Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a leaflet today from the local LibDems, who call themselves “FOCUS” for some reason, saying: “FOCUS goes from strength to strength as another new campaigner joins the team!” Apparently a new leaflet hander-outer called John Reid (no, not that one) is now helping “the new-look FOCUS Team” hand out leaflets. (Click on photo, left, to enlarge.)

You can sort of understand why Davenport and Cale Green’s remaining LibDem councillor, Ann Smith, would decline to mention the fate of her two former colleagues but to dress it up as some kind of triumph, or re-branding exercise, in a direct reversal of the truth, takes some brass balls.

I’m no political expert but would it not have been a better idea to admit in the leaflet that two local councillors and former colleagues had left the party, rather than attempt such a laughable rewriting of history? Councillor Smith might then have built up her message from a position of honesty and credibility. From there, a measure of authority could have been re-established.

But for some reason politicians don’t tend to think this way. Instead, the councillor and her advisers prefer to treat constituents – at least the ones who don’t read the local paper – like idiots in the hope of short-term political gain.

Aside from being a fairly depressing example of the depths to which local politics has sunk, this kind of leaflet is also a good example of  why local newspapers need support. You simply can’t trust councillors – and, although this leaflet isn’t one of them, that includes so-called council “newspapers” – to talk truthfully about the world as any normal person would understand it.

However, I couldn’t help noticing this morning’s effort, which manages to juggle tragedy, absurdity, bad taste and utter irrelevance with a startling clarity of intent. What strikes me first here is the juxtaposition of image and headline. So, while the top third of the page carries an image of utter devastation and a woman wrapped in a blanket who has clearly lost everything she ever loved, the bottom two-thirds blares “TAX AND PENSION JOY FOR MILLIONS”. And what better place to position a teaser for a competition to “WIN A PEUGEOT MOTORHOME WORTH OVER £30,000″ than in between the two?

Simultaneously, the phrase “Nuclear nightmare looms” is virtually hidden. Indeed, an equal amount of space on the front page is devoted to the fact that Amanda Holden has produced a “brave smile”.

Just look at it. It really is a startlingly odd jumble of words and pictures.

It’s interesting that publishing firms take so long to pay what are relatively piddling sums of money to freelancers. Yes, administrative mistakes happen but this is a pattern of late payment – more than 30 days qualifies as “late”, according to the Late Payment of Commercial Debt Act (1988) – that suggests a general sloppiness caused mainly, perhaps, by the fact that freelancers hardly ever bother to kick up a stink.

What I particularly object to, however, is when the late payment is sent by cheque. Thanks for that Mr Publisher – that’s another week I’ll have to wait until the damn thing has cleared.

And so it’s happened again. This time, the Guardian has suggested that Morrissey has reignited a “racism row” by calling the Chinese a “subspecies”. My immediate response to the paper’s interview, imaginatively entitled “Bigmouth strikes again” (exactly the same as the cover-line for the NME piece back in 2007) is not, strangely, that Morrissey is a racist. Worryingly, in light of my otherwise unimpeachable liberal tendencies, it is that the Guardian is talking crap.

Aside from the interview’s rather tired set-up, in which the poet Simon Armitage explores the experience of being a Smiths/Morrissey fan, (“When Morrissey sported Jack Duckworth-style prescription glasses mended with Elastoplast I went looking for a pair in the market,” etc) and thus ends up using the words “I” and “I’m” an excruciating 35 times in the fucking preamble, the description “subspecies” has to be deliberately taken out of context in order to be interpreted as racist. In fact, as Armitage actually states in a follow-up Guardian news story, the word “subspecies” was deliberately chosen by Morrissey because, in a discussion about animal rights, it vividly suggests that the perpetrators of violence against animals are actually below the level of the animals whose rights are being violated. Or, as Armitage more succinctly puts it:

In his view, if you treat an animal badly, you are less than human. I think that was his point.

Now, fair enough, branding 1.3bn people with a culture stretching back thousands of years as a “subspecies” is crude, nonsensical and misjudged. But I guess the point boils down to this: If someone starts talking about various nations and cultures they dislike, and the Chinese crop up in that discussion and are described as a “subspecies”, then yes, fair enough, they are racist. But if someone starts talking about cruelty to animals, and they say they have a particular problem with China’s record in this area, then surely, despite the possibly ill-advised language, this is not really a race issue at all. And the fact that Armitage was there, and he doesn’t think Morrissey made a racist statement in the first place, makes you wonder about the Guardian’s agenda.

So anyway, now I’ve said all that, I feel a bit scared. Am I merely pointing out the weaknesses in a newspaper article, or am I, y’know [whispers] a Morrissey apologist? I fear I must be. Why else would I conclude this post with a link to a horrifying YouTube video depicting animal cruelty in China?

I’m not sure what journalists did before Twitter. Maybe they phoned people or something. Nowadays though, all they have to do is type some inane request into Twitter, tag it #journorequest and watch PR companies and wannabes fall over themselves to help out. Maybe.

It’s perhaps a little lazy but the process is, at least, entirely open, which I suppose is an improvement on the days when lifestyle hacks just phoned up their London PR friends when they needed some “real-life” story. Still, it feels weirdly uncomfortable to have the base practices of journalism laid bare for all to see. Most of these requests tend to involve something “saucy” or prurient, or simply reveal journalistic laziness/incompetence (“Does anyone know the PR contact for so-and-so?”, etc.) The cleverer PRs have also realised that they can tout their clients to lazy hacks by re-appropriating #journorequest for their own ends.

Anyway, here’s a selection of my favourite #journorequests from the last few days. They’re presented (mainly) without context or explanation, just as they appear on Twitter.

We’re looking for people who’ve had sex at work for a naughty confessions feature. Any used will be paid. Please get in touch #journorequest

I’m looking for a 13 year old girl who is pregnant for a magazine feature. Please message me if you’re interested #journorequest

Anyone know the press office for Odeon/ Vue cinemas? #journorequest [Dave's tip: Financial Dynamics does the PR for Terra Firma, the private equity firm that owns Odeon; Vue's corporate website lists Clarion Communications as their PR company and provides a phone number]

Seeking women who think they’re absolutely marvellous looking and can’t stop admiring themselves in the mirror #journorequest

Looking for people who have taken the new ‘legal’ high ‘ivory wave’ #journorequest

Anyone out there tried this new recreational drug, ‘Ivory Wave’? It’s meant to be a rival to Meow Meow. Get in touch #journorequest

Ooh – I’m also looking for someone who’s had sex at work – will need to be pictured and identified for #journorequest

#journorequest Tiens Tianshi Toothpaste is launching in UK this September ….DM for more info

Does anyone know who does then PR for Aresnal / The Emirates? #journorequest [Dave's tip: Google > Arsenal Football Club > Contact us > Club switchboard > 020 7619 5003]

Need to find unemployed overweight women who think their weight stops them working. Good fee. DM me. Pls RT. #journorequest

I’m seeking examples of celebs who have had, or are planning to have, a Victorian themed wedding #journorequest

And so it continues. Forever.

By the way, does anyone know where I can find a medium-sized bag of heroin at a reasonable price? #journorequest

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.

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