Accordion legend shows he can still bust a funky rhyme.
I used to be a Sunday tabloid journalist. My heart was never in it as I couldn’t be bothered getting worked up about stating the bleeding obvious and then pretending to be outraged by it.
Apparently, it turns out that not everyone has a strictly vanilla sex lives. Whodathunkit? Criminals do nasty things. Lawks a mercy. And teenagers get drunk and take drugs. Hold the front page!
At the weekend I saw something that took that last gem to a new level. The Scottish Sunday Express splashed on Anniversary shame of Dunblane survivors. Many others have already kicked this crap and its author to pieces and it’s been pulled from the alleged paper’s sorry excuse for a site but I am still angry enough about it to put my oar/boot in as well.
As with most Sunday tab yarns, further investigation revealed that this was a flammed up piece of crap. No surprises there but it was the sheer scale of the flamming coupled with bad taste and hypocrisy that sticks in the craw.
In essence, the “story” reveals that a couple of Dunblane survivors are 18 now and have been using social networking sites to talk about drink, drugs and sex. This, claims the piece, “shames” the memory of what happened.
In essence, these kids are being condemned for being normal teenagers. When they were very, very young they went through a hellish ordeal that the rest of us cannot imagine. One of the kids in the story was shot. These teenagers have performed a miracle in A) still being alive and B) functioning like everyone else. They should be celebrated or, better yet, left alone.
This is what we have come to: desperate hacks cyberstalking the victims of tragedy in the hope that they don’t become monks.
Of course, we journalists are famed for never drinking, taking drugs or having sex. On no, not us, guv. Add to us our well-known love of veracity and we are exactly the kind of people who should sit in judgment on everyone else.
And the Express, which is owned by a pornographer, hardly has the moral high ground on matters of the flesh.
But what of the hackette who wrote this abysmal piece. Well, Paula Murray is getting the Julie Moult treatment. But before we burn the witch we should remember that reporters are not solely responsible for what appears under their byline. A newsdesk, sub editors and an editor all OKed this vile smear.
Did any of them put their paw in the air to say what the Express now tacitly admits: that this was morally reprehensible?
There is room for individual conscience. Many, many years ago, when I was shifting at a London Sunday tab far viler than the Express, I deliberately messed up a particularly nasty nasty because I thought it was wrong.
It didn’t feel good to be unprofessional but I bet it felt better than Ms Murray feels now.
I’ve just hotfooted (hotfeet?) from BBC Scotland’s Politics Show where I chewed the fact about the future of Scottish papers. If you’re reading this before 1 March you can watch it on iPlayer. (I’m at 80 minutes in.)
I was pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing almost totally with John McGurk about the net and the importance of “distinctive content”. He and I crossed swords many times over just these issues when he was managing editor at Scotsman Publications and sales figures loomed large in his mind.
Those figures have been brought into sharp relief by the departure of Mike Gilson through the revolving door of The Scotsman’s editor’s office.
On a personal level, I like Mike but it’s hard to be positive about his record.
He was parachuted in from a local newspaper in southern England. He was Johnston Press’s man. Like others at JP he can be accused of not understanding The Scotsman, thinking it was the Edinburgh Morning News. The paper is demonstrably poor. And, of course, sales collapsed to the tune of 14,000 sales.
However, this is far from the full story. Mike had many strong points. He was an enthusiastic editor and an imaginative journalist. He was the ninth to sit in the editor’s chair since I joined the paper in 1995. He was by no means the worst or even the second worst to occupy that bloodstained perch.
Those sales figures cannot be laid solely at Mike’s door. To support this assertion I would point to Johnston Press’s impact scotsman.com, which I edited for seven years. Thanks to the team I worked with, we built it up to be one of Google News’s top sites worldwide, a multi-award winner, 4 million users a month, blah, blah, blah.
But then JP got rid of the team, ditched the lovingly crafted site and imposed their own one, better suited to the Craphampton Argus than our huge international audience. Unique users have halved.
My defence of Mike is based largely on this. As JP’s short-sightedness did to the websites so it did to the resources that the editor of the paper had at his disposal.
And unsurprisingly when you cut costs, sales fall. Unfortunately, that process will continue under the new ubereditor, John McLellan. This is no reflection on John. He’s a very strong choice. A shrewd, instinctive news man, he has been at TSPL since shortly after the relief of Mafeking. He has a gut feel for the readers. And he has for a long time been the most web-friendly editor at Barclay Towers. Also in the editorial hierarchy he has Tom Little and Ian Stewart, two talented stalwarts who *gasp* have more than a passing acquaintance with the TSPL products.
If anyone can make the (much denied) seven-day model work in practical terms, it’s these guys. Former Marine Ian Stewart’s been shot at, getting subs to work an extra couple of shifts won’t be much of a trial. But in quality terms the move is a disaster – as is the Record’s similar move. Even Citizen Kane couldn’t save that situation.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that making the product weaker does not make it more attractive to the customer.
One of my favourite web things ever was the version of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton that cut out everything but the swearing. (I used to be a well-spoken young man but then I entered my first newsroom…) That was many years ago.
Now there is a worthy successor and what a labour of love it is: every nugget of sweartastic goodness from every episode of The Sopranos. And nothing else. Pure, unadulterated Anglo Saxon. Oh, and it’s not very safe for work. Or your mum. Unless, that is, your mum is a heavily tattooed Lithuanian sailor with Tourette’s.
the sopranos, uncensored. from victor solomon on Vimeo.
It never snows in Portobello. But it did. And here’s the proof.
The Scotsman is dying. So is The Herald. Here are some notes towards a plan to save them – and all newspapers. I’d like to see a consortium to put this into practice and save Scotland’s native, quality, national press for the nation. This isn’t born out of delusion but rather a few discussions I’ve had with like-minded senior journalists who believe that the money can be raised and that this is last chance to save these two titles.
Gaaagrgrrh. Has anyone else made the mistake of upgrading to Wordpress 2.7? It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a smouldering turd of online putrefaction.
Not only is it as slow as a bucket of frozen kebab fat but the text editor is completely screwed. If you want the luxury of not writing in HTML then you have to jump through endless hoops of clearing caches, removing useful plugins and hunting down wee tweaks like Testing TinyMCE 3.
It’s a total disaster and I wish I’d never upgraded. Roll on 2.8. Unless it actually reaches a hand out of the screen and twists off your genitals it can’t be any worse.
“My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here.” Am in Surrey
Eeh, Tony Blair’s doing a rare job as Middle East peace envoy, isn’t he? No wonder his big pal Dubya is giving him the US’s highest civilian honour, the Order of the Useful Idiot.
Meanwhile, in the aforementioned Middle East, heads may be scratched as to what “peace” Bliar is being rewarded for. Israeli forces continue to pound Gaza, Hamas continues to fire missiles into Israel.
Do you think Dubya would be busying himself with baubles if, say, Iran was behaving in the way that Israel is?
Me on the radio on future of Scottish journalism: http://tinyurl.com/5ltdpz
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My tweets- calgacus: How women are rewriting the future of Sierra Leone http://t.co/McCnvJgL #caweek #africa
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