meanwhile former BBC political reporter Nick Booth has backed a channel 4-backed website in Birmingham called Help Me Investigate which claims to offer ‘open source’ collaborative investigative journalism!  There is even a local website search engine, VillagesOnline, which features more than 2,000 sites.

Social media appears to be a good solution to replace regional newspapers.  But while it appears to serve the community there is the strong danger of an age divide.  Regional newspapers are read by older people and social media is used by younger people, as demonstrated by the latest UKPulse survey.  Furthermore many older people don’t even have access to these media – Ofcom figures show that just 27% of over 65s have broadband connectivity.

But isn’t this just a generational thing with the old gradually being replaced by the new.  The problem is that this is not a gentle transition – local newspapers are in big trouble now!  We must also remember that our population is getting older not younger – for the first time we have more people over 65 than are under 16.

So just what is going to serve the fastest growing section of our society?