IT IS roasting weather and the school holidays are in full swing, but the merry jingle of an ice-cream van is met with silence on Hull's Bransholme estate. Six weeks after the area suffered disastrous flooding, many families have moved away while their sodden homes dry out. Others are confined to upstairs rooms or are living in caravans on the street.

It is a scene that for several days went overlooked. The floods that hit southern England a month after Yorkshire's inundations generated many more newspaper column inches, despite damaging fewer homes and killing fewer people. “Disasters aren't serious unless they happen in the south,” huffed the Yorkshire Post. Nooks such as Thorngumbald, where water is pronounced watter, were too far for London-based reporters to venture, some whispered. Those who did go north tended to stop in South Yorkshire, where the damage was less widespread but more telegenic. “Sheffield had a proper torrent. Our water just sat there,” says one glum Hull victim.

Hull was pushed off the front pages by other big news that week, including a new prime minister and terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow. But it is not the first time the national media have been accused of southern bias. In small, centralised Britain, all the big national papers—including The Economist—are based in London (as are many of their readers—see chart). By contrast, federal countries including America, Germany and Australia have a national press which exists almost entirely outside the capital.

News from northern England is harder to sell than stories from the south, according to Robert Torday of ING Media, a London PR firm hired by Hull to get its flooding story back in the headlines. Hull and some other northern cities are experiencing an identity crisis brought about by the decline of the manufacturing industries that once kept them going, he suggests. National newsdesks realise that the old cobbled-streets stereotype is out of date, but are not sure what has replaced it.

Lean times in the news business have not helped, forcing most papers to cut back on correspondents outside London. Fewer reporters writing more copy (to fill supplements and now websites) has increased reliance on news agencies and press releases, at the expense of scoops from Thorngumbald and other quiet corners.

Now it seems that regional newspapers are doing the same thing. “The local press isn't local anymore,” says Bob Franklin of Cardiff University, who claims the papers are increasingly borrowing national stories and giving them a local spin. Editors insist that they are still locally focused. But Mr Franklin has analysed coverage of general elections by 30 West Yorkshire newspapers since 1987. Back then nearly three-quarters of election stories were pieces about local candidates and campaigns. By 2005 this had fallen to barely a third, with the remainder made up of reworked national stories. This exacerbates London-centricity nationwide, since national papers rely on local ones to feed them regional snippets.

The decline of local-newspaper training schemes is further separating national papers from their regional rivals. A generation ago, most national reporters trained on a local paper and then rose through the ranks. Now, even local freesheets expect cub reporters to pay for their own training in shorthand and the like. Bright sparks have little incentive to toil on the regional circuit before aiming for Fleet Street.

Big companies such as Trinity Mirror, which owns more than 200 local papers as well as the national Mirror titles, still form feeder chains of news, Mr Franklin points out. Still, he fears, “when you get to the news conference there may not be many people thinking, ‘Gosh, what's happening in Rochdale?'”