From Sly Bailey to Paul Dacre and Martin Clarke, everyone with any connection at all to the regional press is outraged by the BBC’s plans to launch a series of local online video services.

They’re all upset about pretty much the same thing: the Beeb’s move into what they like to think is a commercial area and the threat it poses to regional publishing. Martin Clarke told the Society of Editors this week that the BBC was a “boa constrictor” that has “no business” moving into a market where regional papers are struggling.

I’ve argued that the BBC is merely bringing its local services to a new platform, just as it has throughout its 90-year history whether it be radio, television, Ceefax or, indeed, the web. I’ve also argued that regional publishers have nobody to blame but themselves for allowing a vacuum to form in this area.

I would have some sympathy for Trinity Mirror, for Northcliffe, for Archant and for all the others in the business of local and regional publishing if they hadn’t actively sown the seeds for their own destruction.

The story of the regional press is the story of British industry and business in microcosm - a lack of investment during the good times and savage cost cutting when the going gets tough. Without exception, the regionals were slow in bringing their services to the web and, even today, some of them are trying to hold back online in a misguided effort to protect their printed editions.

I started as a trainee reporter on the Kent and Sussex Courier in 1986. Back then, as now, it was a Northcliffe title. Back then, it published eight editions across west Kent and East Sussex. For a couple of years it invested in new editions and new teams to cover those new areas. Briefly, it challenged the Kent Messenger as the biggest-selling title in the South East. Then the investment tap was turned off and so, it seems, it has remained ever since.

Today’s Kent and Sussex Courier is a shadow of its former self. A changed front page and, perhaps, a page three slip is pretty much all you get in a so-called edition. Offices have been closed, reporters not replaced and the result is plain to see - an almost complete absence of interesting, truly local news. This state of affairs is reflected on its website where, if you lived outside the main population centres of Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells, you’d struggle to find any content of real relevance to your area.

Other great papers and their websites are much the same and have been for years.

So forgive me if I fail to shed any tears for the owners, managers and bean counters in the regionals as the BBC comes at them with its local video services. They have been responsible, in just two decades, for the near-death experience of a tradition which stretches back to the launch of the Kentish Gazette in Canterbury in the early 18th century. I feel very sorry indeed for the few journalists who remain within traditional publishing outside London for they are certainly not the authors of this story.

But the BBC should be encouraged in its plans despite the howls from the publishers. If this recession turns out to be as severe as many seem to think, there aren’t going to be many of these companies left when we finally come out the other side. Make no mistake: we are witnessing the death of the regional publishing industry - five years from now the majority of these titles and organisations will simply not exist.

With ITV down and out, with local radio dying on its feet and with the independent local blogging networks still finding their place in the world, where else are people going to find out about what’s going on in their area if not the BBC?