The Prime Minister visited our Motherwell Campus last week. The national story was always going to be the speech.
But the Wishaw Press splashed with our Brain Health work, and Motherwell & Wishaw Today covered it online.
That’s no accident, and it shows how news judgement works.
A Prime Minister’s visit hands you a news hook, but it doesn’t hand you the story you want told. Left alone, the coverage follows the speech. If you want something else to land, you have to decide what that is, shape it for the reader you’re aiming at, and put it in front of the right people before anyone else sets the agenda.
For us, the angle was clear: a college in Lanarkshire teaching its students and staff how to protect their brain health matters to the people who live here, in an area where health inequalities are well known.
Local reporting also does something national coverage rarely can. When the story is about health inequality, it reaches the people living with it, in a paper they already read, from a reporter who knows the area. Those readers can then judge whether the people responsible are doing enough about it. A national story on the same subject would probably have treated it as a policy issue, which is useful, but it wouldn’t have told people in Wishaw what was happening a few streets from them.
That’s why the strength of local newsrooms matters for democracy as well as for journalism. Where local papers shrink or close, communities lose the people who attend the council meetings, know which school is struggling and recognise the names in a story. Fewer stories get told, and the ones that do tend to come from whoever has a press office. Where new reporters arrive, the opposite happens: more issues get scrutiny and more voices get heard.
So it’s encouraging to see Newsquest putting new reporters and new websites into the area so quickly. More places for local stories to land can only be good for communities like ours.
A politician’s visit will always draw cameras, and rightly so. But the best local editors don’t let a visit set the agenda. They use it as a reason to cover something their readers need to know about, which is what happened here.
And yes, it’s also as good an excuse as any to share this photo of me and Andy Burnham.