Why the NUJ needs to get real on Bullivant

The ever-credulous NUJ removed its head from the sand just long enough this week to hail Chris Bullivant as the saviour of journalism and the Robin Hood of the newspaper industry.

As reported by Jon Slattery and others, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: “The launch of the Birmingham Press this week is a vote of confidence in the city as a news centre where the skills of writers, photographers and production journalists can help to provide an added service to readers in a complex modern environment.”

Dear concluded: "We warned Trinity Mirror that by collapsing the scope of its publications in the city and making journalists redundant, the market was being opened up for a competitor happy to recruit skilled staff who became unexpectedly available."

The union’s northern organiser Chris Morley said the Press was a ‘significant step’.

Oh please. To read the comments above, you’d think Bullivant had created in his Knowle nerve centre a newsroom bursting at the seams

Meet the Pollyanna editor

I'm an eternal optimist, but even I can't share the sunny outlook presented by this New Zealand editor, as reported by Roy Greenslade.

"Newspaper companies are effectively reinventing themselves in the digital age and are now providing a compelling, integrated experience for readers and advertisers alike."

That's all right, then.

Read the full post here



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Media mayhem in the Midlands

THERE’S  a lot of activity in the West Midlands medialand at the moment, much of it a microcosm of what’s going on in the sector across the UK and beyond. I wonderered, then, if I could draw any conclusions about the future shape of the media by looking at a snapshot of what’s happening now.

What follows is a pretty incoherent collection of thoughts, and I apologise in advance for my lacklustre excuse for a ‘conclusion’ at the end. You might want to stop reading now, to be honest.

Disregarding the entry of my new venture, TheBusinessDesk.com into the fray, we’ve seen the launch of at least two new Midlands business