SUPPOSE, just for a minute, you're the Government. In fact, suppose you're the Coalition Government which - thanks to a series of sustained cuts to just about everything - isn't very popular with Joe Public at the moment.

You need some good publicity but, with these being austere times and all that, you can't splash out. You need it cheaply and you need the message to get out absolutely everywhere. Don't worry, this isn't a political rant. It's about a stroke of marketing genius on the Government's part.

What do you do?

Well, you could promise to invest a million quid - a lot of money, I know, but not that much compared to, say, the size of the nation's deficit - in a popular cause. Giving local high streets a boos, for instance. You could also introduce an element of competition, to get people living near to said high streets to get excited about it, and tell them that only a small number, say, a dozen, will actually be lucky enough to see the benefits.

Then, to really get things going, get a celebrity involved. Someone who's presented a couple of TV series on the very subject you're touching on, for instance. Bingo! A PR masterstroke is born!

So what you have is a piece vaguely in favour of the Government appearing prominently in every newspaper up and down the land - including, I'll freely admit, The Champion. It is, if you ask the cynic in me, a very, very clever bit of marketing which gets an awful lot of positive publicity for relatively little outlay.

But, as one of my colleagues has already pointed out, "everyone is clamouring for a piece of the Portas pie", and while I'm probably right to question the marketing behind it there is of course the real story behind it; the community groups, the small businesses and the members of the public who are toiling away, putting the bids for their towns together.

A woman I spoke to earlier today regarding Ormskirk's own bid couldn't have put it better - even if they don't attract the money the Portas Pilot project is offering, it'll still have been worth it because they managed to get a host of different people to get together and come up with some positive ideas to help their local high street.

So, a clever marketing stunt conjured up in deepest Whitehall or a genuine bit of feelgood community news? The jury, as ever, is out...

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ONE of my wittier friends on Facebook, a reporter for the Runcorn and Widnes Weekly News, couldn’t have put it better when he was asked whether he’d be updating to the Timeline feature.

"Facebook timeline is your collection of the photos, posts and experiences that help tell YOUR story". I don't want to tell my story, I just want to stay in touch with people I don't like enough to keep in touch with via conventional means."

Unless you’re self-confessed technophobe and Champion reporter Jim Sharpe, then chances are you’ll already have Facebook and will have already been asked this question. At the last count, 48 of my ‘friends’ had taken the plunge and done it; so far, I’m one of the tricky, persistent ones who’s resisted it. As it turns out, it’s going to be get changed anyway, whether I like it or not. To paraphrase Paul Weller, the public get what the Facebook wants.

But that’s small beef compared to the feature on Facebook which really annoys me, and it isn’t requests to play Farmville, to look for my soulmate on Zoosk or to ‘poke’ people I haven’t seen since the Nineties.

It is, in fact, those stupid apps which declare to all and sundry which websites you’ve been reading.

As a journalist I read lots of different news articles, whether they’re printed or on the web, from all sorts of different publications. I read pieces on BBC News Online, I resist the urge to comment on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free section and – as much as I don’t want to admit it – I too have been drawn in by MailOnline’s utterly addictive right-hand column.

But, in much the same way I wouldn’t want to be caught shuffling through a copy of The Daily Star in the supermarket, I wouldn’t want all of my Facebook friends to be told every time I read something on The Guardian or The Independent websites. Your choice of newspaper, like your choice of political party, car or brand of corn flakes, inadvertently says a lot about you, and I’d rather Facebook didn’t broadcast that to hundreds of people unless I told it to. True, I do give out all sorts of other information on Facebook, but it’s always on my terms and it’s always things I don’t mind the world knowing. But newspaper apps tell everyone automatically, and that’s what I resent.

Regular readers might know that The Champion also has a presence on the world’s most popular website, but not one which demands all your details and automatically lets all your friends know if you’ve read One Man And His Dog. Maybe I’ve been brought up in a slightly more secretive age, but unlike a lot of my mates there’s still some things I’d rather keep an element of privacy over.

To be fair to the creators of these apps they do ask whether they can do this – oh, and access all your personal information – before you sign up to whatever online news brilliance they’re providing, but for what it’s worth I’d still rather take the ten seconds to track down their website directly from Google. There are people I went to school with who I wouldn’t trust with all my personal information, so why would I treat the creators of The Guardian Facebook app differently?

I’m sure the technology brings all sorts of benefits to the newspapers who try it, but I can’t see Champion readers wanting to try it any time soon. If someone reads an article in the papers and wants to tell people about it, I’m sure they’ll find a way of letting their Facebook friends know.

But I can’t see them wanting Facebook to do it for them, without their knowledge, each and very time they read an article.

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SO THE Champion's 18 this week. Your favourite local paper can, among other things, legally get the drinks in without worrying about being asked for its ID by the bloke behind the bar.

I've been celebrating the anniversary by working away on the special birthday supplement you'll find delivered with this week's edition - a task which meant trawling through the thousands of papers we've put out over the years, to uncover all those juicy front page splashes hidden away in our secretive and extensive archives.



It's been an enlightening experience, particularly because as a youngish Southport chap with a passion for journalism I've grown up with the Champion, reading the thousands of stories it's run over the years, delivering it through neighbours' front doors, getting valuable work experience in its editorial department and - for nearly three years - working at Clare House as one of its journalists. Looking back over hundreds of front pages stretching all the way back to the early 1990s was - quite literally - delving through the local history of Sefton and West Lancashire.




Launched in response to plans to sell off Southport newspaper The Globe to a rival publisher, the Champion was published for the first time on March 2, 1994, by a team who resorted to using hotel rooms, wallpaper pasting tables and a garden shed to get that first edition out. Yet despite facing the challenges of the internet being invented, a credit crunch and plenty of challenges faced by the regional press as a whole the Champion series now encompasses seven different printed newspapers, the Champnews.com website, and the ChampXtra enewsletter, launched last year.


In the special supplement I've looked back at some of the biggest stories which have appeared in our pages since 1994, and how the Champion covered them at the time. With stories from our early days in the mid 1990s right up to last year's Royal Wedding, it's a heady blend of the news and views which have helped shape the area's favourite newspaper over the years. The supplement also takes a closer look at some of the businesses who've appeared in our pages - in 1994, we launched the first edition of the Champion to give our readers and businesses a voice, and you responded by supporting us and helping us to become the award-winning series of newspapers we are today.

Hope you enjoy reading it...

Open publication - Free publishing - More 18th

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WHAT do you mean when you say the word "local"?

That's what I've been wondering this week after a top media academic put it to me that the term "hyperlocal" has only been invented because "local", as a convenient catch-all, has completely lost its currency. Which, given that I work in the world of local newspapers, has got to be worth considering.

Said academic, former Times and Telegraph man turned internet entrepeneur Greg Hadfield, said at a very enlightening speech at MediaCity last week that what traditional media considered local had become too loosely defined. I know what he means; when I was a student in Carlisle, turning to BBC North East and Cumbria's "local" TV coverage - or ITV's Border News - was an exercise in patience, with most of the headlines coming in from Newcastle and Sunderland rather than where I was actually living at the time. For local news there was one place I turned and still do for the latest from our friends in the north; the excellent News and Star.

So how local should local be? A town? A council ward? A neighbourhood? Your street? That's the answer the traditional media and the newbie citizen journalists are battling it out between themselves for answers, and I guess a lot of it's down to what your audience considers as its local identity. All I can say is that The Champion's main experiment in hyperlocal news to date - the print rather than online ChampLocal newsletters - were scrapped because they weren't greeted with the same response The Champion itself does. Something which itself speaks volumes; arguably for local/hyperlocal news to really work, it has to be sustainable in the way all too many hyperlocal projects at the moment aren't. It can't just be money for nothing.

But what do you consider local? Is what you get in The Champion local enough? I'd love to know. Drop me a line at david.simister@champnews.com or give the newsdesk a call, because you, the readers, are at the heart of what we do.

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EVEN if the buildings weren’t from the near future, the prices at the Salford multi-storey were. A future where parking for just over four hours costs a scary £7.50.

It was the first time I’d travelled to MediaCity UK – the new and very shiny home for the region’s broadcasters and web whizzes – to get a glimpse into the way the UK’s digital media could be going from an assortment of experts from both sides of the Atlantic. Given I was brushing shoulders with BBC executives, university academics and iPad addicts in possibly the media-savvy place in the north west, there’s probably worse places to start.

The buzzwords for the day were Social, Local, and Mobile – or SoLoMo, if you speak fluent Journalese – with the experts’ emphasis very much on how to get today’s news out to the iPad/iPhone generation. Easier said than done if you want to make enough money out of it to make it a sustainable media business!

There were all sorts of smart ideas on how the media should stay relevant in an increasingly digital age, with everyone from Sky, Guardian Media Group and the University of Central Lancashire’s Journalism department coming up with their own ideas on how to crack the conundrum. While it was obvious there were lots of different ideas floating around I think there was one thing absolutely everyone could agree on; that the media as we know is evolving and changing faster than ever before.

How does it all affect The Champion and you, the reader? Well, I’m keen to embrace quite a few of the ideas I’ve learned about at MediaCity, particular with our website in mind, but what surprised quite a few of the experts I got chatting to is that The Champion as a printed title is actually bucking the trend on what most of them assumed was a given across the media.

Our print circulation is going up.

As I left the conference to pay my £7.50 parking charge, an analogy alluded to by speaker Francois Nel struck a particularly poignant note. He told us that a shoe company is not there to make money – it is there to make shoes, and the money is a result of it making shoes. To succeed, the product and the people come first.

No matter whether it’s a small company like The Champion or one as big as the BBC, media companies in that sense are exactly the same.

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HAD a great phone call from one of our West Lancashire readers this morning.

The lady, evidently from the more traditional elements of our readership, had a church-related story she was keen to see in next week's edition of The Champion but had no time for a newfangled fax or email; she wanted to do it the old fashioned way, and relay the copy to me over the phone, word for word. Not a problem, I said.

But she wasn't terribly convinced. Could one of these modern day journalists, ensconced with Facebook and Twitter, really have the shorthand skills necessary to be able to take down a small essay, word for word?

I could tell, as she read out her carefully-written church event notice, that she had a quiver of doubt in her voice, nervous I was going to get a crucial element of the story wrong. In fact, she was so nervous she demanded I read it back to her, over the phone, just to check I hadn't missed any words out. It was like being back in my university shorthand classes.

So she was pleasantly surprised when I read her announcement back to her, word for word, fact for fact. The quiver in her voice shifted to a tone of slight surprise.

"Obviously you're good at your shorthand then," she commented. "Well done. It's good that journalists can still take a good note."

I didn't dare tell her my shameful secret; that none of it was taken in Teeline, the shorthand of choice if you're hoping to get yourself noticed as a qualified journo. It's not that I can't do it - I can - but over the years I've developed my own equally messy shorthand system which (for me at least) works even better.

I let her know I'd get cracking on the story for her and wished her every success with the event. Before immediately going back on Twitter...

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THERE were so many copies of The Champion it took a forklift truck to move them.

As part of a little project I've been working on - more of that another time, I promise - I got treated to a rare visit to to the secretive archive where all of the old copies of our papers are kept, to have a nose through the thousands of newspapers which have been put together over the years. That might sound like a bit of a daunting task, I admit, but as someone who's grown up with The Champion it was something I'd secretly really been looking forward to.

I can think of few better insights into the world of local newspapers and how they've changed over the year.

Once I'd got my fingers blackened with decade-old printing ink I'd found plenty of copies of The Champion covering some of the bigger stories I half-remembered from my own childhood; the development of the Ocean Plaza in Southport, or more specifically the lack of it at the time, was a recurring theme through our Southport editions.

In the old Skelmersdale editions was a story that's been given a fresh airing over the past few months - the town's regeneration. The borough council are as keen as ever to get work going but I discovered on my trawl through the archives that there's nothing new under the sun - in fact, one front page from 1998 reported on plans to bring facilities including a new cinema to the town's Concourse shopping centre.

And then there were the things you just don't see in local newspapers any more; the monochrome pictures on the front page splashes, the enormous motoring supplements every time a new registration year arrived, banner plugs along the lines of "Your News + Your Views = The Champion" and Britpop puns in the picture captions (no, really). One particular irony was the presence of a Champ Extra, a printed column focusing on almost exactly the same additional news pieces as our online ChampXtra enewsletter!

Looking through The Champion archives was enlightening and - thanks to the amount of binders and piles of newspapers involved - absolutely shattering.

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