Words Dept.

It’s come to something when a regional newspaper group thinks it makes business sense to close eight local offices and force what’s left of its depleted journalistic staff base to either work from home or commute miles into the city centre to get to their own newsroom. The idea of long-established local beat journalists fulfilling the basic requirements [...]

Yet another Manchester-based business news website/e-mail service has spasmed into life this month, prompting the question: Is there really enough business news to go round? I’ve been a business journalist in Manchester for four years this month, covering the North West for a national magazine. During that time, the North West Enquirer came, ran out [...]

The headline in the MEN (page 11, today) says Boy, 13, cut free from spanner. Surely it would have been easier to cut the spanner from the boy? Still, I’m no expert. FIRE-fighters had to use a hacksaw to free a 13-year-old boy’s finger from a spanner… The boy told doctors he had been playing [...]

Look at this. It’s Jonathan Wilkes being interviewed in the MEN about his role in the musical theatre version of The Wedding Singer. I really love musicals, especially those based on moderately entertaining late-1990s Adam Sandler movies that made very little mark on the public consciousness. So I was keen to read this insightful piece. [...]

Earlier tonight I saw a delightful bit of PR puff on BBC1′s The One Show about the O2 Arena – aka the Millennium Dome – being the most popular concert venue in the world, ahead of Madison Square Garden in New York. Strange, because according to the Manchester Evening News earlier this week, the MEN [...]

A bewildering choice of headline in the Manchester Evening News, which appears to use Carlsberg Special Brew as part of a punning headline in a story about the “homeless and disadvantaged” today. Man City footballer Didi Hamann is pictured on the back page visiting a “resource centre for homeless and disadvantaged people in Stockport to [...]

…will be resumed imminently. I’ve been on holiday (Lake District, since you ask), which is why I haven’t posted for a while. Glad to see the thing about the Dispatches programme is still attracting interest. The Liberal Democrat Voice says this blog hosts an “interesting online discussion” about the programme (ha!), while David Ottewell of [...]