If it bleeds, it leads to sales

Posted by Martin Stabe on 7 November 2007 at 17:56
Tags: Croydon Advertiser

The harder the news, the higher the sales. That seems to be the message in the most recent post on the always-entertaining blog of Croydon Advertiser editor Ian Carter.

Some local authorities, it seems, would prefer Carter’s paper to stop reporting on the less pleasant aspects of life in Croydon. But the fact is, Carter says, hard news on the front page shifts units at the newsagents’. The harder, the better, in fact.

Carter suggests sales figures aren’t related to interest other media show in a particular story: One recent splash, a “quirky” story about Croydon bakeries taking on security guards, was picked up by Radio 4 and Johnny Vaughan on Capital radio. But it was a poor seller. But contrast, “a fairly unexceptional story about a bus stabbing” the following week did far better. But another week later, a story about three teens killed in a crash was the biggest sale for well over a year, Carter reveals.

The figures aren’t back yet, but Carter predicts that last week’s splash, “Tiger Tiger Sex Attack” will “sell like hot cakes”.

Civil war on Trinity editors’ blogs

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 March 2007 at 16:35
Tags: Croydon Advertiser, Harrow Observer, Harrow Times, Newsquest, Reading Chronicle, Trinity Mirror, Uxbridge Gazette

Normally it’s newspaper editors who worry about the trolls who lower the tone in the comments sections of their blogs. At Trinity Mirror’s newspapers in southern England, however, something unusual is happening: the editors are too busy trolling each others’ sites to worry about insults from outsiders.

Trinity Mirror Southern’s editors have all been blogging for a few months now, but recently seem to have specialised in posting their Schadenfreude over their stablemates’ travails.

Adrian Seal of the Uxbridge Gazette, for example, blogged his amusement over by a post by Simon Jones of the Reading Chronicle, who has lost a recent recruit from Down Under just months after “making a great song and dance” about how the Australian reporter had allegedly chosen to join paper rather than the award-winning Croydon Advertiser.

The Advertiser’s editor, Ian Carter, is also amused by this turn of events and describes Jones’ claims that the antipodean hack had picked the Chronicle over his own paper as “a gross distortion of the truth”.

Carter also notes that Lindsay Coulson of the Harrow Observer “is gleefully ignoring the unwritten rule that exists between most local papers by routinely rubbishing her rival’s front pages and sticking the boot into all and sundry”. On her own blog in Harrow, Coulson replies to her critics’s criticism of her criticism of the (thankfully, Newsquest-owned) Harrow Times.

But don’t think the readers aren’t taking part in all this heckling. When Seal (we’re back in Uxbridge, now) expressed his satisfaction with “another strong edition” of the Gazette, someone called A. Reader jumped right in:

“another strong edition” - such modesty! Perhaps you should leave it to your readers to be the judge of that. The thing I find irritating about the Gazette is the obvious details that seem to get missed out - e.g. the story on your site just now about the car dealer who assaulted a 74 year old. What was his sentence? It’s basic who, when. why, what, where stuff! And let’s not get started on all the typos (in headlines even) week in and week out!

And which paper do you edit, anonymous “reader”?

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Journalist or rubbish collector?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 23 October 2006 at 18:44
Tags: Awards, Croydon Advertiser, Gravesend Messenger, Journalism

Wicked whispers: Which of the judges of the EDF South East Media Awards did Ian Carter of the Croydon Advertiser once talk out of quitting journalism in favour of  a career as a refuse collector?

PS: The Gravesend Messenger took newspaper of the year.

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