The view from New Orleans
More than a hint of The Wanderer's Marty O'Neill in some of the writing here but interesting report from the Couhigs' hometown paper https://www.nola.com/news/article_632281ec-c884-11ea-a0e2-bb4710f0d014.html/?k&fbclid=IwAR2Lt9Wkf3PaY4anFl8JYOOFuvoFAVgdSZr866QoVZgn9ShVQdhdZK8IY_E
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That's a pretty decent summary for an outsider to get up to speed.
Brilliant article, more accurate than the BFP!)
That’s proper journalism...right there. For a start, the facts are right...unusual for local papers
The BFP have four staff, half the sports stuff was being written by an intern, and the company that owns them is in real trouble. I don't know if they'll be around much longer.
The BFP have four sports staff, or four staff in total?
Four staff total
And we lost the Bucks Advertiser here in Chalfont St Peter recentky
That’s extraordinary. What a pity.
sadly pretty much a common story for local papers in the UK, here in Dover we have 1 full time reporter for our local rag and the other 4 staff are shared across 3 other titles...
There was a decent 12 page pullout in this Friday's BFP to be fair
The play-offs are about the only time they've cared about us all season. I know they're stretched, but hopefully they'll see what an asset we are now and keep it up going forward. I can't speak for the pullout, but what little coverage there was over the season was largely just copy and paste jobs - often literally just releases from the club website.
That was a bit glib from me really, and based on historical recollection. They have been a lot better of late and that was perhaps a cheap shot.
Good to see so many standing up for local journalism, long may it continue.
Local journalism is under great pressure. Support it whilst you can because you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
When things are going well it may be easy to become complacent, but independent coverage and a voice for fans is a vital part of the game.
I share the concerns for the future of local journalism, that is where I started my own career and I still buy local papers whenever I can. The BFP’s coverage of our club is much better than it used to be, but there’s still room for improvement. I believe that local papers should be supportive of their local football club whilst retaining an independent stance and being critical when necessary.
Far too often in the past, the BFP has given greater priority to criticism than it has to being supportive.
The BFP spent 2002 until 2014 almost exclusively covering London Wasps which didn't help.
Those were dark days. You'd have to dig a few pages deep to find mention of the town's actual team.
The BFP used to give excellent coverage of the wanderers in the 1970's through to the 90's, but during the waps era saw their bizarre attitude almost becoming anti wanderers.
The BFP and the local council hopefully have woken up and realised what a fantastic asset to the area having a Championship football team is.
Shocking to think they only have four journalists. When I worked there in the mid-90s they had four on Sport alone.
A true vicious circle. There’s no reason to buy a local paper because the quality is so poor and the quality is so poor because the budget has been slashed due to falling sales and advertising.
I remember the concern around ‘98 when BFP sales went below 35,000. I believed it’s comfortably below 10,000 now.
Dying medium really isn't it.
Waiting a week to read about something that Facebook broke days before really is something from a bygone age unfortunately.
Sadly, I think you have a point but the challenge is to think of a different approach and not just accept the changing situation.
The BFP has a website though.
There's no reason why it shouldn't rival the Gasroom, Chairboys on the Net, Chairboys Central, or any of the other sites covering Wycombe / The Championship as the go-to place for news, updates, interviews etc.
I never know if it's my system, but the BFP site always seems to stick and be quite hard to navigate.
The Wycombe FB group is often better for news, and they used to joke on there when they said BFP reporters just lift stories from the group.
Didn't seem as funny when a reporter actually introduced themselves once and admitted they were doing just that!
Could they devote more resource to Wycombe, and less to this type of shite perhaps?
https://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/18579771.weekly-horoscope-2020-saturday-july-18---star-signs-russell-grant/
Early this season, they would c&p club press releases and put the reporter's name at the top - seemed to be more a case of sloppy formatting in forgetting to take it off, but it wasn't a good look. Not to mention it was already available on the club website. They're incredibly stretched, but you've still got to produce good, original content to get people reading and/or buying.
The BFP site is shocking, does everything it possibly can to give the internet a bad name. Grindingly slow, weighed down by annoying pop-ups and tasteless click-bait Taboola feeds. Sad thing is, many local newspaper sites are now built like this.
@NewburyWanderer it is unreadable
You need a functioning local paper to keep a historical record. You can go to Wycombe library and reconstruct whole seasons just from BFP articles and reports. With the best will in the world you won’t be able to do that in fifty years from a website.
@floyd archive.org
On the subject of the BFP website though, the BFP is owned by Newsquest - one of the stupidest companies in the industry, and I mean that literally - a bunch of dinosaurs incapable of planning for a future without print on paper. Instead of skating to where the puck is going to be, they're laying flat on the floor around hoping the puck is going to bounce off their face into the net.
If you want to see a visualisation of just how badly they have understood digital media and the importance of local journalism, you only need to take a look at the request map for the BFP website - every node coming off the central bubble is an external request, and 99% of those are effectively spyware so they can try to make money off your data - they've never tried to save the BFP or any of the local news publications they own, just milk every last drop out of them until they're a useless, dead husk. It's like buying a cow for the milk and then trying to suck a thousand gallons a day out of it. It's never going to end well.
Newsquest are absolute scum.
Lots of papers have responded awfully to the new tech available and the competition it has brought them. Some have at times collaborated well with other contributors and done a decent job sharing resources and building up networks of information, but for many it's meant cutting jobs, clickbait, aiming for first rather than best, relying on or straight stealing other people's stories and photos, sometimes just rehashed twitter rants with limited vetting, and "sponsored" or corporate influence posing as stories. Several of the biggest spend lot more time and money on algorithms to make sure there stuff appears high on Google searches than they do on making it readable.
Haven't read the BFP in years as I'm not local now but it used to be a good read whilst I was in Uni and kept me in touch with the wanderers before I was a proper fan. Haven't really considered the BFP website as a news source in a long time, has always been either wrong, out of date or pretty awful to navigate.
The Athletic promised to deliver a better class of football writing, mostly by buying up decent writers, but seems to stay away from news so isn't really cutting edge or one stop, not sure how long I'll subscribe but some of their content is very good.
Friend of mine has worked at the Oxford Mail for years and has plenty of choice words to say about Newsquest. He also says one of the most important things for any local newspaper to get right is the sport reporting, particularly the local football team - that's where so many of the physical sales and online clicks come from. The OM does seem to do a very good job of covering Oxford United (although constant staff and cost cutting means their local non league coverage is a lot poorer than it once was). The BFP were similarly good through the 80s and 90s but as others have pointed out, seemed to dump WW as soon as Wasps came to town; that kind of coverage is difficult to simply pick back up as trust has been lost.