Out With A Bang

Whether by accident or design, the North-East of England is a very interesting place to be now media-wise.

That particular penny has taken a little while to drop, but events of the last 36 hours have only strengthened my feeling that over the course of the next 6-9 months, Newcastle, Sunderland and the great English-Scottish borderlands to the north are the place to be… the area to which many an eye will turn come the spring.

Why?

Well, first there is the Northumberland Gazette which is to be one of six JP weekly newspapers to disappear behind a pay-wall come next Monday…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/nov/25/johnston-press-charging-for-content

That will be interesting to watch pan out; not least for TrinityMirror who are there, on the same patch, with their own ‘YourPlace’ proposition…

http://www.journallive.co.uk/northumberland-sites/

Which way the JP wind blows is always of interest in this neck of the woods, if only for the fact that John Fry is my old boss at Archant; deep in the bowels of Prospect House we used to have Norwich City conversations before I fled the world of print press halls, delivery vans and paper boys.

Whether now is the time to rebuild Hadrian’s Wall round the Northumberland Gazette’s content just in time for the arrival of Trinity, TenAlps and PA is a moot point; personally, I’d put my written local wares right out front where the world and his IFNC wife could see them…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/26/itv-regional-news-replacement

But, whatever.

What is, however, interesting is Neil Benson’s comments from the TM side of the fence; that their ‘localness’ & ‘community roots’ were a fundamental part of their proposition; that’s where they felt they had to go… into just the sort of patches that JP were now about to build a fence round.

Interesting.

OK, natch we have more than a passing interest in events Ooop north.

But it is two, tiny events in that neck of the woods that – for me – add to the interest that is likely to flow up the Tyne Valley and on into the ancient market towns of Hexham and Alnwick.

One happened in Sunderland; the launch of Josh Halliday’s www.SR2blog.com That kid is smart; smart enough to find himself squeezing up next to Emily Bell for a podcast…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/audio/2009/nov/26/media-talk-podcast-richard-bacon-student-media-conference

Am I biased; yeh, course… he’s playing with our toy. But at least they’re his words, not mine.

http://sr2blog.com/?p=286

But as universtities and colleges up and down the land start to think about how they might arm their J-School students with the tools of a new trade, www.SR2blog.com is very interesting to watch.

And that final straw in the wind? That last, tiny piece of evidence that something might be a stirring in those great, wild borderlands..?

Well, for me, that accolade goes to the Shilbottle Coal Company.

Cos, of course, we have our own little network joining the dots between the River Tyne to the south and the Scottish Borders to the north…

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&r1=1&r2=1

And there, in Alnwick, is a little text ad; placed by a little coal merchant who – for the last 200 years – has ferried his wares within a 30-mile radius of Alnwick.

http://alnwick.journallive.co.uk/

For a fiver-a-week he can now advertise his wares to those same people. And he can place his ad there in three clicks.

It’s not the greatest ad the world will ever see… http://www.coaldirect.co.uk/ … but his message is out there; on a digital platform; in the heart of his local community.

And if anyone tells me that an Alnwick coal merchant has the time, the energy or the inclination to speak to the man from Google and optimise his ad to land back on http://alnwick.journallive.co.uk/ from a little black box away in sunny California, well, I won’t believe you.

He took Google out of the loop; he placed that ad himself. And gave TM £4.50 a week into the bargain.

And that’s interesting.

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