ON my travels the other week, I picked up a copy of what was once my favourite weekly newspaper, the Craven Herald. This used to be a magnificent throwback; a big anachronistic broadsheet with only classified ads on its front page.
Coach trips, jumble sales, pub music nights, farm auctions – it was a tremendous insight into a community, and must have brought in a nice few bob as well. The rot first set in a couple of years ago when a small 6×4 panel appeared touting which news stories were inside. Who cared, when local life was so lovingly detailed via paid-for centimetres?
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And now it’s all over. The Craven Herald has gone tabloid and has banished the small ads from its front page. It now looks like any other Newsquest weekly, its USP sacrificed to the god of group efficiency.
That’s not to say that it isn’t still a great newspaper. It’s packed with courts, council and planning stories, community news and readers’ letters; it’s full of local stories about local people with some excellent columnists as well. My beef is that it’s lost the very thing that made it distinctive and special, and sadly that may cost it in the difficult years ahead.
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