Out of a clear blue sky came Hurricane Rupert. With eerie shades of Michael Fish, an unexpected Category 5 summer storm devastated parts of Britain last week. It might well be named “Rupert” as it appeared intent on flattening the life’s work of press and TV baron Rupert Murdoch. Fleet Street has never seen anything like it.

But enough has been said and written about one man and his dogs. Let’s look instead at another, slower-moving, tragedy involving the press: the fate of our regional and local newspapers.

On June 17th, the Press Gazette announced: “Torquay’s Herald Express is to become a weekly newspaper from next month – with an unspecified number of editorial positions under threat. In an announcement on the Northcliffe-owned title’s website this morning, editor Andy Phelan said the last daily edition would be on 15 July and that it will be replaced by a 100-page weekly coming out for the first time on 21 July.”

This is not an isolated incident. It’s happening all over the country, often unreported in the nationals.

Regional newspapers are faring just as badly. Where I live in the Westcountry, the 151-year old Western Morning News (WMN) is in serious trouble. Often its main feature of the day is taken directly from the national Daily Mail, as with Andrew Alexander’s Wednesday column. The Mail’s city editor Alex Brummer is also a regular in both papers.

The WMN’s senior journalist and writer, Martin Hesp, produces so many columns: political, personal, countryside, touristic and general news, that I wonder what would happen if he ever got ill or resigned from overwork. A few other journalists cover far too many arts and culture events. Sometimes it’s hard to avoid an occasional jaded review.

One staffer told me: “You don’t need me to tell you that regional newspapers are in a hell of a plight at the moment – I think we had about 80 editorial staff when I joined the WMN and now we only have 20 odd. People are hanging on to the jobs they’ve got with fingernails scratching down the exit corridors. I know the WMN’s freelance budget has been cut to nothing compared with what it was when I started writing for them.”

It’s hard to avoid the truth that these stalwarts of the local scene are fading away fast. Two years ago I set up an online version of a local newspaper: Devon & Cornwall Online. It seemed obvious that much of the material of town and city-based journalism will go exclusively online eventually.

But there’s online and there’s super-online. Much of the “river of gold” of the local press, classified advertising, is going to specialised national websites, especially in autosales, property, including rentals, and other big-ticket categories. What’s left is appearing on postcards in newsagents’ windows or in a new line of home-delivered freesheets and pamphlets.

My own effort, DCO, grew steadily for a while and then hit the wall. It got stuck at a low-to-medium daily audience and stubbornly refused to budge. Apart from website design and a few freelancers, I’d taken a “toe in the water” approach to funding the project. Either its time had not yet come, or it never would. Looking around at other local projects, I’ve now assumed the worst.

The most vibrant outlet for local news and gossip is, without doubt, hash-tagged Twitter, based, oh so ironically, in California. Take a look at #Exeter, #Devon, #Cornwall. These are wonderful if you run a small, local business. You can quickly build up thousands of like-minded “followers”: individuals and companies. This allows you to “direct message” them. Twitter is very underrated as a business communications tool, and is basically free. What chance local rags?

There are other sources of local news. Here in the West we have two television outfits: ITV’s West Country Tonight, based in Bristol; and the BBC’s Spotlight, in Plymouth. Both are high quality, but ITV’s effort is probably doomed in the medium term because of its dependence on fickle advertising revenues — and Bristol is a bit remote for those of us in Devon and Cornwall. The BBC’s compulsory public subscription is a much better guarantee of survival for the longer term.

In today’s 24-hour news culture, the regional press is not local enough, nor sufficiently national. And truly local journalism is having its existence salami-sliced away by newer entrants with little loyalty to small communities, and by social-media sites.

Perhaps only David Cameron’s community-based enterprise ideas can save it. A voluntary-sector local press could be the last chance to preserve genuine small-town and county-based journalism.

Devon & Cornwall Online will re-emerge soon as a pillar of the Big Society. Who’d have thunk it?

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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When we are blitzed by a single story for days or weeks on end it eventually melts down into a haze, punctuated by a cacophony of voices repeating the same words.

Out of the haze emerge the main characters, not as we know them, but as primitive humans populating a strange savannah landscape. We have entered the anthropological phase of the story.

Yesterday’s fall of a 168-year old newspaper title, the News of the World, reminded us that, in extremis, even the most rational of folk get overtaken by ancient archetypes, in this case the Hunter Gatherer.

At that point, life and livelihood merge as equally threatened. The moral universe of our day vanishes, replaced by the most atavistic of drives: survival.

We imagine Stone-Age hunter gatherers as ruthless killers and formidable pursuers of wild game. Interlopers from rival tribes are swiftly eliminated to safeguard the local food supply: the ultimate sanction, death, casually meted out in a constant battle for life and security.

Tabloid journalists are not so very different. Their livelihoods depend on a steady stream of juicy stories and the ability to out-scoop rival hacks and editors. At the limit, anything goes in the pursuit of a story that delivers the bacon.

Looking back through the haze of the NotW saga, journalists appear as the hunter gatherers of old, ruthlessly chasing down their prey before the rest of the pack closes in.

The Archetype subsumes their consciousness. They are back on the plains of Africa playing the Great Game of survival. The image blinds them to notions of “fairness” and “equality” — livelihoods depend on their skill and guile.

The difference between salary and life narrows until any notion of morality is filtered out. Modern-day characters, such as the Murdochs and their editors, become inured to pitting their wits in a “livelihood or death” struggle that plumbs the depths of our primitive sensibilities.

Now I’m not trying to excuse the deplorable acts of rifling through the lives of crime victims and their grieving relatives, but to see these events in the framework of history and, in particular, the endless pull of ancient archetypal memories of the race itself.

The unexceptional people involved have to be seen in the context of what red-top journalism has become and the psychological effect it has on ordinary, flawed individuals who are asked to hunt and gather seedy information in order to feed their families.

This story is not as black and white as it seems. Society as a whole is partly to blame for placing such heavy burdens on a small band of writers who enjoy the thrill of the chase.

John Evans

John Evans is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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It’s not often I introduce a new word into the world of communications. Well, I’m going to now.

Have you noticed that many local newspapers are called the “Echo” in some form? There’s Exeter’s Express and Echo, and The South Wales Echo, and many more across Britain. I can’t ever recall a national called by a variation of it, though.

So “Echo” is probably the best single-word describer of a local newspaper. It’s a pity that most locals seem to be a dying breed, or soon will be. The costs of printing and distribution are overwhelming even the “river of gold” of small ads and classified advertising.

Where Craigslist led the way in America, so many British locals are being gradually replaced by online alternatives.

Now imagine a hybrid between a quality blog and an Echo — online, of course. What would you call it? An Eclog, naturally.

That’s not to be confused with an eclogue, which is a poetic pastoral dialogue. The Greek origin of the word means “selection” or “pick out”, which is rather apt, I think.

Here at Syntagma Towers we have spent the last three months creating a new business. It will shortly produce the world’s first Eclog: Devon & Cornwall Online. You will find it on a screen near you in June.

May I suggest you rummage through your loft and find all those forgotten objets d’art you might want to flog to the good people of the West Country of England.

Alternatively, if you are a solicitor, accountant or estate agent, you may like to advertise your services locally. If a tourist, letting agency or general holiday company, it will not harm your interests to book a presence on the English Riviera, bearing in mind that the site will be visible across the country and may well become the first port of call for people wanting to vacation in the area.

Other Eclogs in the pipeline include, Somerset (with Bristol) and Dorset (with Bournemouth). In fact, there’s no limit to the possibilities.

So here’s to the Eclog, a brand new feature in the news and views industry of British publishing.

John Evans

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A view frequently expressed by internet entrepreneurs and commentators is: “Local is good”. To put it bluntly, it means that there’s more money to be made by serving a local community with advertising than by offering global coverage.

Three years ago that was not true. Even when the dollar was low and the pound high, a British website could make more from U.S. ads than British ones. I know, I tried both.

Here I’m more concerned with very local conditions: individual towns and counties. And, in particular, that “river of gold”, classified advertising.

Small Ads, as most people call them, are deserting local newspapers in a mad stampede and migrating online. Big ticket categories like cars, properties and jobs are piling into specialized websites where you can upload pictures and text, then sit back and wait for the response.

Local papers are losing out across the board in these areas. Many are closing down, most are currently up for sale. A month ago the Daily Mail group sold the prestigious London Evening Standard for £1 to a Russian oligarch who was once a KGB spy. The original Northcliffe must be spinning in his tomb.

The economics are stark: the costs of printing and distributing a newspaper or magazine, to the standards we have grown used to, are now prohibitive. Big websites may not yet be yielding a profit, but their smaller, nippier competitors are, or are about to do just that.

The question of where we will get our local news from is a pertinent one, especially as many councils are using badly-drafted anti-terror legislation to spy on people’s habits and activities. Not only do we get a KGB spymaster owning a major local newspaper, but KGB methodology too.

Clearly we need to be informed in our local patch. While 24-hour news concentrates on mainstream concerns at a national and international level, big TV is generally retreating from small stories in small towns. It’s not at all obvious whether small stations can fill the gap, while radio is blind and full of pop music.

It’s also true that big broadcasting and big print occasionally miss the point big time. The Daniel Hannan moment where a politician’s denunciation of Gordon Brown bypassed the mainstream media completely, but became a worldwide hit on YouTube, is a typical case. The story subsequently reflected back into MSM as an internet phenomenon rather than a political one.

Local information needs a light and deft touch, often absent from the big battalions.

As local newspapers fade away, they will be replaced by cheaply run local websites — a cut above blogs but using the same kind of technology and methods.

Here at Syntagma we are setting up a separate company to move into this space. We will start with a Devon and Cornwall site in May, followed by Somerset, and other counties down the line.

It’s an exciting time to be online in the content business. Costs are low, opportunities wide. But above all, with a whole tier of local news disappearing, including ITV’s variable contributions, it’s all to play for.

Local is not only good, it may well be best.

John Evans

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I keep repeating that this site is non-political. And so it is.

You can hear a “but” coming, though, can’t you? Well, you’re wrong, it’s a “however”.

However, Syntagma has 90 American readers for every Brit, so, conscious as we are that politics is big news in the States right now, we have a small announcement to make:

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is coming to visit you this week.

Ignoring the deafening silence, I just want to bring you up to date on Broonie’s progress. Frankly it’s a regression of unparalleled proportions.

Leaving aside my own psychological assessment of him when he first came to office last year, yesterday we were treated to the most devastating political assassination by a journalist that I’ve ever read.

Even if you’re not interested in politics, read it as a master class in the art of personal destruction, much as you might tackle Machiavelli’s The Prince.

It’s all the more calamitous for Brown because the first half gives him his due, albeit in back-handed fashion. It’s what comes next that hits home. Matthew Parris, a journalist at The Times (London) and a broadcaster of great wit, provides us with a forensic deconstruction of Gordon Brown which overflows with such penetrating psychological insight that Brown must have shrivelled up when he read it.

Already far behind in the polls and with ratings only ever matched by Neville Chamberlain, Brown is practically dead in the water politically. Now read this extraordinary coup de grace.

Here it is.

The cartoon is by the brilliant Peter Brooke, also of The Times. It features Gordon Brown after a painting of a gruesome nude woman by Lucien Freud which sold for countless millions recently.