Residents will not be celebrating the end of Greenwich Council’s fortnightly freesheet Greenwich Info, the town hall’s Labour leader Anthony Okereke has said.
Greenwich Info will go online-only in the coming year as part of a £33m package of cuts at the council. First published in 2016, it is thought to be the most frequently-published council paper in the country.
The scrapping of Binfo – nicknamed after its most likely destination in residents’ homes – will bring to an end 40 years of a frequent council-owned publication. Its predecessor, Greenwich Time, began as a monthly in 1984, but by the early 2000s had gone weekly and began to mimic real local newspapers – even including a TV guide at one point.
The coalition government moved to outlaw “council Pravdas” in the mid-2010s, but Greenwich was so attached to its paper that it sought a judicial review. Eventually it struck an out-of-court settlement to allow it to publish a fortnightly that did not look like a newspaper, while other councils such as Lewisham stuck to quarterly publications.
Scrapping the paper, which former council leader Denise Hyland once admitted was “dull as ditchwater”, will save up to £150,000 a year, the council says. Four years ago, a scrutiny panel of councillors objected to renewing a print and distribution contract because none of them received the paper. Council officers insisted they were mistaken and Danny Thorpe, the leader at the time, renewed the contract anyway.
Matt Hartley, the Conservative opposition leader, told last week’s overview and scrutiny panel meeting that the council had been “wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds” on “this ineffective means of communicating”.
Okereke replied: “Communications is at the core of what we want to do as a council and Greenwich Info has a role to play in that. Now, having to make up to £35 million in cuts, it’s difficult now to continue with that. And obviously we have to protect frontline services. So it isn’t a cut to celebrate.
“I know Cllr Hartley might be celebrating it, but I don’t think our residents will be celebrating it. When I’m walking around, and other councillors can attest to this, the greatest thing you can find is being stopped by a resident talking about something that they’ve seen in Greenwich Info, or when a resident calls me and says, ‘I got your email from Greenwich Info’.”
Mirsad Bakalovic, the council’s director of communities, environment and central services, said that issues involved with the ending of contracts may mean that the full £150,000 saving might not be realised in the first year, but one job in the Greenwich Info advertising team was likely to go, with scope for more to go in the future.
Okereke said: “There’s still a lot of work that we have to do in terms of digitalisation and communicating with residents. So just because Greenwich Info might be going, there’s still to play for our wider communication service.”
Despite the effective end of Greenwich Info, the council will still have a print outlet — if one not delivered door-to-door — in the little-seen Greenwich & Lewisham Weekender, which is published by the company behind Southwark News, thanks to rules laid down by the government.
Weekender is mostly paid for by a contract to print public notices for Greenwich under laws which still force councils to use print newspapers for this kind of advertising, even if they are barely read in the area. It launched in 2017 with some news coverage, but stopped this after pressure from the council and Weekender has stuck to what’s-on features and council advertorials ever since.
The Weekender deal costs Greenwich taxpayers about £150,000 each year, for a paper that the council stipulates must contain “engaging local editorial content which helps to positively inform residents about the measures that their neighbours and local service providers are undertaking to make the borough a great place to live, work, learn and visit”.
• Lewisham Council is also cutting its in-house publication, although the quarterly Lewisham Life magazine will now appear twice-yearly rather than be scrapped altogether. The council said that “rising costs in printing and labour mean the cost of printing and distribution are steadily increasing year-on-year, while advertising revenue for an infrequent, printed publication has decreased. Over time this trend is likely to continue.” Lewisham added that it was hoping to find sponsorship or more advertising to resume quarterly publication.
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