Siobhain Butterworth, readers’ editor at the Guardian, rightly devotes her column today to the affair of the Morgan Tsvangirai article that wasn’t. Her explanation makes sense to a journalist — a trusted source who had prepared articles for publication under the MDC leader’s name for the Washington Post and the Melbourne Age — and in his letter the following day Tsvangirai said: “Although the Guardian was given assurances from credible sources that I had approved the article this was not the case.”

The article which appeared on Wednesday last week (It has been removed from the paper’s website but is currently still available in the Google cache) included this:

We ask for the UN to go further than its recent resolution, condemning the violence in Zimbabwe, to encompass an active isolation of the dictator Mugabe.

For this we need a force to protect the people.

In his letter Tsvangirai, made it clear this was not his view, writing: “By way of clarification I would like to state the following: I am not advocating military intervention in Zimbabwe by the UN or any other organisation.”

A mystery remains: why did the Guardian not make more of what looked like an important new angle? The article had been arranged by the comment section. Was there a lurking doubt about it on the foreign desk?

Peter Preston in his Observer media column today writes about the BBC’s plans for local on-demand web sites with up to 20 minutes a day of video and the opposition from the regional newspaper giants. “It is,” he says, “a baroque row.” Not sure about the adjective but I see what he is getting at.

He writes of “hyper-local internet video sites which conflict directly with the sites that Johnston and Trinity (among others) are creating as their own escape paths to a digital future”.

That is surely a part of it but it seems to me to be more about preserving the monopolies the big groups have built up over the years by buying daily and weekly newspapers across the land. The comments of David Newell, director of the Newspaper Society, the owner’s union, quoted in Hold the Front Page, bear this out:

The BBC should not spend public money duplicating local news services already provided by existing local media companies. This was acknowledged by the BBC when it withdrew its plans for ultra-local television last year.

The BBC’s 60 local websites already compete head-to-head with regional newspaper websites and its expansion plans, combined with its cross-promotional power, threaten to steal away audiences and undermine the ability of publishers to pursue their own digital development strategies, which are so important to the future of local media in the UK.

Nationally newspapers have competed with the BBC since the start of news on the web. The result is that we have some of the best news websites in the world. A little more competition in the regions would be welcome.

Peter Preston uses the term “hyper-local” while others have used “ultra-local”. The BBC itself uses an unadorned “local” for its plan to set up sites in 60 areas across the UK. They would serve, on average, populations of 1 million each.

The one they are planning for Suffolk, where I live, would be aimed at a population approaching 700,000. It is an area over much of which Archant has a virtual monopoly of print news. The BBC would aim at an area roughly the same as the circulation area of Archant’s East Anglian Daily Times.

The way the cost of the service is being presented in newspapers is typified by Preston’s phrase: “Ofcom letting the BBC spend £68m of licence fee money.” This is for a period of three years, and spending would reach £23 million in 2011/12. As journalists we play with phrases for emotion power. From my perspective, the sites would cost an average of £350,000 a year, the cost of a modest family home.

It is worth going back to the source material and looking at BBC’s proposal. Done properly, the scheme could help make local independent news websites more viable. Most of the local content would be made available for embedding (with BBC branding) in both commercial and not-for-profit sites to supplement their own coverage. The BBC also says it would link to coverage by other local news providers.

For anyone who is thinking of news sites which are really ultra-local this is promising. But I do feel their proposal to spend about £800,000 a year by 2012/3 on buying video news from external providers is not nearly enough. It works out at little more than an average £13,ooo freelance budget for each site: the price of a modest family car.