THE radio news bulletin in the car on the way into Solingen was entirely in German, but I knew it was about the snowy conditions. I understood just two words; “London Heathrow”.

What you see above is a residential street in downtown Solingen, a German city where I'm currently on holiday, in the middle of the same snowy winter we Brits are going through. Don't be fooled by the massive mounds of the white stuff surrounding the parked cars; both the roads and the pavements have not only been gritted, but cleared as well. Something we don't seem to be able to manage in Sefton or West Lancashire.


When it snows in Germany the roads are cleared, the pavements gritted and shoppers put their gloves on and carry on. In Britain the public transport system is paralysed, entire airports shut down, cars crash on icy roads and pensioners slip on the frozen pavements. It’s bizarre, but we Brits as a nation just can’t cope with snow!

Last year I saw first hand how the entire region was caught out by an unusually high amount of snow. Searching questions were asked of the Government and the local councils, who promised that the scenario where entire towns were left ungritted wouldn’t happen again. It just has!

In England I’ve seen buses and trains cancelled, roads which look more like ice rinks, and even milk deliveries being carried out by tractor. Here, the most dramatic things I've seen are a Smart buried nose-deep into the snow, and a very elderly Citroen 2CV going about its business on snow chains.

The way everyone in Germany gets the roads cleared and just carries on, completely unfazed, never ceases to amaze me.

Compared to the chaos we’ve got, the Germans don’t know how lucky they are.

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SO we're snowed under. With phone calls, emails, and letters that is.

The moment the flakes starting falling last Friday afternoon, I knew this week - the week of our combined Christmas Champion - was going to be a busy one. The only thing I didn't know was just how busy.

Trying to condense dozens of phone calls and emails from angry residents furious with a lack of gritting where they lived, press statements from local authorities doing their best to explain why and updates on a public transport system crippled by the cold conditions into just 700 words is pretty much impossible. But I tried anyway.

Everyone's got their own story of how they've been affected by the snow and ice, but among the worst cases we've heard are:

* Milk deliveries in Parbold being carried out by tractor, due to the roads being impassable for milk floats

* Taxi drivers in Skelmersdale being forced to abandon their routes over the weekend for health and safety reasons, losing around £500 each in the process

* Ormskirk's traditional market being reduced to a single stall last Saturday due to traders not being able to make it into the town centre

* Crosby recording temperatures as low as -17 degrees celsius over the weekend

* Traffic in Crossens, on the outskirts of Southport, grinding to a halt after a Sainsbury's delivery lorry lost control and skidded near the Plough roundabout

* Police officers in Ormskirk digging the snow to enable elderly and disabled residents trapped by heavy snowfall to leave their homes safely

* Major train disruptions on the Merseyrail network, including a train fire in Freshfield on the Northern Line

* Ongoing cancellations of Arriva's bus services in parts of Sefton and West Lancashire

But despite the best efforts of the politicians, the local councils and the public transport companies the real stars we've seen so far are in fact you, the readers. For every story from a resident infuriated about how bad the situation's been, we've heard another from stricken residents who've had their bacon saved by kind-hearted neighbours.

And you've sent us all your pictures in, just to let us know what Sefton and West Lancashire looks like. If you believe in the old adage of every picture says a thousand words, just click the link above and see just some of the scores of pictures we've been sent in.

For keeping us in the loop, we can't thank you enough.

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YOU might remember that earlier this year I had a go at creating my own car magazine.

Life On Cars, in magazine form, was a sort of celebration for my motoring stuff surviving a year in one of the rearmost sections of The Champion, being the bit you reach if you've survived news, features and entertainment and not decided to head straight for the sports section.

Despite only one copy of that first edition ever being printed off (which now lives under lock and key in my portfolio) it got such a good response off petrolheads who read it that I decided leaving it a year would be easy. So I did another.

And now, another two months after the follow-up, I've done the difficult third issue.

Aside from giving me another opportunity to do something I love - rabbiting on about cars - I think the Life On Cars magazine is actually a genuinely useful editorial exercise, because not only does it give me a chance to keep my page designing skills up to scratch, it's also a great way to improve our Champion online content. It is, after all, something you can't get in The Champion newspaper and so you have to go online to read it.

I've just one sad admission to make; although a lot of the content's written up either for The Champion motors section or for GR8Life Magazine, the page layouts are all done outside the office, in my own time. As much as I hate to admit it, the magazine is created simply because I like doing it.

Hopefully, you'll enjoy reading it then:

Open publication - Free publishing - More automotive

P.S: Like everyone else, I'm aware that the entire region's covered in snow as I write, but I haven't forgotten about it. More on www.champnews.com and in the paper next Wednesday (December 22, 2010

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WITHOUT further ado, I'd like to introduce the latest addition to The Champion newsroom.

As you've probably already noticed, it's coming up to Christmas and - in between working on stories for our special Christmas Champion, due out next Wednesday - we spent a carefully considered few minutes putting up and decorating a tree for the newsroom.

Unfortunately, unlike the beautiful creation our colleagues downstairs at Linedancer Magazine came up with, our tree came without anything to stand it on, meaning we've had to use typical editorial ingenuity instead.

Look carefully at the shot above and you'll spot that not only is the base a cunningly-disguised waste paper bin - that single strand of tinsel has everyone fooled - but that it's stood in front of a concrete pillar because tying the two together using the Christmas lights was the only way to stop it from falling over. Health and safety people look away now; in a way, The Champion building itself is somehow structurally integral to our tree!

One of the kinder members of our production team described the result of our efforts as "having all the elegance of a car crash". Personally, I actually think it's quite arty, in the same way that Tracey Emin's unmade bed was considered art. Everyone enjoyed a celebratory mince pie in its honour, with the notable exception of me, because I'm working on a feature on the joys of not eating mince pies.

Merry Christmas.

P.S: A special mention should go to Edge Hill University lecturer Marc Stanton, who not only read my article about how disagreed with his views on the future of local newspapers, but actually went to the trouble of ringing me up about it.

In the interests of fair play, I ought to point out that he was keen to stress he believes in quality regional journalism, agrees that newspapers and websites can and should compliment one another and that I should pop over to Edge Hill in Ormskirk for a friendly natter and a coffee.

Consider my cap doffed.

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I COULDN'T not respond to a fine bit of local newspaper coffin-nailing carried out by an Ormskirk media academic the other day.

Although I've had the weekend to mull over comments made by Edge Hill lecturer Marc Stanton in which he says that the days of traditional paid-for newspapers are numbered and that the future of free newspapers - papers, don't forget, like The Champion - are "in the balance", I'm still struggling to understand them.

Let's get the things he and I both agree on out of the way first; crucially that the ye olde idea of there being print, broadcast and radio journalists is gradually dying out, because all these mediums now cross over, particularly via that newfangled Internet I'm always going on about. I trained as a print reporter but really I think of myself as working in Convergance Media, simply because I'll be expected to write for a newspaper one moment, coordinate our website the next, and then either record a Podcast or shoot some video footage.

It's also no secret that The Champion is launching a radio station in January, which will add another string to our bows. All these things working together, I have absolutely no doubt, is a good thing.

But then Marc - a man who, I should point out, I haven't had the privelige of meeting yet - start to head off in completely different directions. While I fully respect his years of experience in the media, I just can't agree from my own experiences with his assertion that our days are numbered.

Marc's views on the media would have been entirely appropriate had he been speaking in 2008, a torrid time when titles across the land were abandoned, scores of journalists found themselves shut out and - worst of all - communities suddenly found themselves without a voice. It was, however, in the middle of a particularly nasty recession and while I know that even today lots of journalists are having a tough time, the industry is slowly fighting back.

Consider this: in the past year more newspapers have been created than killed off, so much so that a now-infamous analyis by Clare Enders that half of the country's titles would be gone within five years has now been scaled back.

Why aren't we covering the parish councils? Apart from the none-too-small problem of there being so many of them, the industry as a whole has had to slice back its operations, often to the point where sending reporters out for the afternoon would compromise stronger stories. But the fact is the proper newspapers will, in most cases, still beat the so called 'citizen journalists' to the real stories.

Journalism lecturers are, naturally, lecturers and therefore clever enough to know exactly the problems being faced by local newspapers, but also about how bright ideas can be used to help tackle them. The idea that the Internet will kill newspapers is about stupid as watching MTV for the first time and deciding that radio has had it.

Local newspapers aren't dying. They're just changing for the better.

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NOT the dreaded manflu - though its devastating effects were proven by a leading panel of men some years ago - but something, I fear, with symptoms far worse.

Currently my sentences are punctuated with coughs which sound like a rusty chainsaw being started up, which are in turn bookended by sneezes which feel as though England's entire supply of phlegm has been stockpiled up my nostrils, mixed with a touch of gunpowder and then detonated at random intervals. 'Tis, readers, a particularly unpleasant bug.

Naturally, being a bloke, the worst part isn't the illness itself, but the sheer boredom of not knowing how long it's going to last. I made the mistake of Facebooking my plight last night and openly wondering how long it's going to be before I get better, which one particularly tactless mate either completely misunderstood or saw as a perfect opportunity for a spot of piss-taking.

"You don't lose weight over night," came the slightly cruel reply.

Anyhow, the upshot of all this is that - as much I don't want to be - I'm off work for the second day on the trot, partly because I know I'm too ill to be of any use there and partly because I don't want to infect anyone else, lest Sefton and West Lancashire loses its entire stock of Champion reporters to the snots.

I've done my best to make myself useful by doing what updates on champnews I can from here, at my bedside, but it does beg a question I hadn't thought of; what about when I go on holiday?

The next time I know I'm going to be away is the couple of days either side of Christmas, when I head over to Germany in what's becoming an annual melee of mulled wine and conversations I don't understand. Despite the web being a worldwide thing, I'm going to find getting access to the Internet - not least the stories in The Champion newspapers - particularly tricky from an bar in Düsseldorf, which means living up to the With Daily Updates bit you might have spotted on the site might be a bit difficult.

It's depressing to think that Julian Assange can be arrested in London after winding up the US Government and being wanted by the Swedish police and yet still manage to upload pretty much every major news story from around 50 countries on a daily basis, yet I'm finding the logistics of updating a regional website on a daily basis over the festive break a tad tricky, and all because I'm going on holiday to another EU country an hour's flying time away.

So far I've had neither the intelligence nor the insight to work this one out. Then again, I am ill.

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MANY years ago, as a humble student on a journalism course in Carlisle, I made a vow never to get a story on a newspaper's front page.

In between recovering from bad nights out and saving up for more bad nights out I considered myself a features writer rather than a reporter, and as a result considered getting the university newspaper's centre spread far more prestigious than the front page itself. How things have changed!

Although I still do lots of features, largely for GR8Life, I do aim for and get lots of front page stories. What I've never managed until this week's edition of The Champion, however, is getting a story in a bit of the paper I'd never usually go anywhere near.

The back page, which means I've finally written a decent lead for a paper's sports section.

Sport, as a rule of thumb, is something I neither understand nor particularly care about, and I only know who Gerard and Benetiz are because there are other members of our reporting team who love all things sport, particularly football. So getting a back-page piece means I've treaded into territory never previously ventured into before.

It was, in fact, the scuba diving piece I mentioned yesterday which caught the editorial eye, and only then because the ongoing cold weather has meant many of the region's football matches have had to be cancelled. I guess it makes a change from reading about the Southport and Burscough teams are up to, but whether the hardened sports enthusiasts will like it is yet to be seen!

It's nice to get something on the back page for a change but given the choice I'd still rather stick with what I know about; news, features, and motors. And no, I don't know what the offside rule is.

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SINCE my last blog about one man's quest to get fit I've been rather busy, as you can from see the shot above.

The story picks up one day after I left off, with an appointment with Southport-based dietitian Amy Dunne, who went through with me exactly where my largely junk food-based diet was going wrong and how to bring about changes for the better, but in easily-digestible chunks. I'm still not a fan of salad, but it's amazing what a spot of fruit here and there can do.

She also suggested that - even though it's horrendously slippy at the moment - I get off my backside, leave the office and go for a walk for ten minutes each lunchtime. It might not sound like much, but it all adds up to a big improvement in the amount of exercise I do (up, I'm afraid, from very little indeed).

But those steps on their own didn't lead me to being sat on the bottom of the Nye Bevan swimming pool in Skelmersdale, pictured, in what has to be the most fun feature I've done in ages. Thanks to the efforts of the Phoenix Sub Aqua Club, a couple of mates and I have found out what it takes to be a scuba diver, and how easy it is to have a go yourself. I won't reveal too much just yet, but if you check out Wednesday's Champion how much of a laugh - and a way to keep fit - it really was.

Finally, I've decided to overcome my fear of gyms and take out a membership, with the Victoria, based on Southport's Promenade. After a trial visit last Sunday, I discovered it wasn't filled with the Lycra-clad Men's Health readers I'd long suspected were the only people to frequent gyms, so I've decided to take the plunge and put my money where my mouth is. Whether it'll make a difference is anyone's guess.

As The Champion's resident fat bloke I reckon it'll be much more revealing to see whether it'll make a difference to me, rather than our more slender members of the team, so I'll continue being the unlikely guinea pig for all things fitness.

It'll make a good read, and it's a handy benefit if I end up healthier as a result.

David's piece on scuba diving will be published in this week's Champion, due out on Wednesday, December 8.

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A FUN game I'm playing at the moment is challenging a couple of my Champion-reading mates to see if they can spot anything new with our website.

Even at Champion HQ we know that champnews, the paper's online sister, hasn't quite been looking its best over the past few months, so I've been asked to use what I've learned from the weird online world of blogging and tweeting to beaver away in the background and do my best to make it a website worth going on.

I'm the first to admit it's not the most polished product I've ever seen, but that doesn't mean I can't do what I can to make it better. Among the things I've been working on are:

1) Making sure the website is updated every day - including weekends - without fail. Too many people keep telling me they go straight to Southport GB when they go online for their local news, and while I make no secret of what I think of some of their stories, even I accept it is a rolling source of news items. News happens 24/7, not just on the Wednesday when the paper comes out.

2) Better promotion of blogs, including ones we at The Champion write and a selection of ones written by people across the region. Our original blogs page, to be honest, looked a mess and was badly out of date, but the much better replacement means you can read thought-provoking thought from all sorts of people in but a click.

3) More videos and Podcasts, including ones from outside organisations, like the local authorities and educational establishments like Edge Hill in Ormskirk. It means you can see and hear the news in a way that's (obviously) not possibly in the paper itself, and we're all for more of it.

4) A new contacts list. Do you know who our local reporter if you live in Formby, in Maghull, or in Ormskirk? You will when the new one's finished, and it'll be easy to get to if you're online.

5) More in the way of sports and reviews, because we know you like both. Watch this space.

6) Picture galleries, starting with one we did of the Ormskirk Christmas lights switch on last weekend. We take lots of pictures, so it'd be a shame not to share them with you.

7) More exclusive online-only content, like the Life On Cars motoring magazines I do occasionally. It's a common complaint that lots of papers are too small to squeeze the really big features in, but with the web, that's not a problem.

8) More plugs in The Champion newspaper, which still gets delivered to 140,000 homes nearly every week. What's more, if you do fire up the computer - and if you're reading this chances are you already have - you know everything with our name on it has been written by proper journalists, not shady online bloggers with stupid pseudonyms and a penchant for defamation and poor grammar.

So go on, give our website our go, and let us know if you like it. And if you don't, tell me why and I'm happy to see what I can do.

Trust me, I'm a journalist!

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LUCKILY for the authors of a supposed "news" piece attacking both The Champion and our friends at the Ormskirk Advertiser, I've calmed down a bit now.

For reasons that'll become obvious in a moment, I can't share with you with you the exact details, but a call came in yesterday, just as today's Champion was being put to bed. It was from the reporter for another news outlet - though I hesitate to call it that - demanding a comment from us.

The story? That - following us failing to get out to Ormskirk for a meeting held on Monday, by far and away our busiest day of the week in terms of stories - we were being accused of not caring about what goes on in the town. As a humble reporter, it's my job to ask for comments rather than give them out, but our clearly annoyed editor told the caller he had "absolutely nothing" to say.

Obviously the Ormskirk Advertiser thought the same because their editor wasn't prepared to comment either on a story which breaks one of the last taboos of journalism; no matter what you think of them, you never write pieces which exist solely to slag off the opposition. For that reason alone I've spared this reporter's identity because I like to think I remain professional enough not to name 'n' shame someone simply because I've judged them to have written a poor story, but it does change any lingering impression I might have had of the story being run by a media organisation in the proper sense.

I'll continue happily chatting with reporters and staff at The Advertiser, because I respect the fact that they're properly-accredited and accountable to the likes of the Press Complaints Commission (the fact they're nice people also helps), but as a matter of principle I won't be speaking to the author of the article anymore, because I no longer consider him a proper journalist.

Yes, journalism's about rivalry, but it isn't about dirty tricks.

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