A Southern Bias?

This weeks's Economist carries a good piece in which it argues that the trend in national newspapers to focus on the South of England has now extended to the regional press.

Talking specifically about the coverage of the floods in the North,the piece says

News from northern England is harder to sell than stories from the south, according to Robert Torday of ING Media, a London PR firm hired by Hull to get its flooding story back in the headlines. Hull and some other northern cities are experiencing an identity crisis brought about by the decline of the manufacturing industries that once kept them going, he suggests. National newsdesks realise that the old cobbled-streets stereotype is out of date, but are not sure what has replaced it.

There is no doubting that in the case of the floods,the second flooding which hit Southern England was much more widely covered in the press than the devsetation in Hull and other Northern Towns.Perhaps the Thames threatening the homes of Middle England was seena s being far more newsworthy

But the Economist has other reasons

Lean times in the news business have not helped, forcing most papers to cut back on correspondents outside London. Fewer reporters writing more copy (to fill supplements and now websites) has increased reliance on news agencies and press releases, at the expense of scoops from Thorngumbald and other quiet corners

. adding that

A generation ago, most national reporters trained on a local paper and then rose through the ranks. Now, even local freesheets expect cub reporters to pay for their own training in shorthand and the like. Bright sparks have little incentive to toil on the regional circuit before aiming for Fleet Street.