Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 19 August 2010 at 14:28
Tags: Evening Beast
Remember the A-level triplets? While we’re unlikely to see their ilk again, newspapers across the country have been taking advantage of happy 18-year-old girls today.
Now there is a blog “exploring the hypothesis that UK newspapers believe that only attractive white girls in low cut tops do A-Levels.”
Enjoy.
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 16 August 2010 at 12:53
Tags: Evening Beast
YOU NEVER forget your first door knock – and certainly not your first death knock. They are fraught with uncertainty. You never know if you’re going to be punched in the chops by a porn merchant’s minder, or invited in for tea so the grieving family can ‘pay tribute’ to the deceased before departing with a pocketful of pictures swiped from the mantelpiece.
In a well-run newsroom, you’d be sent out on your first couple of dodgy jobs with an experienced pro and ‘his’ snapper. The cricket box down the pants, the timing of the knock, the techniques for getting the target out from behind the front door so the requisite picture can be taken, the safe escape back to the car – all essential skills that had to be learnt.
On my first solo job – fronting up an unruly and violent neighbour creating havoc in his street – I had the door slammed on my fingers and was then chased down a row of junk-littered front gardens, hopping over fences, trench coat flapping in the wind, by a large, angry man with a baseball bat and his equally grumpy Alsatian dog. At least we got the picture, even if the snapper only got off a couple of shots before being overcome by a fit of the giggles.
A colleague suffered the indignity of having a bucket of piss tipped over him from a bedroom window while banging on the door of a suspected brothel. And perhaps it wasn’t altogether wise to once send our latest, rather naïve, Oxbridge graduate into an area known locally as The Bronx – and make him take a company van branded with the Evening Beast logo because there were no pool cars available. It had been petrol-bombed by resentful youths before he was even halfway back down the garden path, pursued, as seems customary, by a large, angry man with a baseball bat and his equally grumpy Alsatian dog.
These days, in our experience-starved sweatshops, a poor trainee is often sent out alone onto the mean streets of our violent, inner-city council estates, left to brave the mob with only his Dictaphone in his hand. But hey, at least he got to leave the office and get away from that screen full of illiterate and irrelevant press releases. And isn’t this sort of thing the making of the man; sorting out those who are going to see the job through from those who’ll run home to Mummy and Daddy when the going gets tough?
Perhaps no more. I was having a pint or ten the other day with a former colleague who is now news editor (sorry, content manager) on another regional daily when he pulled from his pocket a little notebook labelled ‘Dynamic Risk Assessment Hazard Checklist’.
“Have a look at this Grey,” he said. “We’ve just been issued with them. The troops are supposed to fill one out before they go out on a job.”
It was a booklet of forms, with spaces for name and date, followed by a list of a dozen or so questions with Yes and No tick-boxes. I’ll give you a small sample.
Does the task you are about to undertake involve working:
… in places where there are slip, trip or fall hazards?
… in crowds or hostile situations?
… with or near moving vehicles?
… with or near animals?
… in bad or extreme weather?
… with or near harmful substances?
Do you believe that you are safe to proceed with this task? If you are in any doubt, answer NO. Please return this form to your line manager.
And there was more, much more.
So there we have it: the potential death of the door knock, and many other ‘interesting’ jobs as well. Ask a cosseted college kid to go out on a job involving any of the above ‘perils’ and they’ll be quite within their rights to tell you to stick it. Health and Safety Rules OK?
Is there anything else the suits can come up with to stop us producing a passable newspaper?
This is an extract from the August column in the print version of Press Gazette. Check out subscription offers elsewhere on the site.
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 7 August 2010 at 18:18
Tags: Evening Beast
I’ve not been able to corroborate this, but it does come from an impeccable source so I’ll share it with you.
My snout tells me that Newsquest are closing their final salary pension scheme for existing staff. No doubt more will follow come Monday.
Have a good weekend, y’all.
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 31 July 2010 at 12:24
Tags: Evening Beast
The two ladies who drove 20-odd miles to deliver emergency dog food supplies to Liz-fucking-Jones after she complained about her utter poverty must have been a little surprised at what met them. Where was the mud-floored hovel in which their heroine sat sobbing and shivering in the corner? Where was the dog-eaten furniture and where were the dank, mouldering, excrement-littered rooms? And what was that shiny, stainless steel fridge doing in the corner when we’d been assured by dear Liz that she hadn’t owned one for two years?
The truth can now be told, and it’s not going to impress the 4,000 people who allegedly sent the pretend pauper donations from their disability allowances and pensions.
Upcott Farm is now for sale for a cool £1.9million, and the estate agent’s details make for interesting reading: “An attractive farmhouse in a stunning position with uninterrupted views over a private valley together with an exquisite recently renovated barn conversion completed to a high standard.
“Large courtyard with original stables and tack room, gardens, paddocks, broadleaved woodland, private lake with fly-fishing and jetty, professionally laid outdoor manege…
“Upcott Farm … has recently been improved by the addition of a new bathroom upstairs and Black Mountain sheep’s wool installed in the loft for insulation. There is also a brand new boiler, oil tank and log burner.
“The Hayloft has not only been converted to all the latest building regulations, but also includes solar panelling on the roof, hidden cabeling (sic), surround sound and an insulated underfloor heating system.”
So hardly the horrific hovel we were led to expect.
I know we all elaborate for journalistic effect when we write columns, but where does poetic licence end and receiving money under false pretences begin? The previously gullible readers of this utter fraudster might now have an opinion.
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 31 July 2010 at 10:30
Tags: Evening Beast
The film re-make of cult Eighties TV series The A-Team has been universally panned by the critics … except in today’s Sun.
They sent an original A-Team fan and a lad of 12 to see the film and guess what? They both loved the movie, scoring it 8/10 and 9/10 respectively.
Surprised? Well The A-Team was made by 20th Century Fox, owned by Rupert Murdochs’s News Corporation. I need not remind you who owns The Sun.
Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 20 July 2010 at 14:28
Tags: Evening Beast
You bet it does!
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 17 July 2010 at 12:32
Tags: Evening Beast
The Daily Mail’s reader offers are the envy of the newspaper world. They always look good; they always capture the zeitgeist. So the thought of giving away a ‘free’ DAB radio worth £35, just days after scare stories about the cost of the digital switchover, must have seemed like a spiffing wheeze.
But sadly, all is not what it seems. Your ‘free’ radio most certainly isn’t ‘free’.
Where shall we begin? Let’s take Route One or, as the Mail calls it, ‘Priority Orders’. For this you need to collect 20 differently dated tokens, so let’s assume that you take the Mail from Monday (50p) to Saturday (80p), so you’ve spent £10.90 just to qualify. You then need to make a telephone call to register your interest (75p a minute for two minutes) and then also enclose a cheque for £26.70. So that’s £39.10 for a radio that’s ‘worth £35′. What a bargain.
So let’s tread the pauper’s path. For this, you need 60 differently dated tokens including eight that MUST (their caps) come from the Mail on Sunday. So that’s five days at 50p, one day at 80p and one day at £1.50. Your 60 tokens are going to cost you £40.40. Oh, and then there’s a cheque for £6.70 postage. So that’s £46.10 for a radio that’s ‘worth £35′. What a bargain.
It doesn’t stop there. DAB radios eat batteries, so you’ll need a rechargeable ‘ChargePAK’ at just £20, plus there’s the opportunity to purchase an ‘attractive’ case for your ‘free’ radio for another £20 (or just £35 for both).
So your ‘free radio worth £35′, with tokens, ChargePAK, case and phone call, could end up costing you a phenomenal £74.20. What a bargain. Mind you, you do get to read the Daily Mail every day.
I can see the ASA being all over this one, especially as there was no mention of any extra charges in Friday’s front page tease, and just a reference to ‘token collect’ on today’s blurb.
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 7 July 2010 at 15:49
Tags: Evening Beast
It’s a flanelette frenzy as the Media Guardian website reports at length on an ASA ruling against the Daily Mail Telegraph for offering readers pairs of men’s pyjamas (only £19.99) purporting to be “manufactured by a leading British manufacturer, Tootal” when they were in fact made in South Korea.
One small problem. The Guardian’s reader offer site unfortunately carried exactly the same offer with exactly the same wording. Cue some hurried revisionism after punters in the comments section pointed out this faux pas, and the offending words were quickly removed.
Let’s hope whoever was responsible for this misplaced Schadenfreude sleeps easy tonight…
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 1 July 2010 at 15:37
Tags: Evening Beast
EVEN IN these turbulent times, I thought I’d seen everything when it comes to the crass stupidity of management, but the latest Johnston Press edict, issued by a suit called Paul Bentham, is simply beyond belief.
In a memo sent to journalists on the group’s South Yorkshire newspapers, Mr Bentham insists that: “The best practice is now for all editorial pages to be templated, rather than designed around particular stories,” and that editors should not “continue with the old practice of reading every story” but instead “evaluate the risk for each story based on content and the seniority of the journalist and act accordingly”.
As a parting shot, he also suggests that page proofs be viewed as PDFs by the editor and that they should not be printed out as “this creates a further strain on the network speed”.
Where to begin? As editorial guru Peter Sands pointed out in his blog last month, templated pages have resulted in the imposition of ‘two-deck syndrome’ where any remaining creativity left in the newsroom is completely stifled by a formatted design. He rightly says – pay attention, Mr Bentham – that you should read the story first, come up with the best headline you can, and then build the page around it. It’s called ‘layout’. It used to be a highly-rated skill.
As for not printing out proofs, I don’t know about you but I can spot a literal a mile off on a print-out. It’s an instinctive knack developed down the years. But make me read the same piece on screen and the potential for error increases ten-fold. (Hence the occasional literal in my Press Gazette blog.) It’s just not the same.
But then, does Mr Bentham really care about mistakes littering his newspapers? Surely not, if he’s content for reporters to shovel words willy-nilly into boxes and then send them to print without anyone even checking them. Even the best, most experienced, hacks make mistakes. Suggesting that an editor need not glance over every story in his or her newspaper is utter madness. The lawyers must be rubbing their hands with glee.
Does this silly man know nothing about newspapers? Perhaps in Mr Bentham’s barmy new world, not only are subs expendable but editors too.
He’s not really thought this through, has he? Because if there’s no editor patrolling the proofs, who’s going to end up before the beak for contempt when a cock-up saunters through? Yes, you, Mr Bentham.
This is an extract from the July issue of Press Gazette. For the full version, see the subscription offers elsewhere on this site.
Posted by
Grey Cardigan
on 19 June 2010 at 13:40
Tags: Evening Beast
The Daily Telegraph today unveils Matthew Norman as its new restaurant critic, according him the customary front page slot on the Weekend section.
But wither his piss-poor predecessor, Jasper Gerard, mate of departed editor Will Lewis? Any sightings gratefully received.
PS: Matthew, stop referring to your wife as ‘the boss’. That’s the kind of thing you see in shitty county magazine reviews.
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