People are rightly angry and local newspapers must back them
Sometimes they're squatted on their haunches for a tarmac-level view of the carnage, a pose that - when paired with the strained looking expression on their faces - has been dubbed "Done a poo" by popular Facebook group Angry People in Local Newspapers.
The page has become a formidable round-up of staple stories from the regional press, with all the classic phrases and facial expressions which suggest someone somewhere in a council highway's department is in for a rough afternoon.
It's easy enough to shrug off such concerns as parochial but I probably prefer to think of them as local. They very much matter to somebody, even if they live in a village you can't pronounce or a town you couldn't place on a map.
There is a danger, I think, of left-wingers dismissing local campaigners as having "something of the Daily Mail" about them.
And inevitably there are issues in sections of suburbia which do have a whiff of a Little Englander attitude which it is hard for people with progressive politics to sympathise with.
Regardless of the rights of wrongs about applications for asylum centres, they bring with them a lot of predictable bilge about needing to "look after our own".
Similarly plans to build more affordable housing in areas often encounter fears that people with less money will soon be sharing the protestors' postcode.
And I'll never forget the absurdity of covering perhaps my first ever demo, where the crowd of critics were being mobilised to the site of a proposed mobile phone mast through lots of frantic calls (which were - spoiler alert - not being made by the landline).
But one thing I learned from my many years as a local journalist is that it's simply wrong to write-off anyone who has started a petition or chanted outside a council house as some well-to-do reactionary with an obvious over abundance of time and money.
For starters, many legitimate complaints cut across social boundaries and political divides. Everyone has a right to feel the streets are safe or that services they pay for are of a good standard.
But perhaps inevitably when there's less money to afford things or fewer people to look into wrongdoing it's those in poorer areas or in already vulnerable positions who tend to suffer the most.
I've met with council estate residents fighting to save local nature reserves from developments in areas where gardens are a rare luxury. I've talked to disabled campaigners battling to keep vital support services threatened by cost-cutting. I've chatted to people with autoimmune diseases who, as society reopened, felt condemned to a semi-permanent lockdown.
Far from being efforts to shut the door on the most marginalised, these are fights by those already on the margins to hold on to what they have - often in the face of formidable odds.
And consider those they're often taking on. Housing developers keen to keep costs down by taking the easy option and concreting over green spaces. Or perhaps water companies, happier to pump shit into rivers than shave a million or two off shareholders' dividends. Also anti-social arseholes of almost every demographic profile - because if the top-of-the-line SUV and the off-road bike have one thing in common it's that there's always someone willing to travel like a twat.
So if you accept the cause can be just, is the anger proportionate?
Again there can be a danger in treating small injustices as insignificant compared to African famines or family bereavements or global pandemics. And certainly they have to be seen in that context.
But it actually suits people with wealth and power and an interest in keeping hold of both to play down cuts in public services or polluted landscapes or dwindling law enforcement on the basis that things are a lot worse elsewhere. Mustn't complain is an admirable tendency, but not if it only services slightly sinister political priorities.
How dare someone get upset about the closure of their local swimming baths when millions don't have access to clean drinking water! What an obscene thing to complain about! Although this argument only holds water (no pun intended) if you forget the fact that the public pool would be easier to keep open if we worried less about whether the mega-rich have sufficient revenue to build a second one on private land in Surrey. Swingeing cuts in local authority budgets continued even as tax rates for higher-earners and big businesses fell.
Also consider the combined impact of lots of the same problems happening all at once in separate communities. Part of the reason that the devastating effects of austerity took far too long to recognise is that hundreds of individual battles in small-town communities were not enough to engage a national press whose idea of politics remains rooted in big-bang policy announcements.
Only when it became apparent the entire NHS was utterly banjaxed and neighbourhood policing had been quietly dismantled did the scale of what had been happening become apparent. The people who for years had been waving placards were very much sounding the alarm long before anyone listened.
So if we concede that the people are rightly angry let's turn to the second part of the equation, their appearance in local newspapers - because I rather fear this is under threat.
For an awfully long time the press has been an important port of call for people who have been banging their head up against obstinate authorities or disingenous government departments or drivers who think narrow side-streets are basically German autobahns.
It's a chance for them as residents to get their voices heard and sometimes - not always, perhaps not even often - it helps to get results.
The exchanges which stay with me from my time as a local government correspondent were nearly always from people who felt empowered by being given a platform.
I had a lovely thank you from campaigners who fought long and hard to save a section of the greenbelt earmarked for new homes. In truth I'd only spent half a day or so on publicising a campaign they'd given weeks of their time to. But the coverage helped apply pressure and it was great to see the scheme scrapped.
I was also very moved by the gratitude of a lady whose elderly mum had suffered from dreadful treatment at a newly-opened, widely condemned care home. In this case the story didn't deliver all the answers she wanted but the very fact that someone had bothered to do something after a long period of indifference appeared to help her. It was an acknowledgement something had gone wrong, even if it was too late to fix it.
Finally it's worth considering the value of the always unknowable successes of press coverage, in which publicity of a grievance or a gripe prevents a tragedy.
It is the face of a small child knocked down at the schoolgate and heart-rending tributes which will almost certainly generate the biggest interest.
But it's the countless small stories about "accidents waiting to happen" - which will draw a fraction of the online audience - which might prevent that much more lurid headline ever coming to pass. The preventative power of press coverage can never be weighed in terms of clicks and is something we must fight hard to hold onto.
And yet the danger is that the angry people who regional titles are increasingly swayed by are the crowds grizzling on Twitter about primetime scheduling changes or C-list celebrities confecting rows on daytime programmes.
These truly are the very definition of trivial and yet in the age of the algorithm it's these stories, entirely divorced of any connection with the local area, which too many outlets find themselves fighting over.
Where once any talk of covering this would have been met with a stern "it's not on patch", today publications queue up to cover anything from the national gossip pages which might help them towards the ubiquitous target for web traffic.
If meeting that target is increasingly the mission of local newspapers then coverage of community campaigns will inevitably dwindle and local people will find yet another institution intended to represent them and their interests has simply stopped answering their calls. They'll be angrier than ever but don't expect a photo to prove it...
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