It’s worth noting that H&F News is run primarily out of the council’s press office. This means they’re using taxpayer’s money to push their own propaganda. It’s everything that Livingstone’s critics said the Londoner was: misleadingly upbeat, full of spin and one-sided.

On principle I’m agin it. I would like to see how much it’s costing though, as the PR week article you post seems to suggest that it’s largely funded by switching PR costs from PR officers and advertisements to a council-run paper. If that’s the case, the best argument against it is not that it’s run with tax-payer money, but that it’s crowding out local newspapers.

Incidentally, of the six authorities you cite as doing this, four are Labour controlled, which would seem to suggest it’s an issue for both parties.

Doesn’t practically every council do this though? I know they do it where I live at the moment in the sticks of Sussex, and they had also have one when I lived up in Loughborough.

There’s a difference between councils putting out one sheet “what we’re doing” newsletters or even small newspaper style publications that are in the vain of “what we’re doing” and quite another to masquerade as a newspaper with, as receivers would assume, some element of impartiality.

Well I’m glad we’re all agreed that these things – whoever produces them are a waste of money.

Excellent.

These rags are a real threat to local papers … and the moment you move to the sticks, you realize how important a local paper is in keeping the usually incompetent council, of whatever political flavour, under control.

Incumbent councillors are at least answerable to the letters page of the local paper, and would all probably breathe more freely if there wasn’t one.

Lee:

It goes beyond simple masquerading as a newpaper.

Unlike most council free sheets, which are entirely funded from LA coffers, Hammersmith and Fulham’s operation takes third party advertising as well, taking away the revenue stream on which local free papers rely.

It is near enough indistinguishable from an independent local weekly free rag except for its being entirely under the editorial control of the Local Authority.

As such, one of the obvious questions to ask is whether the H&F news is subject to the PCC’s regulatory regime.

Unity: As much worth as being subject to that scheme would be…

@6

There’s a big difference between actual local papers, and “local papers” that have been acquired by the Daily Mail General Trust and follow the pro-Tory editorial line of their parent company, of which there are depressingly many these days.

8 – lets have a little whataboutery: more local newspapers are owned by Trinity Mirror, which is itself more slavishly pro-Labour than the Mail is pro-Tory.

The number of genuinely independent local newspapers is getting smaller and smaller.

And regardless of that, 9&8, they are not used by the people who have power over us in the most direct form to dictate what they want us to hear while we pay indirectly for that privilege.

We all expect papers to be biased, but also (perhaps less so these days) we expect them to have some level of journalistic integrity underneath that bias. Tory or Labour politicians dictating what we should as a public be hearing is more than just a little scary.

@9

I’m pretty sure they (TM) don’t insinuate themselves into editorial the way Dacre’s lot do. And in answer to the question posed by the original post is “because this time it’s *their* propaganda”.

It’s time we adapted that acronym well-known in the US for our shores – IOKIYAT (it’s OK if you are [a] Tory). One of the most mortifying things about the likely rise of Cameron to the premiership is that sense of entitlement to power that his party and their supporters share – he’ll make Blair look like the model of rectitude by comparison, but they’ll cheer him on for it regardless as long as they get to kick the afflicted with the gay abandon they did in the 80s and early 90s.

In general, these monthly or fortnightly papers are a good thing IMO. Why shouldn’t the council try to get across a positive message about the things it’s doing, rather than having everything it does filtered through a biased, jaundiced local rag.

Most of the time a monthly magazine will not compete directly with local papers. The H&F may be a special case, because of the apparent dishonesty in the way it presents itself, but in general I’m in favour of these things.

All communications from councils (or government) should be duly marked clearly with something that shows readers that what they’ve got isn’t independent, it isn’t unbiased, and it is paid for with their tax money.

Agreed. In an ideal world privately-funded newspapers would have to do the same thing.

8, 9, 10 & 11: It’s not just the Mail group papers that are problematic, all four of our local papers are Johnston Press, and their pro-Tory anti-representative democracy line is also palpable.

Locally, they also push up the Labour group a lot, as they know splitting votes is the best way to keep the Tories in, and the timing of when they print letters is also something to keep an eye on

Our local council freesheet doesn’t take ads, yet, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time; I really need to get my arse in gear and set up the local news website that’s not shite (the Johnston press CMS is dire, worse than the Mail’s)

I don’t know if anyone else has been round Shepherd’s Bush Green recently, but the swarm of identical council-puffing banners hung from lamposts is very, um, Pyong-Yang, as Boris would say. Hammersmith and Fulham council are truly ghastly from top to bottom, it’s not just Phibbs, Nicholas Botteril is another on my personal shit list over air quality concerns.

Here’s an example of the kind of ‘news’ they put out.

http://www.lbhf.gov.uk/Directory/News/Congestion_Charge_Air_Row.asp

Nowhere does that mention that they’re so concerned about air quality that they scrapped the two monitoring stations in January 2009, and are just getting round to putting one back in, without any explanation for the gap. An FoI request received a largely ‘fuck off’ response:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/air_quality_monitoring_in_the_bo

Is this article intended as a defence of Ken, or an attack on some Tory councillor I have never heard of, know nothing about, and will almost certainly never have even the faintest interest in?

Another great example – apparently road works in H&F are implicitly the fault of HSE Nazis.

http://www.lbhf.gov.uk/Directory/News/Main_junction_to_Uxbridge_Road_closed.asp

Clearly real men wait for gas pipes to burst or explode before replacing them . These Euroweenies with their socialist ‘hey, why not maintain our critical infrastructure properly’ need to be dealt with ruthlessly. Sweat those gas pipes!

“Is this article intended as a defence of Ken, or an attack on some Tory councillor I have never heard of, know nothing about, and will almost certainly never have even the faintest interest in”

Incurious chap, aren’t you? For your information, even if you haven’t heard of LBHF’s recent activities, the next Prime Minister has, since he’s appointed their leader to be his local government champion, so their views and policies do have a national impact.

Quite right. Taxpayer shouldn’t be expended on media. In Birmingham the Tory/Lib Dem coalition has stopped printing the council newspaper.

However, the big fish is the BBC.