FOR many expat British journalists in the region, this piece of news is going to be hard to swallow: the UK Press Gazette is to close.

It will not publish either in print or on the web after this weekend.

For those not acquainted with the UK Press Gazette, it has been essential reading for British journalists, and indeed any Antipodean journos who ventured to the UK.

Not only did it provide a snap-shot of industry news, events and the occasional personality but it had something more important – advertisements that promised more interesting and better-paying jobs.

For any journalist wanting to be on the move in the UK, the Press Gazette and the Guardian newspaper were the first places to seek out opportunities.

The Press Gazette’s owners, the Wilmington Group, announced the closure just a week after the magazine had held Britain’s annual newspaper awards.

The move is said to have come as a surprise to the small number of staff. The Guardian reported that the title had 2,500 subscribers, each paying Stg115 per year. Its website had doubled traffic to 150,000 unique visitors each month.

However, a spokesman for Wilmington is quoted by The Guardian as saying that there would be “no journalism” on the site after the weekend.

The UK Press Gazette has long faced challenging times, mainly because it covered a small, niche market that is not cashed up in a marketing sense or sufficiently industry-oriented to the extent that it will spend money to keep such independent titles afloat.

Wilmington bought the UK Press Gazette in 2006, taking it out of voluntary administration. However, Wilmington itself has undergone significant rationalisation, selling many of its B2B titles.

The Press Gazette, which had been around for 43 years, last year moved from a weekly to a monthly print cycle, relying more on its website to break news. Clearly, there were not sufficient cost savings in this strategy to keep it alive.

Wilmington Managing Director Les Kelly (media and entertainment division), said while there would be no news coverage, the site would not die. It would offer other services, such as training and freelance referrals”.

The closure is yet more bleak news for the British media. Scottish journalists are about to strike over Easter, complaining of job cuts at Glasgow’s Daily Record and Sunday Mail. (see earlier story.) A total 57 regional titles are said to have closed in Britain as a result of the global economic downturn and the structural challenges posed by internet publishing.

SAD to see that UK Press Gazette is going monthly. As a weekly it was required reading for most journalists.

Don’t know if this particular feature is still running, but years ago they used to ask sub-editors to submit spoof headlines for historical events. One week the event in question was the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. The winning headline was: “Scorch! What a Fuhrer!”

Genius.

Last week’s Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff didn’t generate as much online coverage as similar conventions tend to do in the US. One of the few people providing updates was Paul Bradshaw via Twitter alerts. But then, there is only so much you can get into 140 words.

He did write a piece for the UK Press Gazette, picking up on two of the presentations. The original draft of the story, on Paul’s blog, led with comments by Jane Singer.

She argued that the current mass market, ad-driven model for newspapers was an historical anomaly and that now we were going through a process Singer called ‘punctuated equilibrium’.

We don’t need journalists to cover minutiae, to spend so much time on things they don’t need to be doing, like sports scores, and press releases, and acting as a ‘middle man’ between a source and their audience. We need journalists to put information into context, to do it without fear or favour.

This gets to the heart of how journalists add value to information. A journalist should be explaining the how and why of a story. In an age of an abundance of information, context is all.