Comment: The Guildford Dragon Earns Praise for Its News Coverage of Our Borough

Published on: 21 Oct, 2019
Updated on: 23 Oct, 2019

By Martin Giles

editor

The Guildford Dragon NEWS

To hear the reporting of Guildford’s own Dragon NEWS being officially appreciated is deeply satisfying. We are most grateful for such recognition.

That praise came at the Co-operative Party conference in Glasgow last week, attended by representatives of local counties.

Guildford residents Sue Hackman and Lynda MacDermott supported a motion drawing attention to the importance of local news organisations that provide a voice for the people.

Sue Hackman speaking at last year’s conference. Photo – Stewart Turkington

During the conference, Ms Hackman publicly commended The Guildford Dragon NEWS, citing us as an example of an online newspaper that was helping local people stay abreast of council decisions and inviting them to join in political debate.

She described our website as a “close-to-people and free-to-access part of the Guildford political scene”.

The final motion referred the leadership to the Norwegian model of local news, in which the government offers subsidies to local media.

The motion, aimed at improving the power of communities, was passed unanimously, as was another on combating climate change.

The Co-operative Party promotes policies that give more power to the people and it has a strong influence on Labour Party policy.

But the praise for The Dragon’s value to our readers does not end there. At a recent meeting with a Guildford political activist, I was told our published criticisms from several local parties of various parts of our coverage showed him we sincerely sought balance, and demonstrated independence.

That independence is precious to us: we answer only to our readers. But for The Guildford Dragon to be sustainable we need to be able to pay salaries and that will require considerably more funding than we now obtain from the sale of advertising.

Every month, we enjoy an average of 87,000 hits by 20,000 unique readers. That encourages us. Frankly, we operate on a shoestring, deeply indebted to our team of unpaid volunteers for their unstinting, indeed enthusiastic help in providing up-to-date Guildford news.

Here, we must also express our gratitude for being granted partnership with the BBC allowing us to share the copy provided by the local democracy reporter, Rebecca Curley, whom they fund.

We only wish that central government could find a way to subsidise a similar scheme to provide daily court reporters, a real need The Dragon cannot possibly fund.

Thankfully, the need for help in providing such independently-run local news was recognised by the Cairncross Review and by our supportive regulator Impress which is taking up the issue.

In February this year, among the findings by Dame Frances Cairncross, she recommended:

The BBC should do more to help local publishers and think further about how its news provision can act as a complement to commercial news;
A new independent institute should be created to ensure the future provision of public interest news;
A new Innovation Fund should be launched, aiming to improve the supply of public interest news;
New forms of tax relief to encourage payments for online news content and support local and investigative journalism; and
Expanding financial support for local news by extending the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service.

We hope the government will pay attention and recognise the value we provide to our community.

And I finish with an appeal: every reader who values our efforts can help by informing friends and contacts about The Guildford Dragon so they can join our ever-expanding readership. Thank you for reading this.