Why you have to love Billy Bragg

Posted by Graeme on April 30, 2008 9:22 AM

Last night I went to see Billy Bragg at The Sage Gateshead and I don't mind telling you that he was absolutely fantastic.

Anyone who knows me will know that I would probably pay good money to see Billy Bragg if he was singing a selection of Ethiopian nursery rhymes accompanied only by the spoons. But of the many times I've seen him over the past 20 years, I think last night was one of his finest performances - full of passion, humour and, of course, great songs.

Now you may be wondering what my Bragg review has to do with a blog about life in the Journal newsroom, so I'll explain...

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Being Judith Chalmers

Posted by Graeme on April 28, 2008 2:08 PM

One of the great things about journalism is that occasionally you get to do things you never imagined you'd do.

This weekend, for example, I've been showing an Australian film crew around Newcastle and Gateshead and helping them film a segment for a programme called The Great Outdoors (their version of Wish You Were Here, I think).

This basically meant walking around town with a bloke called Ernie Dingo (honest) and talking to him about local attractions and then trying to teach him how to speak Geordie.

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PR will eat itself

Posted by Graeme on April 17, 2008 2:59 PM

Sometimes you just have to admit defeat.

For months I have been taking the mick out of those awful surveys punted our way by desperate PR firms.

But there comes a point when you can't satirise these people any more and that came today when we got a hopeless PR survey...about PR.

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An April Fool writes...

Posted by Graeme on April 2, 2008 11:56 AM

As someone who celebrated his birthday on April 1 - thanks for all the cards, folks! - I've always been a big fan of April Fools.

The Journal's current policy is not to do any April Fools. I think that's a shame, though having been on the end of phone calls over the years from irate readers who've been hoaxed I can probably understand it.

I've been here long enough to remember some good ones - the bridge to Lindisfarne and advertising being sold on the wings of the Angel of the North stand out.

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Express delivery?

Posted by Graeme on April 1, 2008 3:17 PM

What is the poor old Daily Express going to do now that the Diana inquest is drawing to an end and all of the conspiracy theories about her death are being blown out of the water?

Hardly a day has gone by over the last few years without some story about her being in the Express, but after an exhaustive inquest and acres of coverage, surely there's nothing left to say about the woman.

It's not like they can even fall back on some stories about Kate and Gerry McCann - their next favourite tale - after having to issue a grovelling apology to them about fabricating stories to fill the news void.

The poor little Express Delivery lad - y'know, the one who pops up at the end of any Express TV ads - must be sitting in their offices, scratching his head and wondering what they do now.

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No shame

Posted by Graeme on March 13, 2008 2:59 PM

A couple of weeks ago I had one of my regular rants about the PR industry, in particular its tendency to send out rubbish surveys which will never be covered in a newspaper.

To illustrate my point, I made up a silly (and clearly fictitious) survey about macademia nuts, but I've learned this week that however stupid you try to be, someone in PR-land might just top you.

"Are Geordies & Mackems becoming Latin lovers?" reads a press release that landed in our email inbox recently.

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The curious tale of the Rock's rugby pitch

Posted by Graeme on February 29, 2008 3:22 PM

Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph carried a story about Northern Rock buying the Newcastle Falcons rugby ground just before its financial troubles started last year.

As often happens with broadcast media, the BBC read the story and followed it up on their breakfast programme and then later used it as its lead story on Look North.

There is nothing particularly unusual about that, but for the fact that the purchase of the Falcons ground was reported pretty widely in the North East press last December.

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Journalese-English Dictionary (first edition)

Posted by Graeme on February 22, 2008 3:12 PM

My suggestion for a dictionary that can provide a translation to those words you only ever see in newspapers has proved highly popular.

Thanks for all the suggestions that have come in so far - it's clear that many journalists (and I've probably been as guilty as any in my time) are often lapsing into lazy cliches that have little or no relation to the way people speak in real life.

Here are some of the best (though I'm open to any more suggestions - keep 'em coming!):

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Love is in the air

Posted by Graeme on February 13, 2008 5:28 PM

As if to prove the point I made about PR surveys this week, the industry has been working into a lather over rubbish surveys it can peddle around Valentine's Day.

I have literally lost count of the tosh I have been this week, but in a three-hour period this morning, I learnt that:

* 71% of employees would choose to stay late on Valentine’s Day (thanks to Lloyds TSB Insurance);
* 85% of men would dump their girls on Valentine’s Day to watch their club (courtesy of Nuts TV);
* 53% of people in the UK think Valentine's Day has been over-commercialised (Alliance and Leicester);
* and there has been "a massive 40% increase in lip enhancement procedures compared to the same time last year" (Transform).

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"Beautiful" Ashington

Posted by Graeme on February 8, 2008 2:17 PM

At the risk of turning my simmering feud with the PR industry into all-out war, consider the following press release that The Journal has just been sent:

"Close to the city of Newcastle," it says, "the beautiful rural town of Ashington lies where you can find your perfect home..."

Now there are lots of things you can say about Ashington, but I think most people would say that "beautiful" is stretching things a bit, while "rural" is just plain wrong.

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The conversation I have each day...

Posted by Graeme on February 5, 2008 3:35 PM

So here’s a conversation I have about three times a day.

“Hello, is that the newsdesk?”
“Yes.”
“Hi, this is Sian (or Nikki, or possibly Julian) from Really Cool PR (or Wow Marketing, or maybe Look at Me! Media) and we’ve done a survey which shows that men in Newcastle are the fourth most likely to eat macademia nuts in bed. Would you like to do a story on that?”
“No.”

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Abdul Latif RIP

Posted by Graeme on January 21, 2008 1:59 PM

There is a genuine sadness in The Journal's offices today at the news that Abdul Latif - curry king and self-promoter par excellence - has died.

It has pretty much been the rite of passage of every young reporter in the North-East to write stories about Mr Latif, such was his genius for marketing himself and his restaurant.

His free offers - curry for life to Jonny Wilkinson, a free meal for every Newcastle United season ticket holder if they win the Premiership - were legend, gaining national fame when Viz started to feature Mr Latif in its pages.

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You too can speak journalese!

Posted by Graeme on January 16, 2008 11:22 AM

Thanks for the replies I've been getting about that special language spoken only by journalists.

As well as the replies to my initial posting, I've had a number of colleagues suggesting words that are only ever used in newspapers but never in real life.

These include:

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Express delivery!

Posted by Graeme on January 7, 2008 9:56 AM

I tend to think that there are few things in life that are more annoying than the kid at the end of the Daily Express adverts who pops onto the screen and shouts "Express delivery".

But for local journalists, getting your stories nicked and then presented as exclusives by the nationals comes pretty close.

In yesterday's Sunday Express, there was a story about Fran Lyon, the Hexham woman who has fled to Europe to stop social services taking her baby, which contained the following line:

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Journalists, bad habits and tiny tots

Posted by Graeme on January 3, 2008 2:17 PM

Journalists have many bad habits, but the one in particular that often makes me cringe is our use of an odd language that no-one else in the world can speak.

We mostly write in English, of course, but occassionally reporters lapse into a strange lingo that I can only call "journalese", a strange collection of words that only ever appear in newspapers.

Who, for example, ever uses the word "slam" to mean criticism, except for journalists? (As in "A council was slammed for xxxxxx" or "A distraught mother last night slammed social services for xxxxxx")

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Gordon Brown must love the North-East

Posted by Graeme on November 29, 2007 5:37 PM

After writing a couple of weeks ago about the biggest news story of the year happening in our backyard it seems worth mentioning that the other two biggest news stories of the year seem to be now be happening, well, in our backyard.

If Gordon Brown wasn't sick enough of the North-East with Northern Rock, he can now add the Revenue and Customs crisis and the phantom donations that seem to have been made in the name of just about everyone living between Berwick and Middlesbrough (I am exaggerating for very nearly comic effect).

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Kelvin MacKenzie is offensive (again)

Posted by Graeme on November 23, 2007 1:03 PM

After making himself a figure of hate in Liverpool and then Scotland, former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie seems keen to add the North-East to the list of places he can’t show his face.

In a typically “considered” column in The Sun this week, MacKenzie argued that the Northern Rock was only getting help from the Government so that Labour MPs in the region did not lose their seats.

“This wouldn’t happen if it was the Woking building society,” he squealed.

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Between a Rock and a hard place

Posted by Graeme on November 21, 2007 1:51 PM

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.

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If only we were Italian...

Posted by Graeme on November 11, 2007 4:18 PM

Coverage of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Italy has shown just how differently the media are governed in different countries.

In the last few days, a judge has said the people arrested showed “serious indications of their guilt”, while police have released an alleged confession and even outlined much of their evidence.

This is the sort of thing that would never happen in Britain - not without our editor ending up in the cells for contempt of court, that is.

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Bob Geldof: I Don't Like, err, Webcams

Posted by Graeme on November 7, 2007 4:53 PM

You may not know him as a shy and retiring type, but it appears Bob Geldof was not keen to be filmed by The Journal today.

We had arranged to interview Bob when he appeared at a shopping conference in Gateshead but when we got out our video camera - we're all very multimedia now, you know - he stormed off, saying something about not doing things for websites.

You can read all about it in tomorrow's Journal.

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Spam spam spam spam...

Posted by Graeme on October 25, 2007 3:48 PM

An unsolicited email arrives at The Journal newsdesk.

"Spam, or unsolicited e-mail," it says, "has become an accepted annoyance for any business that uses e-mail as a communication tool."

Yeah - funny you should mention that...

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You have won the (postcode) lottery

Posted by Graeme on October 16, 2007 2:16 PM

Every so often a word or phrase worms its way into the national consciousness.

Newspaper journalists are not immune to this phenomenon, and indeed probably end up using stock phrases more than most people as a quick shorthand way of making a point.

One of my current favourites is "postcode lottery", a phrase that people use to describe pretty much any situation where one part of the country does things differently to somewhere else.

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