1. They didn’t sell enough adverts. Sounds fairly obvious but estimates suggest Crain’s would have had to have made up to £25,000 a week in advertising just to break even. Anyone who ever picked up a copy of Crain’s will have noticed that there weren’t very many adverts in it, and their “no discount” policy is well documented. However, assurances were made that the title would have five years to start making money. Perhaps the recession accelerated that process; after two-and-a-half years, the magazine has closed.

2. They were too fearless. Crain’s always seemed to me to have a sort of fearlessness about it, which was great. But it’s not difficult to imagine that its “no bullshit” approach did little to endear it to potential advertisers used to their cosy relationship with the MEN. I was told by contacts from time to time that they’d stopped talking to Crain’s, supposedly because the paper had messed up some story or other. But from what I could see Crain’s very rarely got things wrong, it just printed things that others either missed or ignored. This got up people’s noses.

3. There isn’t enough news (and a lot of it is boring). I think I might have said this before, but how many business magazines does a place need? As well as the MEN, which has had its own problems over the last two years, there’s also the long-established Insider, which rightly increased its news/online efforts immediately after Crain’s launched. (Disclaimer: I freelance for Insider.) The free-to-access Business Desk North West, which has done well under the editorship of former MEN Business Editor Chris Barry after launching less than a year after Crain’s, has further queered the pitch, while there are also various sector-specific business news websites like How-Do and Place North West. Crain’s should be commended for, in the main, having a proper news agenda that avoided recycling press releases. But there has to be a limit over the amount of business coverage people actually need.

4. It had no local roots. Manchester is the seat of the industrial revolution. Parachuting an American brand into a city as rich in business heritage as Manchester, albeit with a crowd of highly capable local journalists, was always going to be risky. And, when things don’t go to plan, a US owner isn’t going to weep over the closure of an outpost thousands of miles away. The writing was perhaps on the wall when Crain’s parted company with Manchester-based publisher Arthur Porter in January, in slightly mysterious circumstances.

5. The timing was wrong. Launching a business magazine in autumn 2007 was a terrible idea given the banking crisis, property crash, unemployment bubble and recession that followed. All this is easy to talk about in hindsight, perhaps, but the fact remains that Crain’s timing was absolutely bloody awful.

So here’s a breakdown of the New York Post front page:

1. The idea of a 1-1 win is obviously ludicrous. Americans understand this. They have draws in baseball and basketball from time to time. The paper is almost certainly making a jokey reference to an infamous 1968 headline relating to a college (American) football game, in which it was reported “Harvard beats Yale 29-29“, after Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds of the match. So, actually they’re being quite clever.

2. The clearly idiotic concept of “winning 1-1″ is a self-deprecating gag, a joke at the expense of the USA itself, which, in the eyes of the rest of the world, especially Britain, famously doesn’t understand football.

3. The subheading refers to the Battle of Bunker Hill. This episode in the American War of Independence is classed as a pyrrhic British victory, where massive British losses were sustained. So, again, it’s quite a clever and subtle historical joke.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the USA gave us Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show and The Simpsons, whereas Britain came up with Carry on Camping, Mr Bean and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Just saying.

With this in mind, I thought I’d have a bash at a similar sort of piece. Obviously 3,000 words might piss you off a bit, so I’ll just give you the first few pars. If anyone at the Observer wants to commission me, I’m all yours at a rate considerably cheaper than Miranda Sawyer.

How Greggs is taking over the world

Peter Kay’s mate (the one out of Max and Paddy) eats there, so does Brian Blessed and my window cleaner. The appeal of Greggs among hungry normal people in places like Chadderton and Northwich is truly fucking astounding. So how did that happen, asks David Quinn (BA (Hons) Smash Hits)?

It was on the high street I spotted the place, just between Curry’s Digital and Timpsons. Blue and orange sign, with the delicious aroma that only baked-on pastry can provide. The queue of unfashionably-dressed people outside told me everything I needed to know. These normal types simply couldn’t get enough of this stuff, whatever it was, and I was determined to spend several weeks researching a pointless feature on the subject.

I went inside and looked around. There was a fridge with some sandwiches in it (“prawn mayonnaise” according to the sign) and some ladies behind an apparently heated counter containing an array of pies and pasties. “What would you like, love?”, one of them asks, and I am immediately drawn to her crow’s feet, her daft hat and her gruff northern charm.

I ignore her completely and instead identify an office worker standing in the queue, which snakes purposefully towards the exit. As I reach for my Moleskine notebook and Olympus voice recorder I poke him in the chest and ask him: What brought you here? What is all this stuff? How can I wring a 3,000-word feature out of it? He looks at me, him in George at Asda, me in Paul Smith, and replies: “I like cheese and onion pasties.”

Greggs. You might not have heard of it but you probably know at least one person earning below thirty thousand pounds a year who regularly buys some kind of cooked brown thing from one of these establishments. Be it a pie, a pasty, or a “prawn mayonnaise sandwich”, Greggs is the place to be if you are a British person who has a proper job in a shop, office, factory or somewhere like that, somewhere in 21st century Britain today.

Peter Kay’s mate (the one out of Max and Paddy) is an idol to these people and regularly comes into the Horwich branch for a steak and kidney pie, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and bottle of 7Up. “It’s all about the pastry, the heat on your tongue as the gravy dribbles down your chin. It can only be matched by the joy of the fizzy bottle of ice cold 7Up that I wash it down with!” he says, after I have his dialogue translated by a northern person I went to university with.

Emily, a wonderfully committed and, dare I say it, attractive young thing who runs the PR team, is similarly enthusiastic. “Greggs has become a metaphor for all that is wholesome, wonderful and British about this great British country of ours in the 21st century,” she says. “Cheap, ordinary, drab it may be, but, look, we can’t all eat at the Ivy every day, can we?”

Continues for several pages…

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.

There is a dismal lack of basic journalism at the heart of this story. What happened to the idea of corroborating facts with more than one source? Claims such as those made by the boss of the helpline, Christine Pratt, are unproveable hearsay, while the dubious state of the NBH’s finances, connections to a human resources consultancy business and links to David Cameron and Ann Widdecombe – none of which was mentioned in the BBC’s story – take us into obviously dodgy territory with a possible political smear campaign at its centre. Various bloggers managed to pinpoint these basic problems – why not the BBC?

Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, attempts to justify the BBC’s approach on his blog:

We can’t, of course, verify the truth of her allegations – merely report them and Downing Street’s response to them.

Which may come as a surprise to those old-fashioned folks who believe journalism involves making sure something is true before reporting it. The logical approach would have been to ignore the batty Mrs Pratt on the basis that there is no way of proving whether or not what she is saying is truthful. A proper news story of the sort pedalled by the Sunday newspapers would involve speaking to a whistleblower before going public with this sort of claim. But there isn’t a whistleblower and the motivations of the charity are clearly suspect. Which maybe suggests the story isn’t true.

I’m generally not inclined to attack the BBC. But it should never have treated this story in the way it did. The fact that it has then filled the airwaves today with the sort of basic facts that should have informed its original story – but didn’t – just adds insult to injury.

According to the Daily Mail’s Joe Bernstein on Saturday, football fans would today enjoy a “transfer merry-go-round”. Robbie Keane would leave Spurs for Sunderland, Kenwyne Jones would depart Sunderland for Liverpool and Ryan Babel would be sold to Birmingham by Liverpool. Of course, none of this actually happened. A couple of weeks earlier, the same paper had reported that Jones would join Liverpool in time for the game between Liverpool and Spurs on 20 January. Again, total bollocks.

These are just a couple of examples from one newspaper but every day, particularly during the twice yearly transfer windows, the papers are filled with complete and utter claptrap, planted by agents and clubs and seemingly unchecked for even a microgram of credibility. This is particularly the case where big name players are concerned.

In October 2008, the Mirror reported that Fernando Torres had been offered £200,000 a week to move to Manchester City, while the Telegraph printed an immediate denial. A little over a year later in December 2009, the Mail reported that City’s hopes of signing the player had been “dashed”. Yet, just a month later, the People claimed City were lining up a £100m bid for the player this summer. Contradiction spawned from wild stabs in the dark are the hallmarks of football journalism.

The story in the People was bylined Steve Bates. That’ll be the same Steve Bates who reported in November that City would sign Spurs’ David Bentley in the January window, quoting “Eastlands sources”. Strangely, these same sources didn’t bother to mention that manager Mark Hughes would be sacked just three weeks later.

So to help Steve and his compatriots, I present the Words Dept. Football Journalism Bullshit Assistant. Simply print out the list of football-related names and phrases below, cut them out, rearrange them on your desk and a story will miraculously invent itself.

Words Dept. Football Journalism Bullshit Assistant (Patents Pending)

audacious

the San Siro

Vennegoor of Hesselink

smash

Anfield hierarchy

Kenwyne Jones

misfit

wage structure

come-and-get-me plea

Fernando Torres

unsettled

Hertha Berlin

Wayne Rooney

income tax rate

the Nou Camp

Guus Hiddink

Kia Joorobchian

Schalke

Paraguay international

£90 million

£150 million

£250 million

Younes Kaboul

This coincides with the launch of ManCon’s paywall structure. To read this review of Pizza Express, for example, you now have to pay a minimum of three pounds a month.

This blog was the first to reveal details of ManCon’s “heroes” pricing structure (it really was, honest), which is backed by a cheaper “friends” model. For this, you get access to various stuff including special offers and competitions, as well as restaurant reviews.

I’ve nothing against paywalls in principle. My view is that the marketplace will decide whether you can make money on the web using a paywall model (although all the evidence so far suggests that unless you’re delivering either pornography or very highly targeted, valuable information towards business users, you probably can’t). But I am curious about what ManCon loyalists think of being charged money for something that was previously valued at zero. Bizarrely, a review of Papa G’s in the Printworks from ten days ago is now trapped behind a paywall, although if I Google it, I can find the exact same review for free. It’s hardly going to have me reaching for the credit card, is it?

And while the reviews are very detailed and well written by proper journalists and all that, does anyone, when it comes down to it, really care? If I want an idea of whether a pizza place is any good, I can either use a free review site like ViewManchester, or I’ll possibly risk eight quid by, y’know, going in there and ordering a pizza.

ManCon has done a very good job of convincing people to part with their cash in advance of its relaunch, raising at least £60k from subscribers. The crunch will come in a year’s time when these people will be forced to consider whether renewal is worth it.

One would expect that a journalist might possess a modicum of scepticism about such issues. So it was with some bafflement that I heard on Radio 4 the other week that the first person to get one of the new cards was Angela Epstein, a freelance hack who writes a column for the Manchester Evening News.

In her MEN column last Thursday, she wrote:

I’M so proud I could almost burst. I haven’t felt this good about cradling something small and pink since my daughter Sophie was born.

All right, so I’m exaggerating a bit. But honestly, when you’re the first member of the public to be issued with a brand spanking new national identity card, it’s a seminal moment.

Getting to the front of the queue was a reward by the Home Office for Epstein’s decision to use her column as a “platform” to “venture encouraging opinions” on the ID cards scheme (her words). The remainder of the column reads like a government information leaflet, extolling the virtues of ID cards and detailing the whole tedious process of getting one. Embarrassingly, there is even a confession about the sense of self-validation Epstein felt after pocketing her “piece of history”, while the “if you’re a law abiding citizen with nothing to hide” line is senselessly barfed on to the page with the rest of it.

I’m a sad, lonely blogger and clearly have no chance of rising to the dizzy heights of writing a column of such penetrating brilliance for a newspaper like the MEN. As such, I’m a bit lost for words. Luckily, the commenters on the MEN’s website are a little more on the ball:

Airhead, silly, unintelligent and vacuous are the words that sprang to mind regarding the article. If this is an example of the journalism in the MEN then I have to say you have a problem. This is NOT what I expect regarding the important topic of ID cards from a ’serious’ local paper. To be honest, I’m flabbergasted that it was published. It lets you down badly and the less we read of Ms. Epstien’s ‘opinions’ the very much better. If this is your seminal moment, Ms. Epstein, then I really pity you.

AA Gill is a cock. To shoot an animal through the lung for the purposes of “naughty fun” is plainly disturbing and not in the least bit entertaining. Gill seems to see himself as a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson; an intrepid gonzo journalist with a penchant for firearms and an appetite for illicit adventures involving red-blooded, macho tomfoolery. He is desperate to escape the truth, which is that he is a balding art school graduate (and former drunk) who has made a living by writing about whether or not some carrots have been satisfactorily boiled.

After the Jan Moir “thing”, Gill has proved beyond all reasonable doubt my recently expressed theory that all newspaper columnists are basically pricks. OK, maybe not all of them. Charlie Brooker is alright and there are arguably one or two others that aren’t that offensive. But, as a general rule, if you’re paid to express your opinions on the pages of something that used to be a tree, it’s pretty much certain that you’re an arsehole. (And yes, I’m aware there’s a fine line between writing a newspaper column and writing an opinionated blog post like this. But on the other hand, I’ve never shot a baboon.)

By the way, is it weird that I felt vastly more repulsed by Gill’s column than Moir’s? I only ask because I appear to be out of step with the mob. There are around a thousand articles on Google News relating to Moir’s indefensible Daily Mail-sponsored gay-bashing and 25,000 complaints have been filed to the PCC. Meanwhile Gill, who shot a defenceless animal in the chest for fun, has elicited less than 20 stories on Google News and, as far as I’m aware, no complaints to the PCC. There’s some kind of social lesson and/or bad joke buried here somewhere but I’m not sure I’ve got the energy to think about it.

• You’ve not seen any actual corn flakes with the logo on, have you? All you’ve got is a JPEG that’s been knocked up in Photoshop and no real idea whether the technical gobbledygook Kellogg’s mentions makes any sense
• Kellogg’s makes 67m packets of Corn Flakes each year, with 2.7bn bowls consumed annually in the UK (according to Kellogg’s). How the hell are they going to burn each of those tens of billions of corn flakes with a frigging laser while keeping costs and production levels constant?
• There’s no incentive for Kellogg’s to do it. They constantly say they don’t supply cereals to anyone else, so how could their corn flakes be mistaken for another brand’s? Unless someone is inserting “fake” own brand corn flakes into a Kellogg’s box (which they’re not)

I guess I might be perceived as humourless for complaining about what is, admittedly, quite a witty joke that ties in cleverly with an ongoing PR strategy blah, blah, blah. But actually, isn’t it a bit worrying that newspapers will willingly publish an April Fool’s gag as fact in the middle of October? Is the internet to blame for this? Whether or not something is even vaguely plausible seems to take a back seat to how many hits it generates on the (Telegraph) website.

In another triumph for Flat Earth News, it’s been revealed that a bunch of filmmakers have been planting made up stories about celebrities in the papers in a successful attempt to prove that the tabloids will print any celebrity-related rubbish without bothering to check whether or not it’s true. Consequently, the Daily Express reported that Russell Brand wanted to be a banker and had a Fisher Price cash register as a child, while the Mirror, the Star and the Times of India went for a story about Amy Winehouse’s hair catching on fire. Both stories are wholly untrue.

Meanwhile, it’s been reported today that Kirstie Allsop might be getting a Tory peerage. Unfortunately, there’s every reason to suggest this particular slice of implausibility may actually be true.