Polly "Hatchet face" Toynbee on local papers.

On the orders of Guardian Media Group, from the compassion of her black heart on behalf of Grauniad Towers, which is losing money in part due to Polly large wage. Polly pleads with us to support local papers:

Another day, another battery of bad newspaper news. Yesterday Northcliffe cut 1,000 journalists from its local newspapers after a 37% fall in advertising revenues. Last week the Guardian Media Group axed 153 from its local newsrooms. The deeply indebted Johnston Press has the Yorkshire Post and Scotsman up for sale. Pick up the phone to call editors and listen to the anguish. Three years ago profits were plentiful: within three months all locals will be deep in loss, most nationals on the same trajectory.

Gosh so I might lose the local arserag, oh well shit happens. But as she asks oh so nicely I will carry on buying a paper, a paper that has also let staff go.

So will down my local newsagent's tomorrow to buy The Daily Mail!

What Polly misses in her article is that businesses adapt or die. That's it, cruel it may be but an old business model will fail after a set amount of time. Maybe its time for The Grauniad to look at its costs and in these hard times look at reducing them, maybe starting with one Polly Toynbee.

Mr Eugenides covers this as well:

Don't say you haven't been warned, friendo. You'll wake up one morning, maybe not too long from now, and they'll be gone; no Polly Toynbee, no George Monbiot, no Seumas Milne; noJoseph Harker, no Richard Gott, no Jonathan Steele. They'll all be gone, and it'll be your fault.

Do you really want that on your conscience?

Oh I think I can live with it. :-)

**Update Paul Flynn MP(left) him of minor stroke, bad taste jokes about farmer suicides and losing a libel case fame; has also been talking about this as well. He mentions the Mail & The Sun's woes with some glee.

That Flynn hates it is for me is enough reason in of itself to buy the Mail. Although The Sun can fuck off whilst it has David "I get a fucking boner thinking about all the money I will make from ID cards" Blunkett MP on the payroll.

Although he said bugger all about The problems with The Grauniad, well bless the doddery oaf is in his seventies now and maybe getting forgetful in his dotage. 

But the bit that amused me was this he said with regards The South Wales Argus:

Parliament had a debate about the plight of our local regional papers. They are in mortal danger. I know one that has never tried the experiment of political balance. They employ a columnist who writes the stuff that gave fascism a bad name. Yet still. We would miss them. What would we have to throw against the wall in disgust?

I believe I know which columnist he is talking about and I am sure that Mr Mike Buckingham at the South Wales Argus, er the unnamed columnist has already done a glowing eulogy for when Mr Flynn shuffles off this mortal coil.

I have and I am just awaiting Mr Flynn to show the good grace and actually die so I can use it.

Maybe it is time to support the South Wales Argus a bit more often.

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