Tag: journalism

It’s been chucking down rain all day (to the extent that even a short walk to the local shops seems like a bad idea) and the Adver’s claiming that there’s no news. So, just to pass the time, here’s a photo of a recently retired dustbin, gathering the rain.

You might think that people from an organisation with its offices right next to the railway station would prefer to get away from the railway for an ‘away day’. Apparently not. With fifty four staff on the away day, that’s roughly a £5000 public sector donation to the Swindon & Cricklade Railway. It’s almost worth it, just to see the Adver, for once, not referring to people that work at the Research Council’s Swindon offices as ‘boffins’.

You’d think that, if you were writing an article about an error in an earlier report, you would be very careful about proof reading it. At the Adver, apparently not. Was it volcanoes on Tuesday or tornadoes on Wednesday?

I do wonder at the quality of reporting in the national media sometimes. Under the headline ‘Train boss promises improvements’ the leading paragraph reads

The incoming managing director of First Great Western has promised more trains, less overcrowding and better services.

But listen to what he says in the associated video clip.

We are scouring the land for the right sort of rolling stock for that, but it’s not currently available.

He says a lot about promising improvements in reliability (as does the train company’s press release); he talks of increases in train capacity that have been made in the recent past, but on what First Great Western will do about the current overcrowding the message is clear: there is nothing they can do. And even if they wanted to, the restrictions in their franchise, where they will be busy paying money to the government for the privilege of providing the rail service (£1,130.5M over ten years), mean that there is little they could do to increase capacity here.

It’s so nice to be labelled. Apparently, I’m deprived.

The rollout of the new centres is already making youngsters’ lives better in deprived areas…. Children’s centres exist in Drove Road, Pinehurst, Freshbrook, Middleleaze, Park North and Westcott Street and the final touches are being made to one in Gorse Hill.

In the list of areas that most locals might think of as being ‘deprived’, only some of those listed by the Adver would be included. Deprivation through wealth is rather novel, don’t you think?

I was, perhaps, a little premature in my suggestions of amnesia amongst our local councillors. Yesterday’s Adver carries a story about ongoing discussions between Swindon Borough Council and universities, but about a town centre campus, not a Coate Water campus. ‘Story’ is quite an apt description in this case. The leading paragraph suggests that discussions are well developed.

PLANS for a town centre university are in the pipeline and the University of the West of England is believed to be the top choice to meet Swindon’s higher education needs.

The quote from The University of the West of England* is considerably more guarded.

UWE, along with other universities has been involved in preliminary discussions with Swindon Council to which no outcome has yet been reached.

That reads like nothing more than ‘maybe’ to me. The figurative pipeline in the newspaper story could be very long.

*Mind that initial ‘The’. It’s in their legal title and they can get very picky about it.

It’s nice to see that the BBC can still be quick off the mark and first with the news. Over a month after it was reported in the Adver and commented on here, the Beeb has finally caught up on the work being done by Wiltshire Wildlife Trust to improve access to the River Ray and modify the local environment for the benefit of riverside wildlife. The work started yesterday, but the news release from a month ago is unchanged. Some of Jo Sayers’ comments from that news release which the Beeb quotes now have a certain irony to them now that they didn’t have a month ago when quoted by the Adver.

At the moment, in some places the river is so overgrown that people can’t even see it.

Recently, some would say we’ve been seeing rather too much of the river.

So I exaggerate a little: Swindon is neither sunny (as I write, ’tis raining outside) nor by the sea; but my exaggeration is only slightly more than that of Anna Mansell of The Adver.

SWINDON may be a somewhat land-locked town, but residents will soon be able to bask on a beautiful beach…. A sweeping bend will be created on the river at Rivermead, and the beach will be installed giving visitors a place to sit and enjoy the scene and animal life sights.

I don’t think ‘basking’ is quite what the Swindon Water for Wildlife River Ray restoration project has in mind, as becomes clear later in the article.

This big sweeping bend will provide a shallow, graded gravel beach which will provide a community focus in the area where people can come and enjoy the river, sit and contemplate, or dip their dogs.

No hint of basking there. More a case of taking cover as a flotilla of soggy dogs shake themselves dry.

The deputy leader of Swindon’s red nest seems unsure as to what caused one councillor’s encounter with the law to make it to the front page of the local rag, and another councillor’s encounter with the law just got a small mention on the inside pages.

Two Councillors in the paper too for alleged misdemeanours. Interesting one is a front page article and the other one a few lines on an inside page. Not sure if that’s due to the worlds obsession with sex, or political bias?

Unless she has never read a UK newspaper, I’d have thought that was simple to answer. The outspoken Councillor Glaholm arrested for kerb-crawling, or Councillor Heenan charged with failing to produce a driving licence, driving without insurance and failing to display a valid vehicle excise licence (and one of those charges already dropped, apparently). For an editor of a local daily paper with nothing much to report and looking for a salacious headline, the choice is obvious.

‘Swindon is second safest town in the UK’ according to the headline. Not really. According to an insurer, policyholders in Swindon are the second least likely to make an insurance claim for theft. Secure, maybe, but not ‘safe’ in the sense that most people would imply from that word.