Westminster Press, a division of the Pearson Group, invited us to an in-house seminar on digital media. The 1980s had been a lucrative decade for local newspaper publishers. The recession may have destroyed some of their larger advertisers, but the Thatcher era saw the creation of hundreds of small businesses to take their place. These companies tended to advertise locally and lacked the muscle to drive down the price of display advertising. There was competition; community magazines, for long the only reason reprographic equipment companies still sold stencil machines, had discovered desktop publishing and some were selling advertising space. Local television offered fractions of minutes to larger SMEs for the cost of a newspaper advertisement. However, the coverage of community magazines was limited and patchy and producing a television advertisement was prohibitively expensive. Yet, the future wasn’t bright for insular, analogue local newspapers in a world that was becoming increasingly digital and connected …
… (An extract from The Ghost in the Labyrinth by Peter Kruger)
