Liverpool's MP's given a platform

News of a great new initiative from the Liverpool Daily Post in the run up to the general election.

It has launched Liverpool Party Central tasked with the role of getting the city's candidates blogging.

According to How do media

MPs have been given direct access to the site via a content management system, so the blogs aren’t moderated editorially by Echo or Post staff

Now isn't that a good idea

From the heart of Royston,angry locals in dog poo uproar

There's nothing that seems to get people more uptight about their community than bin collections and dog poo.

The former is the lead story in this morning's Telegraph but for the latter,a great story courtesy of Angry people in local newspapers which reports from Cambridge where

Schoolchildren are being forced into the path of traffic by piles of dog mess on pavements,

Anna Greetham headteacher, from Tannery Drift First School in Royston,tells the paper

Over the last two weeks I've had quite a number of parents saying it has been a problem.
"Please could whoever it is pick up their dog's mess so that children aren't at risk from walking it into school and the classroom - there are health implications for the children.

What use is this "portal" if you don't have the internet

An interesting story from Scotland via Hold the Front Page which reports that

The editor of The Scotsman accused politicians of "doing their best to damage" the country's newspaper industry.
It followed a proposal from the Scottish Government that local authorities would no longer be obliged to publish public notices in print editions of newspapers.

The Scottish Parliament is

consulting on a change in the law to allow notices such as planning applications or road closures to be advertised on the internet.

and if approved

would allow councils to use a new public information notices portal, therefore saving local authorities millions of pounds, although it has been stressed they could still use other mediums if they so wished.

However this comment on the story sums it up

What use is this "portal" if you don't have the internet? It is a deliberate ploy to keep some sections of the community in the dark. The majority of the poor, the pensioners, those of us who have a life and don't spend all our time twittering... Typical politicians, you can't trust any of them.

Tagging too far

Some very interesting comments from Newsquest's digital MD being reported by Press Gazette.

Roger Green was non too complimentary about local paper's attempts to engage with the community using online devices.

Speaking at AOP’s Micro-local Forum, he gave a candid assessment of how he believed online technologies were inefficiently used by local newspapers.
He mocked the unnecessary geo-tagging of stories where location did not play an important factor, suggesting it wasn’t necessary for stories about "the launch of a pet insurance policy" to be plotted in this manner. "I mean honestly, what’s the point of that?"

Council news is keeping local papers alive

Interesting that a local councillor has claimed that council news is actually keeping local papers afloat

Liberal Democrat Gerald Vernon-Jackson told a Select Committee hearing into the future of regional media that Portsmouth Council's paper Flagship helped fund the city's local newspaper.
He said: "We in local authorities are in many ways keeping these newspapers afloat. We keep pumping money into these papers, hundreds of thousands of pounds a year."

via Independent

Local newspapers "producing a torrent of worthless badly written drivel"-Discuss?

A damning indicement of local media?

Well the mabiblogion sets the cat amongst the pigeons with this piece in the Independent yesterday where he looks at the state of local newspapers in Wales

The failure of the Welsh government has been mirrored by the inability of the print media outlets to change and refine their output. They too have not responded to the problem. This inability to change and respond to the problems they face looks a lot like falling on one’s sword. If there is still a place for the local newspaper (and I am not sure there is) they need to make changes quickly. The ability to view local, regional, national and international news at the click of a button has made them largely obsolete. The remaining strength of the local newspaper lies in reporting things that don’t make it out of the area. The trouble is that in becoming ever more reliant on press releases and producing a torrent of worthless, badly written drivel, they have lost their market.