Between a Rock and a hard place

THIS year’s biggest news story has probably been the Northern Rock crisis and, as luck would have it, it’s happened on The Journal’s doorstep.

As a result, we have probably carried more column inches on the bank than most other newspapers, but our coverage has been markedly different to other media.

From the outset, we decided that while we had to look at what had caused Northern Rock’s problems as rigorously as anyone else, we also had a duty to the North-East to do what we could to campaign for the Rock’s survival.

In honesty, that wasn’t a hard decision to take. Just about everyone in the region has some connection to Northern Rock - I don’t have a mortgage there but one of my closest friends works there and so do a few other people I know – and we all stand to gain by its survival.

But of course, it hasn’t always been an easy route to plot. When you see that one of the country’s biggest banks has a scientist for its chairman whose main qualification for the job is that his dad was chairman too, that’s pretty hard to defend.

There’s not much you can say either about Adam Applegarth’s flawed business model, except to point out that nobody seemed to think it that flawed when profits were soaring and the share price went through the roof.

Mistakes have clearly been made but it’s been The Journal’s role to at least act as a bit of a balance to the southern media coverage criticised by the Bishop of Newcastle this week. It never pays to be too chippy about our colleagues in the south, I suppose, but I can’t help feeling there are some people glad to see this Geordie upstart being run out of the banking market.

Our support for Northern Rock has certainly been noticed. The Money Programme came in to film Journal editor Brian Aitken talking about our support – when they filmed our morning conference, I was about an inch off camera! – as did French TV. Yesterday our deputy editor Peter Montellier was interviewed by four different people from the BBC (which shows, I fear, the Director General’s point about over-manning at the Beeb).

It seems unlikely that anyone is going to come out of the Northern Rock crisis well. People will probably lose their jobs and shareholders will probably lose money (though I would've thought that was the risk you took when you bought shares).

But The Journal certainly isn’t going to sit back and let the Tories overblow the situation just so it can have a stick to beat the Government with.

Expect the Northern Rock to be on our news pages for some months to come...

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