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Sorry I’m late posting this week’s column: I’ve been enjoying a drug-fuelled sex romp with Eric Pickles, Pippa Middleton, a small goat and the Archbishop of Canterbury. You see, if you fancy a drug-fuelled sex romp with celebrities, or indeed small animals, now’s the time. No News of the World to expose you, them or it. Safe as houses.

But be quick: there’ll be another redtop along shortly. The closure of the News of the World may have caused an earthquake in the world of the media, but normal service will soon be resumed and the tabloids will be glad to refocus their attention on the core values of their profession – such as pointlessly creating vacuous eye candy celebrities who are then pitilessly destroyed to the deafening sound of packs of readers baying for blood and nudity.

Many things have been revealed to us by the demise of the News of the World, none of them particularly new or shocking, such as the willingness of big business to do anything, anything for money, or the cosiness of the power elite who govern the country.

The media is divided now, of course, much more so than 30 years ago when I was a boy reporter. There’s the entertainment wing, represented by the redtops and the comic-book bigotry of the Mail and Express; then there’s what remains of the serious side of newspapers, the broadsheets which offer provocative and challenging journalism which analyses, questions and holds to account. Most of my time, however, was spent in the regional media, a branch of the profession now, seemingly, in freefall decline.

The News of the World has garnered the headlines – but the long, slow decline of regional media is having, in my view, more of an effect on our lives as a community.

The causes of that decline? The concentration of ownership of regional media in the hands of a few select corporations and individuals whose primary concern is servicing the shareholder has done no favours, of course. Some would say people’s declining interest in community and local democracy has contributed to the decline. I would argue it’s fundamentally the other way around. Others would say the rise of television, radio and the internet have fatally damaged local newspapers, though I would agree with one R Murdoch that this very rise could drive more readers into the hands of the papers to find a source of local information they can trust, that’s permanent and accountable.

My own thirty years before the keyboard convinced me of one thing for sure: where control of local newspapers was in the hands of local journalists who cared for their community and invested time, effort and money in comprehensive, local coverage of that community, newspapers did well. Where consultants, focus groups and corporate management centralised, cut, economised, refocused, followed the dumb herd onto the internet and generally otherwise tinkered around against the instinct and advice of the people on the ground, disaster ensued. I suspect people in many other professions would say the same.

When I was a snotty little boy, my Dad would walk me around the centre of Plymouth. There, side-on to the main parade at a crazy angle, stood the Western Morning News and Evening Herald building, clock hanging over the pavement. It had been there for decades: when Nazi bombs destroyed the city and killed thousands, it stood defiant and alone, journalists and printers braving the carnage to stand with their readers in the face of catastrophe. The city was rebuilt around it, and its askew strength became a landmark. When, later, I worked there, I loved the inky smell, the way the building would shake with life as the papers ran. The place was famous in the city, a symbol, an institution dear to the hearts of the tens of thousands who bought the papers.

The corporation that had come to own the titles abandoned this symbol; in a telling gesture of contempt for heritage and culture, they sold the building and moved to an industrial estate far from the heart of the city. The new building on which they spent millions now stands virtually empty as the corporation continues its abandonment of a community with which those two titles were once synonymous. Adverts are handled by far-off call centres. Pages are produced by journalists at other offices far from their readers. The printing press is silent and the papers are printed far away. It’s very sad. It’s a story repeated endlessly around England by different corporate owners, but everywhere there’s one factor in common – change has gone hand in hand with decline in circulation and advertising. Each change has produced more and more frantic cutbacks to preserve the dividends of worried shareholders.

This decline may not be limited to local newspapers, of course – for example, the BBC is contemplating savage cuts to its local radio stations that may mean the jaw-dropping banality of Radio 5 Live being piped through transmitters that once served local communities.

You can help stop this decline if you think it’s important that you continue to know what your local councils do with your council tax money, for example, or how justice deals with local wrong-doers, or what’s on in the park this Saturday. You can buy your local papers, or you can support MPs, led by the Labour MP Denis MacShane (www.denismacshane.org.uk), who have argued that the Government needs to step in to help local media play its part in our community life as a democracy. The National Union of Journalists (www.nuj.org.uk) also campaigns, as you would expect, for investment in journalism.

In his book on journalism, Flat Earth News, which I recommend to you, Nick Davies quotes James Cameron writing on the demise of the News Chronicle in the 1960s:

“The News Chronicle was founded by considerable and dedicated men; its function was defined and its patronage identifiable. Latterly, it drifted by default into the hands of lesser people, who thought greatly about commerce and casually about journalism; who permitted its affairs to be run by mediocrities on one floor and sharpshooters on another; who felt that the way to compensate for thoughtfulness in one column was by banality in the next; and who, when both things failed together, were brave enough to tell their staff on Monday that there would be no paper on the Tuesday. The trouble was, the people they so summarily wrote off were the only ones who cared.” The paper, he said, was “a warhorse ridden by grocers”.

In recent days we have discovered that the media is really too important a tool to be wielded by “grocers and sharpshooters”, as Cameron so presciently had it. Will anything change?

Now, the Archbishop has been smearing warmed peanut butter all over my naked form as I type this and I hear a bleating from upstairs, which is either Pippa or the goat. I must get on – or was that a long lens I saw twitching in the shrubbery?