WHAT do you mean when you say the word "local"?

That's what I've been wondering this week after a top media academic put it to me that the term "hyperlocal" has only been invented because "local", as a convenient catch-all, has completely lost its currency. Which, given that I work in the world of local newspapers, has got to be worth considering.

Said academic, former Times and Telegraph man turned internet entrepeneur Greg Hadfield, said at a very enlightening speech at MediaCity last week that what traditional media considered local had become too loosely defined. I know what he means; when I was a student in Carlisle, turning to BBC North East and Cumbria's "local" TV coverage - or ITV's Border News - was an exercise in patience, with most of the headlines coming in from Newcastle and Sunderland rather than where I was actually living at the time. For local news there was one place I turned and still do for the latest from our friends in the north; the excellent News and Star.

So how local should local be? A town? A council ward? A neighbourhood? Your street? That's the answer the traditional media and the newbie citizen journalists are battling it out between themselves for answers, and I guess a lot of it's down to what your audience considers as its local identity. All I can say is that The Champion's main experiment in hyperlocal news to date - the print rather than online ChampLocal newsletters - were scrapped because they weren't greeted with the same response The Champion itself does. Something which itself speaks volumes; arguably for local/hyperlocal news to really work, it has to be sustainable in the way all too many hyperlocal projects at the moment aren't. It can't just be money for nothing.

But what do you consider local? Is what you get in The Champion local enough? I'd love to know. Drop me a line at david.simister@champnews.com or give the newsdesk a call, because you, the readers, are at the heart of what we do.

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EVEN if the buildings weren’t from the near future, the prices at the Salford multi-storey were. A future where parking for just over four hours costs a scary £7.50.

It was the first time I’d travelled to MediaCity UK – the new and very shiny home for the region’s broadcasters and web whizzes – to get a glimpse into the way the UK’s digital media could be going from an assortment of experts from both sides of the Atlantic. Given I was brushing shoulders with BBC executives, university academics and iPad addicts in possibly the media-savvy place in the north west, there’s probably worse places to start.

The buzzwords for the day were Social, Local, and Mobile – or SoLoMo, if you speak fluent Journalese – with the experts’ emphasis very much on how to get today’s news out to the iPad/iPhone generation. Easier said than done if you want to make enough money out of it to make it a sustainable media business!

There were all sorts of smart ideas on how the media should stay relevant in an increasingly digital age, with everyone from Sky, Guardian Media Group and the University of Central Lancashire’s Journalism department coming up with their own ideas on how to crack the conundrum. While it was obvious there were lots of different ideas floating around I think there was one thing absolutely everyone could agree on; that the media as we know is evolving and changing faster than ever before.

How does it all affect The Champion and you, the reader? Well, I’m keen to embrace quite a few of the ideas I’ve learned about at MediaCity, particular with our website in mind, but what surprised quite a few of the experts I got chatting to is that The Champion as a printed title is actually bucking the trend on what most of them assumed was a given across the media.

Our print circulation is going up.

As I left the conference to pay my £7.50 parking charge, an analogy alluded to by speaker Francois Nel struck a particularly poignant note. He told us that a shoe company is not there to make money – it is there to make shoes, and the money is a result of it making shoes. To succeed, the product and the people come first.

No matter whether it’s a small company like The Champion or one as big as the BBC, media companies in that sense are exactly the same.

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HAD a great phone call from one of our West Lancashire readers this morning.

The lady, evidently from the more traditional elements of our readership, had a church-related story she was keen to see in next week's edition of The Champion but had no time for a newfangled fax or email; she wanted to do it the old fashioned way, and relay the copy to me over the phone, word for word. Not a problem, I said.

But she wasn't terribly convinced. Could one of these modern day journalists, ensconced with Facebook and Twitter, really have the shorthand skills necessary to be able to take down a small essay, word for word?

I could tell, as she read out her carefully-written church event notice, that she had a quiver of doubt in her voice, nervous I was going to get a crucial element of the story wrong. In fact, she was so nervous she demanded I read it back to her, over the phone, just to check I hadn't missed any words out. It was like being back in my university shorthand classes.

So she was pleasantly surprised when I read her announcement back to her, word for word, fact for fact. The quiver in her voice shifted to a tone of slight surprise.

"Obviously you're good at your shorthand then," she commented. "Well done. It's good that journalists can still take a good note."

I didn't dare tell her my shameful secret; that none of it was taken in Teeline, the shorthand of choice if you're hoping to get yourself noticed as a qualified journo. It's not that I can't do it - I can - but over the years I've developed my own equally messy shorthand system which (for me at least) works even better.

I let her know I'd get cracking on the story for her and wished her every success with the event. Before immediately going back on Twitter...

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THERE were so many copies of The Champion it took a forklift truck to move them.

As part of a little project I've been working on - more of that another time, I promise - I got treated to a rare visit to to the secretive archive where all of the old copies of our papers are kept, to have a nose through the thousands of newspapers which have been put together over the years. That might sound like a bit of a daunting task, I admit, but as someone who's grown up with The Champion it was something I'd secretly really been looking forward to.

I can think of few better insights into the world of local newspapers and how they've changed over the year.

Once I'd got my fingers blackened with decade-old printing ink I'd found plenty of copies of The Champion covering some of the bigger stories I half-remembered from my own childhood; the development of the Ocean Plaza in Southport, or more specifically the lack of it at the time, was a recurring theme through our Southport editions.

In the old Skelmersdale editions was a story that's been given a fresh airing over the past few months - the town's regeneration. The borough council are as keen as ever to get work going but I discovered on my trawl through the archives that there's nothing new under the sun - in fact, one front page from 1998 reported on plans to bring facilities including a new cinema to the town's Concourse shopping centre.

And then there were the things you just don't see in local newspapers any more; the monochrome pictures on the front page splashes, the enormous motoring supplements every time a new registration year arrived, banner plugs along the lines of "Your News + Your Views = The Champion" and Britpop puns in the picture captions (no, really). One particular irony was the presence of a Champ Extra, a printed column focusing on almost exactly the same additional news pieces as our online ChampXtra enewsletter!

Looking through The Champion archives was enlightening and - thanks to the amount of binders and piles of newspapers involved - absolutely shattering.

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