Category Archives: UK

Parliament: Early Day Motions

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"That this House welcomes the rise in popularity of baseball in the United Kingdom ... ecognises the contribution that televised baseball has made in increasing the popularity of the sport and in particular the contribution of Jonny Gould, Josh Chetwynd and Erik Janssen; expresses disappointment at Five.TV's decision to cease showing Major League Baseball on terrestrial television; expresses concern that the rise in popularity of baseball in Britain may suffer as a result; and therefore calls on Five.TV or another free-to-view channel to show Major League Baseball on television."

I’ve Said Too Much: Are we buying this anymore?

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Lloyd Shepherd responds to David Simon's Guardian piece: "[It’s] perhaps instructive that London, a city many times bigger than Baltimore, has no publication with the same news values as the Baltimore Sun, and is rather served by a right-wing rag aimed at the suburbs and three freesheets with the emphasis on gossip and entertainment. Local professional journalism could die in London and, you know what? No-one would notice. Literally no-one."

Lynne Featherstone MP: Is there too much news?

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Hornsey & Wood Green MP Lynne Featherstone: "If you take my own home patch of Haringey - it's been a council with more than its fair share of scandals and tragedies over the years, but it's also been exceptionally rare for any of the local newspapers to have broken news based on investigative reporting. I don't blame the journalists generally - I know how many words have to be written in how few hours - but in the case of Baby P it was largely only when the case went national, bringing in national news organisations, that journalists started shedding the light on all sorts of things. ... [T]here is a news glut. But also - there is a real paucity of much news too. Now if someone can make a business model out of that local reporting..."

Independent: Democracy can’t exist without newspapers

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Tim Luckhurst: "Devolved Scotland is a new and fragile polity in which debate takes place within a narrow consensus. Its electoral system privileges party over electorate and the ruling elite is self-selecting and jealous of its privileges. The country's broadcasters are ill equipped to fill the vacuum left by its failing newspapers."

Comment is Free: Simon Fletcher: Blogs close the news gap

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"Twice in the past month [Andrew] Gilligan has used the platform of the Standard to attack the City Hall bloggers ... The line was that the blogs were an amateur joke. But you don't take the time and space in a mass-circulation paper to repeatedly bash an irrelevance. They are a target precisely because they are doing something interesting and relevant."

Sunday Herald: Can Local Newspapers Win The Fight For Their Traditional Heartlands?

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"But might the outcry over [BBC Trust chairman Michael] Lyons's words be the sound of a raw nerve being hit? There are certainly some journalists, working across the 14 groups that produce local papers in Scotland, who believe so. One experienced editor believes that local papers are very close to losing their traditional place at the heart of their communities. "