With the NUJ claiming to have seen ‘internal company documents’ that suggest the Birmingham Post might become a weekly or bi-weekly paper, it’s a good time to remind ourselves of how important the local media is for democracy.

The FT’s Jonathan Guthrie wrote an interesting article on this last week, which began with the assertion that ‘dissent is the essential business of journalism’. He went on to praise our very own Paul Dale, of the Post, for his uncovering of a report that poured scorn on the notion that Birmingham’s Central Library was suffering from ‘concrete cancer’.

Good local scoops, Guthrie argues, bring scandals to the notice of the national media. We all lose out  in the long run if the local media is downgraded.