SubScribe: Cheers all round Google+

Thursday 19 December 2013

Cheers all round


A quickie post to show that even if our MPs, bankers and business chiefs have collectively lost the plot, there are people out there proving that vision, brainpower and enthusiasm still work.




Tweet treat of the week had to be this rundown of how the media would cover the end of the world.

Tom Phillips of Buzzfeed produces the most stunning work week in, week out. His anatomy of a Twitterstorm took days to perfect and he said at the time that his head was spinning with all his different characters.

He also told us everything we needed to know about the Autumn Statement and a seriously good analysis of the 'forced caesarean' case. (That gave SubScribe an unexpected day off - what more could this blog say?)

This time, we can see apocalyptic print and web 'front pages' from the Washington Post to Buzzfeed itself, via the Times, Mail Online, the Stoke Sentinel, Farmers' Market and the dear old Express.

Phillips says he was working on the post for more than a month, although not full-time, which we can see from his other appearances on the site (take a look at www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips).

If ever there was proof that talented people should be given their head and the time to bring their ideas to fulfillment, this is it. Read every word and weep - with laughter.




Buzzfeed was also on the money this morning when the N-Dubz singer-cum-X Factor judge Tulisa appeared in court to answer drug charges.

Few will forget Nigella Lawson's court appearance earlier this month when she had to defend herself against drug accusations - even though she was a prosecution witness in a fraud case.

Maybe Tulisa used Nigella as inspiration - but the big question is will the Mail make quite such a song and dance about her picture as it did with the original?


Who says standards of English are slipping? Thanks to the Evening Standard's Lucy Tobin for pointing out this bill for the Brighton Argus.





On to more serious matters and the Daily Mirror, which found its mojo this week with a succession of old-style Mirror front pages. The Cudlipp spirit has well and truly been resurrected and the paper is all the better for it.




And finally, SubScribe commiserates with the staff of the Liverpool Post, which closed today. 

The paper was published daily for 156 years until the end of 2011. It was then relaunched as a bumper weekly, but the change didn't work. And so today the staff live-blogged their way to the exit door, banging out the paper on their way.

As with many regional newspapers, the Post started out under the ownership of a local dignitary - in this case a former chief constable - and ended up as part of a huge national group - in this case Trinity Mirror.

When it was born as a morning daily, the Post cost 1d. When it died as a weekly, it cost £1.

Its younger sister the Echo survives selling 75,000 copies a night, but the death knell was sounded for the Post after its weekly circulation halved to about 4,000 in less than two years.

Announcing the decision last week, Steve Anderson Dixon, managing director of Trinity Mirror North West, said last week that it had been taken with a heavy heart.
'Sadly, the Liverpool city region no longer generates the demand in terms of advertising or circulation, to sustain both the Post and the Liverpool Echo.'

Sad indeed.  Liverpool is a city of half a million people and it can't support a daily and a weekly paper? Nor even the wider urban area with its population of more than 800,000?

Liverpool has suffered a huge drop in population over the past seventy years and is only now beginning to recover. Census figures show that about 100,000 more people lived in the city in 1971 than do today. SubScribe apologises for rubbing salt to the wound, but here are some ABC circulation figures for the Liverpool Post & Echo group for that era:


Evening Echo 389,367

Daily Post 96,396

Liverpool Weekly News 43,211

Birkenhead News (Friday) 41,562

Birkenhead News (Wednesday) 16, 289

Wallasey News 20,788

Bootle Times 13,403

More on this another day. For today, let's just congratulate the Post team for going out in style.





A new SubScribe website with archived blogposts and new features is being prepared and should be ready to make its first appearance early in the new year. If you have any ideas of elements that should be included - or avoided - please get in touch via Twitter, Facebook or email. Thank you.



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