CORNWALL Council is scrapping its Your Cornwall newspaper in favour of a new, more locally focused way of communicating with the county's residents.

One of the first actions of the council's new administration has been to take a long hard look at the council's spending. This rigorous financial audit is ongoing, but one of the early issues that it has pulled up is that the advertising revenue that should have fully funded the council's newspaper has been considerably less than expected.

Alec Robertson, Leader of Cornwall Council, said: "We are serious about delivering improvements for the people of Cornwall, both in our front line services and in the way we let people know what their council is doing. It is important to face up to what is and isn't working with honesty and to take appropriate measures at an early stage where changes need to be made.

"It is clear that Your Cornwall, which was part of the former county council's plan to improve the way it communicated with the public, is not working and is costing too much. We have a duty to council tax payers in Cornwall to spend their money wisely and feel that this money would be better spent on frontline services."

He added: "I now want to invite and encourage local people to provide the council with feedback on the best ways to communicate with them."

The new council has also voiced concern about a countywide council newspaper's ability to tackle the local issues that matter to individual communities and specific geographical areas.

"Letting people know about the services that their council can offer them and how they can access those services is still very much a priority for us" added Mr Robertson. "However we believe that this information would be better provided in a more local context, as the needs of people in Penzance, for example, may be very different from those living in Bude. The key is to get the right information in the right places, rather than using a blanket coverage approach through a council newspaper."

"We are taking a very pragmatic view of communications and are keen to make best use of existing outlets that our residents are already familiar with, such as local newspapers, local radio and our own one stop shops, rather than setting up costly new channels of communication. We believe that taking out a page or two in local newspapers on a quarterly basis would allow us to be much more focused on local issues."

The move towards local news in local papers would offer significant savings to the council at a cost of £65,000 that would come from existing budgets. The council is also looking at the opportunities for using social networking media such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs by councillors to communicate with residents.

Mr Roberson said: "This shift in emphasis is an important step for Cornwall Council. We know that well-informed residents are more likely to be satisfied with their council, and we want to put local people back at the heart of what we do by using the communication channels that work best for them."