Tag: journalism

The Adver has reported that plans for building on Swindon’s front garden have been ‘shelved’.

A CONTROVERSIAL plan to build thousands of homes on Swindon’s Front Garden has been shelved due to the tough economic times. The announcement came after Swindon Council admitted its hopes to pick a developer to build 4,500 homes in Wichelstowe from a list of four companies, chosen earlier this year, will not go ahead this summer as they had hoped. However, plans to build some 200 low-cost homes on the 460-acre site will go ahead as planned.

But as the comments from councillors within the Adver’s own report indicate, that is overstating things: the plans have been delayed, not shelved, yet. There’s also something missing from the report: the selection of developers that the council has deferred is for the Middle Wichel and West Wichel developments only. Most of East Wichel is already owned by Taylor Wimpey. Development may have slowed, but with land already sold to a developer, it’s unlikely to stop for long.

Over at the Adver it has been a slow news week. Not because there isn’t much to report (though to be honest, there isn’t much to report), but because their new gee-whiz website is rather lacking in gee and totally lacking in whiz. The site has stumbled along since the revamp, struggling to serve up news stories.

It seems that in the rush to make things more interactive, Newsquest, which owns the Adver, have forgotten the importance of thorough testing before unleashing their developers’ handiwork on the public. They’re not the first, by a long way, to make this mistake in the rush to convert sites to “web 2”. What does seem to distinguish them is how slow they are at putting things right.

Either that or someone thinks it’s a clever way to persuade people to go and buy the newspaper instead of waiting and waiting… and waiting in front of their PC for the Adver website to respond.

I see that the Adver has a report on a feasibility study by Network Rail on five possible high speed rail lines, one of them through Swindon.

One of the proposed lines would run alongside First Great Western’s London to Bristol route and that could see trains transporting Swindon rail users at speeds of 100mph.

Perhaps the reporter is too young to remember when the trains that run the current mainline service through Swindon were introduced and called the InterCity 125 because they ran at 125 mph… as they still do, on a good day, on the line between Swindon and Didcot.

Over recent years, utilities and banks have been encouraging their customers to ‘go green by abandoning paper bills and account statements in favour of online account management. The aim, so the marketing went, was to save both them and us money and also save a few trees. It seems they were, on two counts, lying.

In the last few weeks I have received new customer magazines from Virgin Media and HSBC. Virgin’s Electric! magazine was such mindless, irrelevant drivel that it went in the recycling bin within five minutes of me receiving it. HSBC’s Liquid is slightly less mindless, but every article is a blatant advert for their products. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so naïve as to expect a ‘free’ magazine that is not primarily an advert, but I do expect it to be slightly less blatant than the all-out sell, sell, sell produced for HSBC by Wardour Publishing. It too is now in the recycling bin.

So now I am receiving more paper from the utilities and banks than I ever did before and it is trash which, if it were included in the mailings that came with my bills and account statements, I could chose to opt out from.

In February, I reported, both here and on the TalkSwindon forum, councillors’ attendance rates for 2007. Today, the Adver has finally caught up. They’re only three months late!

Pity the poor journalists at the Adver, desperate for something to fill their pages after a quiet bank holiday weekend. What to do? How about taking a step into the past, going back to the origins of the newspaper and its title, and presenting an advert for alternative therapies as news? Not satisfied with that? How about a story on how leaking rainwater set off a fire alarm? Life threatening stuff, no? And these are amongst the top stories, rationed to no more than fifteen per day, that the Adver posts to its website as a taster of the greater pearls to be found within its printed pages. ’Tis enough to make one want to go out and buy a copy, ’tis it not?

If you believe the Adver, the sun’s always rising.

SWINDON police seized drugs and cash during a day of dawn raids.

It’s not even as though there was a large number of raids. There were only two. It must have been a very short day….

Even when doing little more than regurgitating a press release, the Adver cannot resist applying a positive gloss in support of the proposals to re-introduce a canal to Swindon.

Canal would give town a big boost

THE plan to build a canal through the centre of Swindon has been given the thumbs up by a business expert. Paul Briggs, chief executive of the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce Group, has said that a canal could provide a big boost to the town. He welcomed the project as a key element in transforming Swindon’s town centre into a leisure and visitor attraction, disposing of its dreary reputation.

Only one of those sentences is true: that Mr Briggs of the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce said that the canal could provide a big boost to the town. Could. Not ‘would’ only ‘could’. The article then goes on to reproduce almost the entirety of the chamber’s press release, leaving out only the first paragraph. I’ll repeat that paragraph here, as it makes clear what Mr Briggs was supporting.

The Swindon Chamber of Commerce has welcomed proposals to debate the redevelopment of Swindon’s town centre through the creation of a focal waterway. The plans hope to attract people to Swindon by transforming the town centre into a leisure and visitor attraction, disposing of what some believe to be a dreary reputation.

That’s only a ‘thumbs up’ to debating the plans. It is a long way short of supporting the plans themselves. As the rest of the press release made clear, whilst he is clearly not an opponent of the plans*, there are many questions still to be answered.

* Anyone who thinks the impact of the canal could match that of the coming of the railway 100 years ago obviously has their rose-tinted spectacles on: the canal has already been and gone once, with limited impact; the impression left on Swindon by the GWR remains unavoidable.

If the only measure of success for a project is that it meets its principle objective then, as rather inaccurately reported in the Adver, the changes to waste and recycling collections in Swindon have been a success, with an almost 60% increase in recycling*. However, a project also needs to be measured by what other effects it has and any well-managed project will have a number of other, secondary, criteria for success. Complaint levels of ‘20 or 30 a day’ may be low compared with the reported number of collections, 860,000 per month, but without a comparison with the number of complaints before the changes, is no measure of success. And if Mr Harcourt believes that ‘Swindon is now a tidier town’ then he’s clearly not set foot on the streets of central Swindon.

*Unlike the Adver report, I do know how to do percentages: an increase in the recycling rate from 27.3% to 43.5% is an increase in the recycling rate of just over 16 percentage points, or an increase of almost 60 per cent.

With just three days to go to the local elections, it’s a bit late to be running stories about the use of social networking sites to encourage voting.

Facebook used to galvanise voters
Social networking website Facebook is being used by a Wiltshire council to encourage people to vote.

Swindon Borough Council said the aim was to help make it easier for citizens to find information about the election and to exchange ideas with others.

Swindon Borough Council actually ‘said’ very little: the BBC has just copied the words from the council’s website. And if they’d bothered to check, they would have seen that they have hardly galvanised anyone: the Facebook group has just eleven members, three of whom are administrators.

There is a story here: it is one of poorly promoted experiments and inefficient use of council staff time.