[Andrew]

The biggest issue with many local newspaper sites is the ads literally make them unreadable. It's not so much their ad free rivals which lower their readership bit their own greed - prioritising being able to view ads over content. Ads are a necessary evil but if they make a website unusable people will either ad block or go elsewhere.

I’m not even sure any local news site even loads properly on my iPad, it just constantly tries to load all the heavy adverts, fails and then starts again, with the page jumping up and down all over the place

Round my way you’ve got the Huddersfield Examiner which is Reach and the Bradford T&A run by Newsquest and they are as bad as each other with millions of adverts, clickbait, national stories, stories from miles away, “The EXACT time snow will fall in the UK” type articles, local stories often where the only available information has been sourced from a tweet that a road is closed or a bus route is diverted, meaning literally no journalism has actually taken place. Stories that are basically adverts ‘We try out McDonalds new burger’, stories about the council are just regurgitated press releases with no critical analysis, and then just tons and tons of crime stories.

Although to be honest the BBC local news pages are awful as well, many areas seem to get no more than one or two stories a day, and often they are national stories just allocated to a local area based on the content.