Harry Blackwood, former editor of the Hartlepool Mail, describes the difficulty of finding new work with only 30 years of journalism experience, but no ‘professional qualification’.
Thanks to Martin Stabe for spotting this. Hartlepool Mail readers can now pick up their copy of the paper in church.
The parishioners will now be ‘getting their news from the pews,’ writes Tracey Walker over at the Hartlepool Mail today:
“The Mail has answered the prayers of people living in Hart, on the outskirts of Hartlepool, who were suffering a local news blackout after the Hart Post Office – which sold copies of the paper – closed in July.
The newspaper will now be delivered to St Mary Magdalene Church in the village after a plea from the Rev Janet Burbury and the Rev John Lund.”
Well, church membership and newspaper subscriptions are both down: it’s certainly one way of combining forces.
Online maps are erasing the UK’s history and geography, according to the president of the British Cartographic Society.
Quoted in a BBC report, Mary Spence said internet maps, such as those provided by Google and Microsoft’s Multimap, are missing out ‘crucial data’ on local landmarks and history.
It’s not all bad news online, however: mash ups like the Open Street Map are leading the retaliation against this ‘corporate blankwash’, Spence says.
The rising popularity of interactive maps amongst news organisations – whether its the Hartlepool Mail’s Plot the Grots and Plot the Pots campaigns or the BBC’s recent Beijing Olympics map – could be the next step in the fightback.
First off, they serve up information to the reader in a digestible and filterable way. What is more, while these examples might not highlight cultural hotspots, they endow the humble online map with a living and breathing sense of the geography they chart.
With the potential to personalise the data plotted on these maps to a street-by-street level – as Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock project allows – internet mapping in the hands of news organisations should only get richer.
The Hartlepool Mail is using two interactive maps to back its campaigns against potholes and derelict areas of the town.
The Plot the Pots and Plot the Grots maps let users flag up of potholes in need of repair and streets and buildings requiring attention. Readers can also submit photos and update the maps when problems have been fixed.
Also worthy of note is that the newspaper’s site carries the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) kitemark-like logo and provides links for submitting complaints to the editor.
Looking through the paper’s sister sites, this seems to be a common feature across Johnston Press sites – though not common to all news publishers as requested by PCC chairman Sir Christopher Meyer last year.