“I came away from the M.E.N.’s offices last night with a feeling of optimism for the future of those news outlets that can adapt properly to the new landscape“.

Those are the words I closed this post with in September last year. I’d visited the offices of my local newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, and been impressed by their multimedia approach in the face of a grim future for printed newspapers. Through integrating local television, web video, microblogging and mobile technology they were facing declining sales head-on. By embracing the very technologies that were threatening its existence, MEN Media was showing it was better placed than many other local media outlets around the country to weather the storm of the current financial climate.

Now, just eight months later, they’ve thrown that all away. In a series of cost cutting excercises over the past month they have:

• Cut the budget of the local TV station, Channel M, to even more of a shoestring than it was before. Most of the entertainment content has been axed, including all their excellent coverage of the local music scene. The staff of the station has been halved.
• Significantly cut back on journalists and shut down all the satellite offices around the region that provided local contact points for people with stories to share.
• Following the (voluntary) departure last week of the Manchester Evening News’ head of online editorial, Sarah Hartley, the future is unclear for the paper’s pioneering online offerings. These include a variety of blogs, experiments in microblogging and live video streaming of important events, not to mention the strong links Sarah had built up with the local digital creative community. The blog that covered the city’s digital scene, The Mancunian Way, has today relaunched as an “It’s a funny old world”/”Have your say”-type offering with a much broader remit.

As local writer Craig McGinty put it “The MEN seems determined to cut its journalism costs yet at the same time it is distancing itself from local communities, be they geographical or interest based, eventually though it will be swamped as these groups gather and power forward”.

The management at MEN Media seem determined to pilot their company into a death spiral. Channel M is due to expand on to digital terrestrial television this year, bringing it to a much wider audience than it currently gets. That audience just won’t bother to tune into their local station if it doesn’t offer a good variety of relevant and interesting content. Likewise, any fool can see that without investing in journalism people will stop reading the paper and find their news elsewhere.

It seems that financial constraints forced the management’s hand before the investments that had so impressed me last autumn could pay off. The Manchester Evening News is an important part of daily life in Greater Manchester and to see all its strides forward in recent times lead to nothing is hugely saddening.

When times are hard you need to cut back but to reduce the local TV station to a news and sport service with a skeleton staff and risk the quality of your news by cutting journalists is like a greengrocer dealing with hard times by selling nothing but the cheapest apples. One of you most popular products might be still there but the lack of variety and quality is hardly going to make you popular with customers..

The only positive outcome of these cutbacks is that they leave huge gaps in the market that can be filled by enterprising groups with much lower overheads than MEN Media. If there’s one place these people can thrive, it’s the hive of creativity that is Manchester. I cant wait to see what they come up with.