YEP, it's that time again. The Champion, like lots of other local and regional titles up and down the land, is taking the chance to put all the doubters in their place and celebrate what's good about local newspapers.

But rather than blow our own trumpet, we asked some of the people who regularly feature in our pages whether they think our coverage makes a difference to the response they get for their events, campaigns and activities.

Here's just a few of the responses we got:

Carl Eaton, manager of the Skem Men-Aces, a football team for adults with learning difficulties, said: "It's really important to us, as we like to think that we are a people's club that belongs to the community, and a lot of the small businesses help us out and are able to use the paper to let people know how the Men-aces are getting on.
"We are able to use The Champion to to offer our supporters a massive thank you, as you can't thank people enough for their support. The local papers play a massive part for us as a club. It also gives the players a boost to see themselves in the papers."

Clare Gillard, Parbold Picture House said: "The Champion’s really positive report on our launch of the fortnightly Sunday Parbold Picture House got the new enterprise off to a great start. Its continuing excellent coverage over the two years of its operation has kept the audiences coming, so that almost 6,000 tickets have been sold since the launch. Its programme of great films, the brand new and the much loved, is now part of the alternative entertainment fabric of the whole region."

Bill Follett, vice chair of Liverpool Model Railway society, said: “Since being featured in the Champion we had a record 1,700 people visiting our exhibition. Our survey on the door found that 35% of that figure turned up because they seen a small article that was placed on one of the later pages of the newspaper!"

Ken Fretwell, British Heart Foundation Fundraising Volunteer Manager in Southport, said: “The BHF has been working with the Champion for the past eight months on the Heart of Southport Appeal. The support we have got from the Champion by producing weekly stories and updates on the appeal has been invaluable. We need to raise £152,000 for essential equipment at Southport & Formby Hospital, which could ultimately save the lives of thousands of heart patients in the area. Coverage from the Champion is enabling us to reach this goal much faster, ensuring the Appeal and awareness of the BHF is firmly on the radars of the people of Southport."

Bill Esterson, MP for Sefton Central, said: “The Champion provides a fantastic service to people in communities throughout this constituency and beyond. It keeps people informed about what is happening in their local communities, but it also gives its readers the chance to see what the decision makers are doing. Newspapers are an integral part of any democracy, be that local or national.
"We have heard a lot in recent months and years about the darker side of journalism, with phone hacking scandals and the ongoing inquiries, but newspapers like the Champion prove just how important good local journalism is. Jim Sharpe, David Raven, Stephanie O'Connor, Natasha Young, David Simister and Henry James aren't just writing about the communities, they are part of the local communities. And that's the key to a good local newspaper.
“The reporters need to be at the heart of the community and the Champion's team is. Sefton Central is richer for having excellent local newspapers and not only that, they are always a really good read every single week.”


For more on Local Newpaper Week see tomorrow's editions of The Champion.



 

 

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SOMETHING which became enough of a regional phenomenon to make our pages last week has been stopped short by that old chestnut - internet copyright.

Last week we reported on how a couple of clips about Skelmersdale in the sixties and seventies had attracted thousands of hits on YouTube in the space of two or three days - something it'd take months for our own Champion videos, even with the backing of a regional newspaper group, to achieve. We ran it in last week's edition for a couple of simple reasons; not only were the videos educational, but they managed to attract the interest of thousands of people in almost no time at all. In fact, we were so fascinated by them we linked our online coverage through to one of them, just so our Skelmersdale readers could find out more.

Or at least we did briefly, until a) we got a polite phone call asking to remove our links to the video and b) both clips mysteriously disappeared from the video-sharing site altogether that day. I can understand that if it's pirated episodes of LOST or Top Gear, but for historical clips made for educational purposes forty or fifty years ago? As someone who works in the media, I fully understand exactly how copyright works and the ramnifications of opening the floodgates to unauthorised clips, but I struggle to see how insisting a promotional video for Skem from forty-odd years ago be removed will make any difference.

If someone was using it for commercial reasons, and making money where the original filmmakers should've been getting money, then I'd understand totally. But it isn't. Leaked footage from the new Batman movie it is not.

Suppose it'd never gone on. It just means thousands of people wouldn't have been given a glimpse into the history of Skelmersdale, which is a fascinating story about to enter a new chapter altogether. With the New Town recently celebrating its 50th anniversary and plans to regenerate the town centre back on the cards, interest in Skem has never been greater. Clips like that, which have long since finished serving their original commercial purpose, should be out there in the open anyway, for historical purposes.

Chances are whoever uploaded it just wanted to share a bit of that history with the wider world.

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SMARTPHONES. I reckon every journalist should have one.

They're not, by any means, the be-all-and-end-all and they're not the most important weapons in a reporter's armoury - that'd be a pencil, a notepad, and a mastery of how to use them both as quickly and accurately as possible - but in these increasingly high-tech days for the media I reckon these little bundles of joy are a great tool to have. That's why I'm now on my third.

I was a tad apprehensive at first but when I was working in North Wales the boffins at Trinity Mirror issued me with a Nokia N96, and I fell in love with it. At the time the Beeb and Reuters were issuing them to their journalists in the field and it wasn't hard to see why Trinity were so keen to follow suit; at a stroke you had one of the best compact digital cameras on the market, a connection to the likes of Twitter and Facebook, a voice recorder and a satnav in your pocket, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice. Oh, and you could ring people on it too. I was gutted when, upon leaving the company, I had to leave it behind too.

It was so good that the first moment I could I got my mitts on its successor; the N97 Mini, which over the past two years has accompanied me on all sorts of Champion assignments. It helped me tweet live election results as they were being announced. The proper photographers might have sneered, but it more than performed when I used it to snap some 'slebs on a visit to a local tourist attraction. I've interviewed actors and politicians with it, and it's even helped me navigate through the maze of roundabouts on jobs in Skelmersdale. It wasn't perfect - the internet connection was slow, it was forever running low on power and typing on the keyboard was way too fiddly - but it was a seemingly indestructible phone which soldiered on in the face of adversity. Where the trendier iPhones packed up, the N97 just kept going.

But all good things come to an end, and with my two year contract up, I was finally free to dump it for a newer, snazzier model. The obvious choice was to stay loyal to Nokia and go for the N97's successor, the Lumia 800. As a media man's sort of smartphone, it's even better than the N97 was two years ago.

The Lumia 800 is a cracking bit of gadgetry and more than up to the task, but it's not the one I went for. Obviously it's competing in a battle that develops so fiercely that all my findings will be irrelevant in ten minutes' time, but if you work in the media and want a new smartphone right now you have to go for the Sony Xperia S.

 It's pricier and more delicate than the Lumia but when it comes to the stuff that'll matter for journalists - camera quality, internet speeds and ease of use - it's in a different league. If you use your smartphone as a tool rather than something you show off to your mates, the picture quality alone makes it the one you'd want on your side.

The only thing I'm left wondering is whether it'll be anywhere near as durable as what went before it. Watch this space...

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 NO, that's not a self-congratulatory headline for something new and wonderful at the paper. We have actually been higher - literally - than ever before.

Thanks to Crosby reporter David Raven taking a copy with him on the Three Peaks Challenge he and a team of kind-hearted fundraisers took part in, the familiar blue masthead of Sefton and West Lancashire's most widely-read newspaper has been to the top of Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon.

Here's The Champion at the top of Ben Nevis, in Scotland...

And at the top of England's highest mountain Scafell Pike...

 ...and at the top of Snowdon, the tallest peak in Wales.

More importantly, he's helped to raise more than £3,000 to help buy vital new equipment for Mia Brown, a disabled eight-year-old girl who suffers from severely-restricted mobility.

That's why we were more than happy to put the Three Peaks adventure on the front of two of our editions this week - it's definitely a good cause. Help TEAM, the fundraisers who took part in the challenge, by going online to their website.

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THE jury, as you'll probably have read in The Champion over the past few months, is still very much out on fracking.

There have been all sorts of opinions aired over whether it's safe to blast water underground in a bid to get cheaply available energy but I still found myself slightly puzzled at the latest worry: that Lancashire will become the British version of Texas.

According to the Lancashire Evening Post that's the view of Lancaster and Fleetwood MP Eric Ollerenshaw, and while I think I know what he's getting at it would mean all sorts of other cultural benefits for the green and pleasant Red Rose county. George W Bush, for instance. And, in no particular order; Tex-Mex cuisine, the Dallas Cowboys, NASA mission control, films about chainsaw massacres, pick-up trucks and ZZ Top.

It's also well known in The Champion office that I'm a big fan of Texas. Say What You Want about my taste in music...

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IT'S no secret that a lot of news stories come out of council correspondence.

But what I wasn't expecting was to see the following planning application for West Lancashire Borough Council which is very - for want of better words - matter of fact.

While the application's ordinary enough, what grabbed me was the following bit:

You can't say that local authorities, in this instance at least, don't tell it like it is!

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REGULAR readers will already know that I like a pint of real ale almost as much as my three other favourite things in life; newspapers, cars and inexplicably frequent trips to the Lake District.

A series I've been working on over the last few weeks for The Champion manages to combine at least two of those, which is why I've been enjoying working on the imaginatively-titled Champion Your Local articles. The take a look at the many, many pubs out there in the West Lancashire countryside, and what their landlords are doing to buck the trend and bring in the punters.

Already I've featured efforts at the Railway Tavern, in Hoscar, to make their menu far more local in its flavour, and a military vehicle show at the Heatons Bridge, in Scarisbrick (pictured). In tomorrow's edition it's the turn of The Legh Arms, in Mere Brow, who held a farmers' market to help raise funds for charity.

As someone who pops into these pubs fairly frequently I've seen firsthand the effort that goes on to stop them becoming part of the pub closure statistics (even though, as we've reported all too often, West Lancashire is far from immune to the problems behind them), so it's good to be able to showcase in the pages of our papers what these locally-run, community-minded businesses are doing.

Maybe you know a pub that's got similar plans over the next few months. If you do, give The Champion a call on 01704 392400 or send an email to editorial@champnews.com. Cheers!

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