Shropshire Star, will it catch up with the future?

So the Shropshire Star employees are going on strike over job cuts, at least this will assist the MNA save costs, but will it stop the cuts, the answer is simple really, NO! Some of these people will have no doubt had a cushy number for the past few years, sitting on their laurels, doing what they have to each day, but as they are in a diminishing industry surely the wise ones would have shown initiative, taken the business forward.

A company is only as good as its employees, but sometimes, older, aging businesses do not change with the times, and do not look at growing the business, we sit in a world of technology, we are a world who are hungry for exclusives, and what does our local paper do? Use national stories that have been in the press in the morning’s media.

There is no doubt that with the recent hacking accusations, that newspapers need to change, they need to find other ways of selling news, and this applies to local media as well, the Shropshire Star has no journalist’s, it has reporters, re-active reporters, people who don’t make contacts, snitches, so everything we read is old news, there is the odd local story that somebody has given them, not really something that makes the masses buy the paper.

The way forward has to be internet, local papers have to employ people who are going to seek stories, seek them before they start, charge a subscription internet charge, it can be something as low as 25p a day, but people won’t subscribe for boring journalism, stuff they have already read in the morning papers.

There also must be more of an element of local stories, can you believe that Shropshire’s only local paper has very few photographers, they ask for readers to send in their own pictures. The Shropshire Star is so far behind the times, it is three generations behind.

The problems of course have to be laid at board level, the people who ran the business successfully a while ago, but fell into the trap of all is well, in business you have to move along with the times, sometimes beat them.

The idea of knowing what the market wants seems lost at local level, they have a pretty poor website, that is under used, they copy the morning papers, and have nobody looking at stories in the Shropshire area, yet the arrogance of people who work for the star think they can keep their jobs and see the demise of the Shropshire Star in total, however, even if the board think laying people off will help, it is only a short term fix, to avoid a similar situation again they need to invest and bring the Star out of the dark ages.