Posted by Grey Cardigan on 18 March 2010 at 23:08
Tags: Journalism
IT WOULD seem appropriate to start this piece with a cliché: You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
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(Let’s not argue about ‘till’. That’s how Joni Mitchell wrote it.)
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The ongoing demise of local newspapers is manifesting itself in some strange ways. On his Holdthefrontpage blog, former Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson casts a critical [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 10 February 2010 at 14:51
Tags: Journalism
SO I’M in the Shivering Whippet for a couple of liveners with one of my predecessors as Editor of the Evening Beast – the last proper boss we had, if truth be told.
I’m moaning at him about a budget meeting I’ve just sat through: the sheer penny-pinching misery of management and the inevitable death by [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 4 February 2010 at 23:25
Tags: Journalism
Younger readers won’t know what a sabbatical is. Derived from Greek or Hebrew, it is defined as “a rest from work, or a hiatus, often lasting from two months to a year”.
It used be be commonplace on some newspapers. My father, a hard-working hack, was granted a two-week sabbatical once he’d completed 20 years on his [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 1 February 2010 at 11:39
Tags: Journalism
I’m taken aback by the report in The Guardian that the Daily Mail is to spend £10 million on an advertising campaign aimed at 35-year-old women. Ten million pounds? That’s more than the profits of some regional newspaper groups. Ten million pounds on a single promotion? I sometimes can’t find the money to get some bloody [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Grey Cardigan on 27 January 2010 at 18:20
Tags: Journalism
You might think that the lead item on the BBC evening news would be lovingly crafted, carefully checked, and be a tour de force of television reporting.
Not so. Tonight’s report on the Chilcot Inquiry had a whizzo graphic showing the calendar of Lord Goldsmith’s shifting opinion on the legality of the war in Iraq. Two [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 15 January 2010 at 11:48
Tags: Journalism
It is with great delight that I bring you news that the Framley Examiner has uploaded some new pages.
And if you’re struggling with staff shortages, rampant literals and work experience kids pretending to be trained reporters, boy, will they make you wince.
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Posted by Grey Cardigan on 31 December 2009 at 11:54
Tags: Journalism
ON my travels the other week, I picked up a copy of what was once my favourite weekly newspaper, the Craven Herald. This used to be a magnificent throwback; a big anachronistic broadsheet with only classified ads on its front page.
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Coach trips, jumble sales, pub music nights, farm auctions – it was a tremendous insight [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 29 December 2009 at 00:29
Tags: Journalism
This is an extract from the Grey Cardigan’s January column. For the full version, find the subs offer elsewhere on this site.
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WHAT is it with the Scotch? Give them an invitation to the Christmas do and at the drop of a Tam O’Shanter they’re in the full kilt ensemble, complete with a dinky little dagger down [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 29 December 2009 at 00:23
Tags: Journalism
I’m wary of making this an exclusively Liz-fucking-Jones blog, but you have to admit that these days she’s serving up suitable material on a daily basis.
Her contribution to the Christmas spirit is in today’s Daily Mail, headed “I’ve never liked the homeless - they’re smelly and scary”. Nice one, love.
It’s a lazy ’out of touch hack visits [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 21 December 2009 at 16:40
Tags: Journalism
I’m invited to contribute to Jon Slattery’s end-of-year round-up, nominating my best media of 2009.
For Journalist of the Year, I have to plump for Liz-fucking-Jones. She’s painted herself into a corner in a dank, Exmoor hovel; has landed herself with a herd of rescue animals that she can’t possibly abandon; and, as someone smarter than me [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 13 December 2009 at 16:19
Tags: Journalism
This is an extract from The Grey Cardigan column in December’s Press Gazette. For the full version, see the super, soaraway subs offer.
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THE BASTARDS. They’ve only gone and ‘found’ Tommy Cockles.
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I’ve been hiding our last remaining staff photographer from the management ever since the ridiculous edict was passed down that we didn’t need to employ [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 1 December 2009 at 18:39
Tags: Journalism
A reader writes: “Sorry to keep banging on, but I have reached Page 16 of the Daily Telegraph and a headline that reads ‘School paedophile checks for festive volunteers.’
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”
Good point, well made. Then there was Page 12 of yesterday’s paper, littered with quotation marks and the with unnecessarily stupid downpage heading of ‘Flies more [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 29 November 2009 at 13:31
Tags: Journalism
Poor Liz-fucking-Jones. In today’s Mail on Sunday the Mad Woman of Exmoor bleats about the pressures of fame. The hatchet-faced hypocrite whines that writers ”make rude, personal comments that have nothing to do with your work”, citing a Daily Telegraph report that she went home from her job as a magazine editor to shield her cats’ eyes from a [...]
Continue ReadingPosted by Grey Cardigan on 29 November 2009 at 13:16
Tags: Journalism
I’ve never rated the Daily Telegraph’s Jasper Gerard as a restaurant critic. While better than the flanelled fool who preceded him, he’s not just convincing; his overwhelming self-absorbtion cancels out any impression that he’s passing on useful information to the common man.
In yesterday’s Weekend section, he proved the point once and for all. In the [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 17 November 2009 at 19:32
Tags: Journalism
I know that the red-tops play fancy-free with Contempt of Court, but The Sun’s coverage today of the Delroy Grant case doesn’t so much as drive a coach and horses through the 1981 Act but makes a complete fucking mockery of it.
Am I just out of touch? Do the reporting restrictions that were hammered into us [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 14 November 2009 at 00:33
Tags: Journalism
I DON’T think any of us have ever been happy about the way our craft is portrayed on television. Soap scriptwriters in particular seem to be astonishingly naïve or just plain lazy.
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The Weatherfield Gazette regularly sends doorstep merchants out onto the cobbles of Manchester whose blatant thuggery would have them up before the PCC and [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 8 November 2009 at 15:57
Tags: Journalism
I have a theory that it was the rise of Tanya Gold that finally pushed Liz-fucking-Jones over the edge. Let’s face it, the Queen of the Cringing Confessional wouldn’t have relished seeing the Guardian’s big-footed fatty attracting more outraged readers to her comments field than the original Deranged of Derry Street.
Hence the increasingly lunatic, shotgun-dodging witterings, [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 8 November 2009 at 15:19
Tags: Journalism
Sky News led off its Remembrance Day coverage this morning with the convenient hook that the 200th British soldier had just died in Afghanistan.
Oh really? The rest of us, including the BBC, every national newspaper and the MoD itself have pegged the death toll at 231. So from whence does the Sky News figure come?
A visit [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 4 November 2009 at 17:09
Tags: Journalism
A reader writes: Dear Mr Cardigan, Thought you might be interested in the following couple of items from Saturday’s Daily Mail.
Pages 44-45: A spread on supermarket meal deals in which the Marks and Spencer ‘Dine in for two for £10′ gets 10 out of 10. ‘The wine was lovely,’ reports Amanda Cable, who gushes: ‘By buying two [...]
Posted by Grey Cardigan on 1 November 2009 at 11:17
Tags: Journalism
Whatever some hacks think of their colleagues, being a photographer on a regional newspaper can be a thankless task. There are only so many ways to snap a cheque presentation or an outraged citizen pointing at an errant dog turd.
Now a blog, Angry people in local newpapers, has been set up to to ‘celebrate’ the more [...]
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