Commenting on a post on this blog in January, Garner said he wanted ManCon to “stick out like a sore thumb” – as though this is the key criteria for success in online publishing. He has since presumably realised that much, much more is needed to sustain a subscription-based model, and he has been unable to provide it. As another commenter wrote here back then, all ManCon managed to do was to cull its readership, thus alienating advertisers. Was this really so difficult to predict?

Over at How-Do, the sentiment seems to be that everyone should salute Garner for his boldness and for admitting it didn’t work. Fair enough. I’m just curious about those subscribers who signed up for ManCon for a year, paying up to £100 each. Will they be getting a refund?

Elsewhere in the world of Manchester-based online publishing, a new “hyperlocal” news site called Inside the M60 has launched. (Hyperlocal, in case you hadn’t realised, is the new word for “local”. Just as “binge drinking” is the new word for “drinking”, “hyperlocal” sounds zeitgeisty and now-ish and everyone is getting terribly excited about the concept.)

Inside the M60 was created by journalists Louise Bolotin and Nigel Barlow. According to its own “about” page:

As a result of cost-cutting measures, local papers have by nature become more insular, relying more and more on “churnalism” and breaking that crucial relationship with their readership and their customers, the advertisers. There are, therefore, opportunities for niche journalism projects with a small cost base that take advantage of the low cost of entry and can act as the voice for these communities.

The site has was only properly launched yesterday, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. It wants a range of contributors from different areas of the city to become “community reporters”. Once these slot in, the potential for genuine scoops seems realistic, particularly since the Manchester Evening News closed its local offices last year and now makes all its local reporters work out of central Manchester.

Presumably Inside the M60 is not expecting to recruit an army of NCTJ-trained hacks to man the bureaux in Crumpsall and Beswick and so the mysterious people who constitute “the general public” will be relied on to provide content. Michael Taylor has highlighted what he sees as the “chasm between the present reality of bloggers and the needs of a well-informed society”, using a crass question about Sir Richard Leese posed on Inside the M60′s Twitter stream as the basis for his argument.

I’m not so frosty towards the  idea of “amateur” news bloggers providing a useful service because I don’t believe that only journalists can do what journalists do. After all, some journalists aren’t very good at their jobs and there’s no reason why a moderately intelligent person with good contacts in a local community can’t break decent stories. But, on the other hand, some form of quality control will need to be put in place in order to retain accuracy and, ultimately, credibility. A dispassionate approach to an issue is often the best way to expose it. Nobody listens to a (hyper) local ranter with a chip on his shoulder, and that sort of approach is something that will need to be avoided.

I’m reluctant to be too critical of Inside the M60′s content given the site’s tender age but since its creators are ready to criticise what they see as the weaknesses of other local media, I reckon a little constructive criticism is justified. Firstly, I spotted a lot of typos on the site, including Harpurhey being misspelt, lots of mis-spaced, glitchy commas and the odd half-written paragraph. There also seems to be a bit of an over-reliance on press releases and surveys, which, of course, fall into the category of “churnalism” that the site is railing against. For example, of the ten stories on the front page, three start with a statement summarising some survey or official report, followed by a second paragraph starting with the words “That’s the conclusion of…”

Still, it’s all free to look at and, once the community reporters bed in, perhaps there will be a change of focus. As we have all learnt today, credit should be given for trying something new. So I wish Inside the M60 the best of luck.

Look kids! It’s DJ Davey C drinking a pint of bitter and looking like a dude! He’s going to be in town at the start of October and his peeps are hosting a wicked all night rave at the Pure night club!

According to the e-flyer (helpfully distributed this week by Manchester Confidential to all its subscribers), the knees-up will feature

a roller disco, celebrity DJs, an Xbox area, a chill-out lounge and a VIP room.

Not sure who the sleb deejays are – I like to imagine Norman Tebbitt pushing out the latest party bangers from his Wagner collection.

Everyone is encouraged to

Go along, meet the party members and educate yourself about what they have to offer.

Hmm. Sounds fucking unmissable.

Meanwhile, the Tories are attempting to get local bloggers and social media enthusiasts to turn up to the conference and tweet about it. This was revealed to those gathered at the Social Media Cafe in Manchester last night. I was there, and to call the response lukewarm would be a gross overstatement. In fact, the only way it could have been less enthusiastic would have been if a pissed Nicholas Soames had borne the invitation personally, immediately after vomiting fish head soup into the slot-loading SuperDrive of a brand new 17-inch MacBook Pro.

So remember, guys: DJ Gravy C’s Tories like to party all night and they “get” social media. ‘Kay?

Look at this picture I captured from the news earlier. I’m surprised the BBC allowed Michael O’Leary, boss of “low-cost” airline Ryanair, on air in this get-up. The point is to publicise some new routes from Leeds to fifty miles outside a number of European cities. In the most shameless and embarrassing way possible.

I actually think O’Leary could have maximised the opportunity a little better. He should have worn a sombrero with the maximum baggage allowance scrawled across it and had the departure times tatooed all over his puny forearms.

Earlier this year a Ryanair spokesman described a blogger who pointed out a glitch on the airline’s website as a “lunatic”. Obviously I object to this, so I hereby state that Michael O’Leary is a ball bag. In a stupid shirt.

NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn’t been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown. Why? Because blogging isn’t easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it’s to easier things that people are turning.

In my last post, I questioned why I was blogging and I’ve found myself writing less and less on here. The sheer effort it takes to come up with something interesting, research it and then sort all the links out takes bloody ages and, except for the odd moment of enjoyable Google/hits action, there’s little fun to be had. I recently wrote what I considered to be an exceptionally well-argued post about the 50% income tax rate. Less than 30 people have looked at it. I’ve also been badly shirking in my commitment to AdTurds.

Another problem is that I’m becoming worried that I’m just one of those argumentative web twats who carps on about how awful everything is but has little practical knowledge of what they are talking about. (Like a newspaper columnist, in other words.)

As such, I’ve tended to focus more on my Tumblr blog, which is orientated around quick image, video and music posts, and Twitter. I also like Friendfeed, which, among other things, collates everything you do on the web in one place.

Essentially, do I really need to write hundreds of thoroughly researched, meticulously-linked words if I see something annoying on TV? Or can the same effect be achieved with a withering Twitter update? If any of my 14 regular readers have any views on this, I’d be interested to hear.

As I spend half my time slagging off newspapers and journalists, I doubt it’s really helping my career prospects.

Anyway, I’m going on holiday for a week. This should give me time to think of something to write about.

• The Marple Leaf: Silver linings on dark clouds “There is light at the end of this dark tunnel. These people [the BNP] are nutters. They will now have to face the same level of scrutiny as other politicians for the decisions they make and the examples they set. Not just the things they have said.”
• Living with Rats: Living with a cancer – “Democracy won’t be renewed in the pages of the Guardian or through Facebook groups. These might help, but they won’t influence those who don’t read the Guardian, don’t use Facebook and don’t think – to use the BNP’s catchphrase – politics has any space for ‘people like you’.”
• The Daily Mash: THIS IS HOW THE NAZIS STARTED, SAYS EVERYONE – “As the British National Party achieved its first success in a UK-wide election, amateur historians said they would be amazed if this time next year people like you were not in some sort of camp.”
• Telegraph: Tetris turns 25 – Images from the history of Tetris
• Guardian: No new stadium. A huge debt. Despite their promises, Hicks and Gillett have ‘done a Glazers’ - Excellent piece by David Conn about Liverpool’s problems

Also, keen readers might have spotted that I am now on Tumblr, which I’m using as a depository for my more esoteric interests in the fields of design, music and anything else that doesn’t fit here. Writing will be kept to a minimum. I’ve chosen Crwsksx as the name of my tumblelog. This vowel-free word came to me early one morning a couple of weeks ago and I thought I might as well make use of it. It also has the advantage of sounding deeply mysterious, which is always good.

Since the start of this week my Twitter stream (if you don’t “get” Twitter, I suppose you’ll find that phrase deeply annoying) has been filled with people expressing revulsion over the paper’s dismal journalism. It comes after one of its reporters befriended the teenage survivors of the 1996 Dublane atrocity on Facebook and then splashed with a poisonous article on March 8 2009 that claimed getting pissed and larking about was an affront to the memory of their friends who were murdered. In response, this link to a piece on Bloggerheads has been doing the rounds, while a blog post written by Father Ted and IT Crowd co-creator Graham Linehan has been widely circulated today.

I agree entirely that the Express piece is utterly objectionable and I’m not for one millisecond defending the nauseating outpouring of nonsensical bile it contains. But it’s not much worse than the wide range of biased, distasteful and inaccurate reporting published by the Express pretty much every day for the last ten years. The tabloid has a track record in causing offence, stirring up hatred and generally being nasty to asylum seekers, the parents of kidnapped children and indeed anyone who’s going through a hard time and might be unfortunate enough to end up on its front page. I guess what I’m asking is why not complain about that, too?

The explosion of post-event, blog-orchestrated indignation is beginning to resemble the Daily Mail-inspired furore over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. Something is broadcast (or published)… a web-based bandwagon begins to gather pace several days afterwards imploring people to complain… thousands of people who never noticed the original piece of content and thus were not offended by it in the first place do exactly that. Sounds familiar, no?

If we’re going to have a some kind of campaign of protest over the Dunblane story, perhaps we need to broaden it to include the Express as a whole. It is, as Roy Greenslade regularly points out, permanently offensive and almost wilfully awful – and has been for some time.

Meanwhile, more outrage seems to be brewing over OK! magazine’s tasteless “obituary” of Jade Goody, largely on the basis that she’s, well, still alive. And guess who owns OK!

I’m going on holiday for the next three weeks and will not be posting anything on Words Dept. until after Christmas and possibly until the New Year. I may, if I can be bothered, post some Twitter updates while in Brazil, which will appear in the little panel on the left.

Until then I wish you, as always, a fond farewell. As Stuart Hall used to say. And possibly still does.

Image of Paraty from a set by Luiz Castro on Flickr. Used under terms of Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.