Another fascinating piece of research has landed on my desk from the influential Henley Centre. It was carried out to review local marketing strategies for the media.

It makes excellent reading, and I thought I would share one or two of the points raised with you.

In a nutshell it reveals that the UK is a geographically static nation, strongly attached to its local communities and local interests.

It says there is an increasing need for us to get really close to our customers and truly understand community grass roots.

It gives statistics such as the average house tenure for owner occupiers is seven years. It notes that 45 per cent of the population had not moved home in the ten years to 1991. Of those who did move, 60 per cent travelled no more than ten miles. The report predicts that personal mileage will drop further as consumers look to save time on main shopping trips. This means we can expect to see more, not less, local shopping behaviour.

As I said recently there is a return to local newspaper interest as more and more people thirst for knowledge about what is happening within their communities.

We, like other newspapers, are developing strategies to feed this demand. We can do this through increasing story count and listening to our customers about what they want and the standards the expect.

I think I am lucky in that a lot of readers regularly make positive suggestions about this newspaper, and indeed the Keighley News Midweek.

In the next couple of weeks we are planning some changes to the Keighley News based on your requests and changing lifestyles. Watch this space.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.