Words Dept.

Manchester Confidential has been emailing some of its subscribers today asking for £11.20 a month, £30 a quarter or £100 a year to continue to access the site and receive a slew of new “benefits”.

The site, which has 260,000 (free) subscribers, announced plans for the paid subscription model last month. Its first move involves inviting 1,000 of its most “loyal” readers to pay to become a “hero”, which will allow “full site access with no restrictions” alongside a number of perks including 50% off the ticket price for ManCon events and a free ticket to the Confidential Food and Drink Awards dinner – itself worth £80. Alongside these benefits, ManCon “heroes” will have “responsibilities” – namely telling the site about new restaurants and bars they’ve been to. (Erm, shouldn’t they be paying me for this, rather than the other way round?)

Nobody, apart from Rupert Murdoch, thinks the subscription model can work for mainstream web content (excluding B2B). So it will be interesting to see if ManCon publisher Mark Garner can pull this off. The idea of flattering readers with “hero” status seems at least mildly imaginative but it remains to be seen if a thousand people will commit to a minimum spend of a hundred quid a year. Even if they do, that’s only ten grand in annual income for the site. Edit: Obviously it’s actually a hundred grand, pardon my shit maths. If this sum can be achieved then the need to get vast amounts of cash from remaining subscribers will be significantly reduced.

The screengrabs below show the detail of what is being offered, alongside the message that all subscribers can expect to receive over the next fortnight.

1.The email invitation

2. The “lowdown”

3. The benefits and “responsibilities”

4. The bottom line

I went to Sheffield Doc/Fest last week. It’s a film festival especially for documentaries and I saw a number of rocking films. My special pick was Junior, which is about the most gripping character-based doc I’ve ever seen, thanks to the uniqueness of the central characters Eddie Belasco (75) and his “Ma” (98), who have this incredible relationship. Something quite odd about watching a film like this in a darkened cinema is when you get to see one of the “stars” at the end. In this case, Eddie appeared for a Q&A and, initially at least, it felt strange to think of him as a real person, rather than a character in a movie. Well I thought so, anyway. Perhaps it’s just me.

Anyway, by far the funniest film I saw was Winnebago Man, which charts the efforts of filmmaker Ben Steinbauer to track down Jack Rebney. This erstwhile star of bootleg VHS tapes and latterly YouTube achieved foul-mouthed infamy in the early 1990s and has been labelled the angriest man in the world. Initially he seems reluctant to accept his cult stardom and dismisses those who are interested in his life. But as the film unfolds he appears genuinely touched by the enthusiasm. One of the highlights of the festival was when Rebney took questions via Steinbauer’s mobile phone, which resulted in some predictably unpredictable responses.

If you’ve never seen the original YouTube video, have a look at this. It is very sweary but also contains a number of stone-cold classic catchphrases (“Accoutre-mah”, “Would you do me a kindness?”, “My mind is just a piece of shit this morning”) that I intend to use in my daily discourse henceforth.

The blog has now been fixed. It was offline for a couple of days after someone hacked it and redirected it to something Google didn’t like, which resulted in many seemingly intractable problems. Mercifully, someone pointed me in the direction of Manchester-based Wordpress guru Simon Wheatley, who identified and fixed the problem in about ten minutes. Obviously he deserves adulation for this feat and I commend him to you in the strongest possible terms.

When a normal person expresses the desire to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger”, society tends to condemn him and he may well end up in some kind of psychiatric care. (Indeed, if he’s a Manchester schoolboy, he might end up in court.) But when that person happens to be a slightly pathetic middle-aged man called Adrian who goes by a pair of pretentious initials, then Rupert Murdoch pays him lots of money to write a newspaper column about it.

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.

According to several newspapers yesterday, Kellogg’s is planning to use lasers to burn its logo on to individual corn flakes in an attempt to foil impostors. Metro, The Telegraph, The Daily Record and Marketing printed this as fact. Since journalists don’t seem to have realised that the story is made up by some PR people and isn’t, strictly speaking, you know, true, here are some pointers for their benefit:

• 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.

The Conservative Party conference is taking place in Manchester this week. I know this because of the twin-set and tweed lot I spotted hanging around Piccadilly this morning (alongside a confused looking David Dimbleby).

That the Tories have chosen Manchester as the host city for their last conference before a General Election says something about their state of mind. As an historical hotbed of socialism and radical thought – and with only one Tory MP in the connurbation – Manchester’s selection hints at a level of confidence and swagger that has been missing from the party during the wilderness years from 1997 to date. Picking Manchester is a statement of intent about how the Tories intend to reach out of their comfort zone and, in so doing, win the election. At the same time, so the argument goes, Manchester should be flattered by the attention and the “economic benefits” the conference brings with it.

On the other hand, it’s worth pondering whether it really matters where the Conservatives hold their conference. No policy will be made this week, the average Mancunian is kept apart from proceedings by a heavily guarded ring of steel and the event is staged entirely for the benefit of television. You could hold the conference on the Isles of Scilly and it wouldn’t really make much difference to the half-baked pronouncements about dole scroungers, Broken Britain and the rest of the dross that emanates from David Cameron’s mouth in the direction of readers of The Sun.

Let’s not kid ourselves. The Tories are outsiders and Manchester is their Butlins. They’ll be here for a few days and then they’ll disappear into the countryside. The only lasting impact of Manchester on these people will be as a source of misguided jokes about pigeon fanciers and coal in the bath. Tories go home.

It’s easy to buy into the Sun’s rhetoric that by not backing Labour at the next election, as it will officially announce tomorrow, the paper will somehow guide public opinion in favour of the Tories. You can almost sense the “Sun wot won it for Dave” headlines now.

I’ve just watched the Sun’s political editor George Pascoe-Watson turn in a deeply self-important performance on Newsnight, in which he suggested hacks at the halfwit’s comic had “warned” Labour over what they saw as policy failures and gave the Government a “last chance”. He seems to think it is perfectly natural – and even desirable – for tabloid journalists to boss elected politicians around, which is, when you think about it, plainly stupid.

The whole story about the importance of which political party the Sun does/doesn’t support (currently the lead on Sky News) is disingenuous for two reasons. Firstly, the paper is only ever going to back the winner at a general election, so what’s actually happened is not that the paper has withdrawn its support but instead that it has finally realised, some months after everyone else, that Labour has no chance of winning. Secondly, in a more pluralistic internet age and in the context of a general pattern of declining circulation, whatever it thinks or doesn’t think is quickly, and thankfully, becoming pretty much irrelevant.

Although I don’t generally comment on pop music and its purveyors, I couldn’t help but observe the hand-wringing over whether or not, technically speaking, the Sugababes – now that yet another member has quit – actually still “exist”.

What’s apparently happened, in case you don’t read the FT, is that the three original members of the band – Barbarella, Chelseigh and Kia-Ora – quit at various times during the last few years. As this gradual “staff turnover” became troublesome to their record label, each of the three was replaced with an alternative croaky-voiced harridan. First came Chantelle, then Shiraz was drafted in, and finally we ended up with… another one.

In other words, none of the original trio remains. Instead, all three have been replaced by a slightly better-looking new model at regular intervals. A bit like you get with Mazdas.

The intriguing possibility here is that the Sugababes, assuming they do still “exist”, could literally never end. Girls Aloud and the like will eventually be ravaged by age but the Sugafranchise will continue. The endgame will be the first mimetic polyalloy member of the group, Candida, who will be parachuted in to replace a defrosted Geri Halliwell in approximately 2180.*

*Yes, this observation is recycled from Twitter. Well spotted.

Apologies for not getting back to you. I’m here now, it’s OK.

I’ve been thinking a lot about newspapers recently. About how I never buy one anymore except when I’m going on a long train journey, about the supposed closure of the Observer (which isn’t now happening), about what I can’t help thinking is gross mismanagement of certain newspapers somewhere along the line, and about how it must be possible to produce a local newspaper that isn’t based entirely on “soft news” and advertorials.

There are clearly some complex reasons for the demise of the newspaper, which is why the simplicity of a recent statement by Michael Moore stood out. In an apparently off-the-cuff outburst at a promotional event for his latest film, he said:

“Anytime you say that the people who read your newspaper are secondary to the business community, you’ve lost.”

This led to a further summary by media commentator Philip Stone:

“If you take care of the reader as your primary function then everything else will eventually fall into place.”

All this came to my attention via Roy Greenslade.

It’s kind of obvious, really. If you cut the journalistic budget, the quality of the journalism falls, people stop buying the paper, advertising revenues slump and what Greenslade calls the “death spiral” kicks in. I’m not saying this is especially original, either. But amid the hand-wringing and expert analysis, the neatness of Moore’s summary appeals.

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?