Monday, September 29, 2008

Trinity Mirror

In among the news of Trinity Mirror's closure of several weekly titles in North Wales, including the Rhyl Visitor, which was sad enough, was the announcement that it was also to transfer printing from its Liverpool printworks to Oldham.

I'm sure someone in the management will manage to justify it, but I'll just say this, unless they are buying a fleet of much quicker vans, you can't get papers from Oldham to Liverpool as fast as you can get papers from Liverpool to Liverpool.

About 10 years ago before I started teaching journalism, my last job as a real journalist, as opposed to a blowhard columnist, was as night editor of the Daily Post, a job based in the Liverpool head office (this was before the title was split into distinct Welsh and English operations and the Llandudno Junction offices of the Post opened)

The building was and is unlovely, brutalist, concrete and won't be mourned if it's pulled down. But reputedly if Scouse workers there, who are proud of industrial achievement, are to be believed, it had the largest concrete roof in Europe.

The roof featured in one of my favourite stories about the legendary Post sports editor, Len Capeling. At the time of the docks strike, not sure which, there have been many, one senior editorial executive would take to the roof to watch the pickets through binoculars - what he thought this would achieve that couldn't be had by simply sending a reporter to the scene is anyone's guess. After spying on the strikers he arrived at the afternoon news conference and when the subject of the strike came up announced pompously: "I have a little intelligence."

Quick as a flash Len says: "This is conference, we only want to hear breaking news."

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Evolution

Time to breathe a little life into the blog. Although it has been very encouraging to see the numbers pitching up even when I haven't been posting. Or should that be depressing?

Most are lost souls in a fruitless search for the graffiti artist which I ain't.

Now this blog will be mostly about the media, law in the main, and anything else shiny enough to catch my eye.

I might take it off the Welsh Blog roll though, as I'm not sure how relevant they'll find it. Sad, because I liked the flag.