Blog of Ian Parr

This Guardian blog post by Roy Greenslade annoys me.

Here is a screen shot of my local news paper website homepage.

As you can see four ‘article’ teasers and a HUGE volume of advertising. Actually the articles are more often than not a single line or paragraph long – like this:

Take careful note of the quality of the text.

Here’s the FULL text of one article:
“ONE person was taken to hospital last night (May 30)after a car crashed on the A24 at Warnham.
The incident happened shortly before 8pm with firecrews from Horsham and Crawley attending the scene.
No-one was trapped but one person was giving first aid and then taken to hospital.”

Link to original article

And another:
“AN ELDERLY woman was helped from her Handcross home and given oxygen by firefighters after mild smoke logging this morning (Sunday).
Two fire crews from Crawley were called to Windmill Platt about 10.20am.
Green watch commander Simon Le-Galloudec said food had burnt.
He urged people not to leave cooking unattended.”

Link to original article

Honestly, both these articles are a complete load of bollocks.

And Johnston Press who own hundreds of these local sites covering the whole of the UK have the cheek to complain about the BBC filling the void left by an organisation that has ample money and time to do a better job.

This is about as ‘local’ as the BBC currently gets for me:

Its at a county level only but at least the articles are well written and amount to more than the ‘cat stuck up a tree’ variety that seem to dominate the local press presence.