Francois Nel believes tax relief for training is the best government aid for UK newspapers

Posted by Helena Deards on March 24, 2009 at 4:38 PM

Francois Nel, founding director of the Journalism Leaders Programme at the University of Central Lancashire, has spoken to Journalism.co.uk about how to help the newspaper industry. Nel believes that tax breaks for newspapers to fund training could provide a more long term form of investment for the industry, to counter balance newsroom cuts and help avoid a direct bailout from the government.

Nel explains that when newspapers are required to make financial cutbacks, training is "the very first thing" that suffers. He believes that "cost savings help in the short-term", but are not viable in the long term - "you don't grow through cuts, you grow through knowledge development and doing new things". Nel makes the suggestion that if newspapers were to be given corporate tax relief for one percent of payroll per annum, it would provide a longer-term solution.

Referring to concerns over how government investment in newspapers would affect their role in democracy, Nel points out that newspapers already "get corporate tax relief for all sorts of things - this is no different from that". However Nel isn't just making the proposals for solely economic reasons, he believes that the entire newspaper structure needs an overhaul, and that training and re-training journalists is the way to do this. He concludes, "It's not just an economic thing, there's a great need for structural changes and re-skilling of the industry if we're going to survive going forward."

Source: Journalism.co.uk