THIS friend of mine lives in a town far away from Bolton. They call him Billy No-News because he refuses to buy a local paper and thinks he can learn everything that is relevant to him from television, radio, the internet and people telling him things at the pub.

Every morning he leaves his home to drive to an important job in the big city 20 miles away and, when he gets home at 8pm, he says he is too tired to read anything.

I had an e-mail from him the other day, telling his tale of woe.

It read: "Hi Alan, you would not believe the troubles I have had.

"I bought a low-mileage car recently from the dealer round the corner. Everything was fine until it blew up on the way to work the other day. It turned out that it had been 'clocked' to some tune and was a total bag of nails.

"Mates round here said they were surprised I had dealt with that particular garage so soon after a court case which seemed to be common knowledge.

"We have settled into our new house very well, thank you, but we were surprised by the number of 'For Sale' signs round about.

"It turns out that the empty land we can see from our lounge -- we thought it was somewhere for the children to play -- was earmarked the other month as a site for either a glue factory or an open prison. Clearance work has started and the estate agent -- the one who sold me the house -- just sucked his teeth and said now would be a difficult time to sell.

"Another problem is that the youth club nearby -- the one which the kids looked forward to visiting -- had apparently been identified for closure and it was boarded up by the time we moved in. Teenagers tend to gather outside our house now, throwing their beer cans into our shrubbery.

"The owner of the new off-licence up the street -- it seems he got permission for a change of use from a house a couple of months before we arrived -- seems a little indiscriminate in his sales policy.

"The wife has also had a spot of bother. You may remember that one of the reasons we moved across town was because Betty had landed a new job at one of the biggest local firms. They did not mention it at the interview, because they presumed everybody knew, but new owners were taking over.

"Unfortunately Betty and 200 others have now been 'rationalised' out of a job. Anyway, must go. Still working on the local rag?"

All the above, of course, is complete fiction. But I am sure you get my drift -- local newspapers matter to us all as we build our lives in the communities where we choose to live.

You cannot have too much knowledge, but there are lots of people who never think of it in those terms and miss out on a great deal.

This is Local Newspaper Week -- an event organised by the Newspaper Society, the body which represents the industry.

Local newspapers have been my life for more than 40 years and I have never regretted working in a section of the media industry which provides considerably more solid worth than glamour.

Here endeth the commercial.