It often helps to look at things from a slightly different angle.

In the last CMA editorial, ‘The Next Chairman of Ofcom’, I wrote from the narrow perspective of our members’ relatively small (£13bn purchasing power) corner of the economy. 

But even as I wrote, slightly disparagingly, of the distractions of Ofcom’s media sirens I knew that the stance was over-simplified; nothing in our overlapping and diverse digital worlds can adequately be comprehended in black and white. 

The opportunity to attend The Westminster Media Forum’s seminar, ‘The Future for Local Media’, was therefore welcome - providing a chance to observe the digital landscape from a different viewpoint. 

Like visiting a country for the first time, the differences stand out.  The shock soon fades, the contrast blurs, but there’s value in catching those moments of surprise – the extent of differences and the strength of commonalities. 

In four hours the delegates left behind an extraordinarily stark report of the decline of local media and travelled to a place where their agenda was back on familiar ground. 

There is, at many of these events, a very strange and powerful gravitational force that, resistant to (or perhaps energised by) high-voltage shocks, works overtime to drag any deviant thinking back towards the ‘normal’ (incumbent) mind-set. 

This is a generic behavioural trait applicable across many sectors of the economy.  It would, of course, be recognised by both the Comms and Media constituencies within the Ofcom community but it doesn’t justify why we are in this together – and I would hazard, though some might disagree, that the dark gravitational force is not itself induced or generated by Ofcom’s propensity to dull the brain with endless consultations that systematically prove the survival instincts of those who are skilled in asymmetric warfare against fresh thinking. 

No, the reason we are supposed to be in this together is rooted in the Communications Acts understanding of convergence.  Given that we are now between 5 and 7 years on from Ofcom’s foundation, what was most remarkable about the seminar was the limited evidence of convergent thinking. 

The scope for common cause between the proponents of ‘Next Generation Access’ (Open Access ‘fibre to the home’) and the champions of local media ( whether print, TV, Radio or Internet), and, moreover, the campaigners (amongst whom we should include HM Treasury and DCLG) for stronger local economic growth, regeneration and societal cohesion, seems not yet to have dawned on sleepy non-convergent heads that have not woken up to their interdependencies. 

That dark gravitational force seems to have the knack of ensuring that ideas arriving from the different intellectual planets (Poetry and Plumbing) will hardly ever be allowed to collide or be fused together – despite the evidence that is all around us and for which proponents such as the speaker from mySociety.org must be appropriately apologetic.   

Never mind that it’s obvious (to some) that the champion for a national children’s radio service needs to understand that attempting to garner an aggregate audience is hardly suited to a broadcast technology but is easy-peasy via the Internet. 

Never mind that user generated content – so vital for revitalising local community news (as evidenced by the excellent Newbury Weekly) is constrained by the asymmetric addictions of ‘best efforts’ network providers who would rather not invest in fibre. 

Never mind the blindingly obvious thought that countries such as Sweden, (where most of the ground-breaking local access networks are not owned or constrained by last generation Telco’s) could probably yield some interesting clues about societal cohesion, local identity and the new role of local media. 

No, we need these debates, apparently, to ponder what we mean by local, whether regional news coverage can be made profitable, whether Google should pay syndication fees, whether the BBC should share its raw footage, whether there will ever be a digital dividend and if so whether it will ever be aligned with the reuse of spectrum on the other side of The Channel, or whether, in the current crunch, anyone will bid in the exciting new auction arena to get spectrum and rediscover the cost of broadcast technologies. 

Maybe the best bet for the future of local media in the UK will turn out to be in the hands of Lord Carter’s review of the ‘poetry and plumbing’ of Digital Britain, followed by a sharp message to regulators to deliver what was written on the tin and crack on with enabling a 21^st century digital infrastructure to better serve all parts of the economy.

Across your digital divisions, discuss.

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David Brunnen is Managing Director of Groupe Intellex and writes for the Communications Management Association.

The seminar ,' The Future of Local Media', (London, December 12th 2008) was organised by the Westminster Media Forum..

The phrase 'poetry and plumbling' is a reference to Lord Carter's speech to the Ofcom Conference, 20th November 2008 in which he identified the need for "a compact between the the plumbers and the poets - network operators and ISPs on one side and the Hollywood studios and record companies and creative artists and talent on the other".   In this editorial it is used to describe the gulf between the Media and the Communications sectors in the UK and the need to better understand the developmental interdependencies of Creative Content and Services and Open Access advanced infrastructure networks.