Friday High Five – the news this week
The dominating thought this week has been the changing state of journalism.
I was an early supporter of the Manchester publication The Mill and have been a contributor to the podcast and wrote a business feature for them.
This week their founder and editor Joshi Herrmann really pushed the boat out on a story they’ve run all week about Sacha Lord, the driving force behind the rave night Warehouse Project and the Parklife festival.
This morning, we ran our own story on the probes into Lord’s £400k grant by both the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (where Lord is an unpaid adviser to the Mayor) and the grant giving body itself, the Arts Council of England.
Not only have the Mill garnered enormous public interest in the story, but they appear to have also successfully mobilised their readers – The Millers, as Herrmann calls them – to pool their skills and stories to feed the story still further.
Elsewhere, the calling of the General Election brought into play the public’s fading interest and engagement in politics.
At times of national importance I instinctively turn to the BBC. However, on Wednesday, I instead watched Sophy Ridge and Beth Rigby on Sky News with their powerful and incisive commentary of Rishi Sunak’s rain soaked announcement of a 4 July poll, to a backdrop of Things Can Only Get Better (note to the kids, it was Labour’s theme song from 1997).
Much as journalists and political geeks like me might be switched on by the hum of politics, the general public are not.
Readership and engagement on most media will go down over the next month as people seek out other sources of entertainment and information.
We ended this week with a flurry of strong stories for what I expected would be a quiet Friday before the Bank Holiday weekend – the takeover of Co-op Bank, Andy Bell’s share sale, Praetura’s concert party and the appointment of corporate big hitter Rebecca DeNiro to the board of Norcros in July, promoting the second music related headline of the week.
On Tuesday we have an enormous story to share with you that we believe is very much in the public interest.
Messy it may be, but dull it never is.
Have a great long weekend.
