It’s a subject I’ve returned to often and one I have an avowed interest in. Lantern were one of the first stations to give me freelance shifts. I can’t say my reporting was that great (North Devon’s never been an area I’ve ever been overly familiar with) but the station got by.

One thing always struck me though: just how much pride North Devon took in their station. Mention you worked for Lantern and you were treated like royalty.

Lantern may have been a very small station in comparison to its sister stations and the news was often less than scintillating, but it knew its target audience and its target audience appreciated with plenty of love and respect.

In many ways North Devon was one of the more unusual patches a station could have to deal with. It’s not uncommon for local stations to be based around one major town or city and cover the surrounding rural area, but Lantern was almost completely rural, with several towns but none of them quite big enough to get top billing.

To the Lantern FM audience, Exeter was a world away and Plymouth may as well have been a different planet. Hyperlocal mattered more to North Devonians than the rest of the county, even if the word hyperlocal hadn’t really been coined back then.

Lantern, so we were frequently told, was a profitable station (I guess local advertising was a pretty good way to reach a high dispersed audience). It was well loved. The RAJARs were decent. But it wasn’t exactly a sexy or enticing station.

So, as part of Global Radio’s plans to make local radio more profitable, Lantern was rebranded Heart FM and had more networked programming inserted into it. A small part of Lantern’s soul died, but listeners could still wake up to breakfast DJs Hopps and Chapple and find out where the roadworks were and if any schools were closed, and any of the other day-to-day essentials.

Then, as part of Global’s plans to make local radio more profitable, it was announced that the station formerly known as Lantern would be closing, along with other stations in Plymouth and the South Hams, and one Devon wide superstation would be created, based in Exeter.

Hopps will be departing, as will Chapple. Plenty of other talented local DJs across the Devon Heart network who live in and love their communities are also departing. There’s more networked programming. Listeners in Ilfracombe will probably, rightly, wonder what the hell this new station has to do with their area and when, or if, their northerly coastal town will ever get a mention on air.

Although it’s dangerous to interpret Facebook groups as a general popular groundswell, there’s currently 3,410 members of three separate groups to save Lantern FM. Not bad for a part of the country where internet usage is lower than the average.

There’s a demand for local radio in a place like, for sure. How to get it to pay for itself is another question completely. Former Lantern DJ Ian Starling has set up his own limited reach community station. It will be interesting to see if this continues to grow as disenfranchised listeners turn elsewhere for their local fix.

It’s a situation that’s being repeated across the country as local radio fans protest about Global’s decision to axe several stations. It’s unlikely these protests will have much effect.

As somebody who’s worked for plenty of local radio stations it’s heartbreaking to see what’s being done to once-loved local institutions.

I won’t disagree that local radio occasionally needs a shake up, nor that they may not always be profitable. But the continuing cuts are straight out of the manual of how to lose and alienate local audiences.

In an age of increased listening choice, local, more than ever, is a USP. More networked shows covering a wider area with little relevance to specific communities isn’t the most inspiring recipe for success.

It’s easy to sneer at the music, but this has never been the important bit of local radio. As long as there are familiar and catchy songs then people will listen. What really hooks them in is a good DJ talking about how much fun they had in Bideford a couple of days ago. Or a great ice cream they scoffed at Westward Ho!

A local councillor once told me that the local commercial radio stations were they first places she called when she wanted to highlight a campaign – because we’d talk to the audience in language they understood and could make it feel important to them, locally, she’d always see a huge rise in phone calls the next day from members of the public.

That was several years ago. I doubt if she gets the same response now.

Hopefully something will spring up to replace Lantern FM. And other local radio stations. And other local newspapers, that are also suffering, through a mixture of shifting readership and management incompetency.

Local media is much-maligned. It’s also the lifeblood of a large section of the community. And well loved too. I’m sad to see Lantern’s demise but not, I suspect, half as sad as a good number of people in North Devon.

A football free weekend, right? Wrong. There’s still hundreds of non-league matches being played up and down the country that day, and James Doe has come up with a fantastic idea to support them.

James has declared September 4th Non-League Day and is urging football fans who’d normally watch a higher league game that day to head to a non-league match and show their support for grassroots football.

It’s a fantastic campaign and one that’s so simple you wonder why it’s never been done before.

As somebody who got rather fond of non-league during Exeter’s time in the Conference and still watches the occasional non-league game, I think it’s a cracking idea.

It’s also a great way to reacquaint yourself with the real heart and soul of football, especially if you’re in any way disillusioned with Premier League football. Who knows, you may even get the non-league bug.

Ironically, I can’t make it to any game that weekend due to a longstanding prior commitment, but if you’re in footballing limbo that day, pop down and support your local club.

You can follow James on Twitter (@non_league_day) or sign up to the campaign on Facebook. And if you fancy going to a game but aren’t sure where to head to, feel free to leave a comment here, along with your location (roughly), and I’d be happy to suggest a game for you.

First off, my condolences to Chris and his family. It’s a horrific set of events and one I wouldn’t wish on anybody.

The journalism side of this got me thinking, and reminded me of a story I had to cover when I was working in local news. It wasn’t a death knock, but it was very close, and, again, a lot of the national media hardly covered themselves in glory. Not, I suspect, that this was of much concern to them. Get their story, go, and never have to visit this backwater ever again.

The story itself was equally tragic. In a nutshell a couple in a very small rural town had split up. The wife had turned up to tell the husband she was going to take the kids and leave. That night, the husband killed the two children before setting fire to the house and killing himself.

Of course we didn’t know that at the time – it was one of those rolling news situations where you’re piecing the facts together at the same time as the police, so there was a lot of rumour and conjecture and not a great deal of facts. All I knew was I got a very early morning call (and you know it’s never good news when you get woken up early by the newsdesk) to tell me to get over to the town as it looked as if two children had died.

I was one of the earlier journalists to arrive on the scene. The local ITV reporter was already there and between him and the police, I soon had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

What was also clear was the locals really didn’t want the media anywhere near the town – and there were only a handful of them at this stage. The ITV reporter had warned me that he’d already got a fair bit of abuse from what he thought were friends of the family, and that going softly around the area wasn’t a bad idea (there was only one main road through the place. As I saw, it was a very small town).

It might be a cliche, but rural communities really do feel these kind of events more than urban areas. There’s a much tighter sense of community. In the city, chances are far fewer people would know the deceased and they’d be more willing to speak to the media.

Not in this place.

The handful of us present did the best we could, chatting to locals as sensitively as possible and chatting to the police officers on the ground (generally, as long as you don’t antagonise them too much, the police are fairly amenable in these sorts of situation. They recognise neither of us particularly relish these sorts of jobs).

We’d been doing ok, bar a rather tense moment in the local pub, and I had nearly enough audio to last for the rest of the day, when the circus rolled into town.

First up was a localish reporter who’d drawn the short straw (his patch was the other end of the county and we were at the edge of the paper’s distribution boundary) and wasted no time in antagonising the locals, despite warnings from those of us already present that the mood was a more than a little delicate, and the street next to the scene was particularly unfriendly.

Said journalist then proceeded to go down said street, half pushing his way into a couple homes, repeat knocking on several people who clearly didn’t want to speak to the press, and eventually having to run out of the street after a volley of abuse from somebody he’d pushed too far. When he got his breath back, his response was: “Fuck them. I’m never going to have to come here again.”

Following this journalist came the national media. It was, in the rest of Britain, what could be termed as a slow news day. And then the fun really started.

There was at least one very angry confrontation with a rather large man who’d already got angry with a few of us earlier in the day and whose temper wasn’t being helped by the very pushy journalists.

The local journalists would routinely get elbowed out the way. I’d been lucky enough to get chatting to one resident who knew a lot of the background to the sad story. They weren’t overly keen on speaking on mic, but agreed to do something after filling me in on the details.

Sadly the quiet corner I’d found wasn’t that quiet and midway through our untaped conversation one of the national TV journalists, seeing I’d got a rare talkative local, ran over with their cameraman, tape rolling and literally pushed me out of the way to get their own question in. The interviewee clammed up at that point and things got tense. We got no more out of them.

Eventually the scrum became too much and, after the police press conference, I decided I’d had (and got) enough and there was nothing at the scene that I couldn’t get from phone calls.

Thankfully I left before they started removing the bodies from the house.

While the national media was doing an impressive job of alienating an entire town (by this stage no-one was speaking) I stopped off at the local primary school – I knew someone who knew someone who knew the headmaster, and as we had quite a good reputation locally, he agreed to a brief interview.

Everybody else got a statement the next day. Later, I heard that most of the media decided to hang around the school gates and corner mums collecting their children from school. Mums who were already edgy and unhappy. Apparently there were tears and some very frank exchanging of views.

One small aspect always sticks in my mind. I’d got back to the newsroom and was busy editing my package for the evening bulletin, with Sky News on in the background. Suddenly they flashed up BREAKING NEWS. A family member had been arrested in connection with the incident.

I knew that, and had done for several hours, but hadn’t reported it. Chances were Sky did too. The police had told me, off the record, earlier in the day. The family relative had arrived on the scene in the early hours of the morning in somewhat of a state and it had got to the stage where the police had locked them in the cells for their own good, and to let them cool down and let off steam for a bit. The police had assured me that the family member was nothing to do with the situation and would be released without charge soon.

Sky, I assume, had been sitting on this information for a good three or four hours before flashing it up as an exclusive. My newsroom got a very urgent message from up high – why hadn’t we got this angle? I patiently explained and refused to run it. I’d no wish to make the poor sod’s day any worse. Sure enough, an hour after ‘breaking’ the story, Sky hastily reported, briefly, that he’d been released without charge.

(Oddly enough, the family member rang me a few days later – they’d wanted to find out which places had reported their arrest so they could complain. I had a good chat with them and ended with a promise that I could call them for updates at any time).

In all, it wasn’t a fun experience. I’m sure the family got death knocked by other media outlets, but I’m thankful I didn’t have to do it. And while I generally have a lot of respect for the majority of fellow journalists, I was less than impressed by the way they managed to alienate an entire town in less than 24 hours.

A few weeks later, I had a conversation with a journalist from a local paper about this, and death knocks in general. He said it was something that any good reporter should be able to handle and was just part of the job – we couldn’t stop and let somebody else get the interview because the family may be upset.

I disagreed, and I don’t think my desire to avoid a death knock made me any less of a journalist. The journo I was having a conversation with such he much preferred big crime or tragic stories as they were usually straightforward, but hated council stuff.

Me, I’d become very adept at going through council notes, agendas, minutes and reports with a pen and highlighter and picking out areas of interest that were probably never meant to become interesting. I don’t think it made either of us bad journalists, just better at some areas than others.

I’m aware that I’ve rambled somewhat. Chris’ post sparked off the memory of this story (and mine is most definitely in no way comparable).

I’ve often thought what it would be like to have to be on the receiving end of doorstepping or death knocking. I don’t think I’d handle it very well, which is why I’ve never been overly keen to have to do it. It’s (one of the many reasons) why I can’t imagine anything more unsettling than being of interest because I’ve been on TV, which is why I’ve never had any interest to go the other side of a TV camera.

My current job and areas of journalism interest mean there is pretty much no chance I’ll ever have to death knock; no chance that I will have to sit opposite a mother who has just lost their child in horrific circumstances and ask them how they feel about this, so I can broadcast their words to all and sundry.

And for that I’m eternally grateful.

It’s advice a commenter on the previous post would have been good to consider. I don’t make a habit of running Whois searches on the IP address of every commenter but, given that this place doesn’t get that many trolls or sockpuppets, and given the subject matter, I was a bit curious. Turns out the IP address was from one of the (many) PR agencies who’ve pitched me this World Cup.

Fail.

My first instinct was to blog about it. Look at me! I’ve found another PR person not getting online! I can call them out and it’ll add to the legions of PR fails!

Yes, that would have been fun. But what would it really achieve, in all honesty?

I’m not in the habit of naming and shaming – it’s always struck me as a little counter productive. And, frankly, it the grand scheme of things immature PR leaves childish anonymous comment on insignificant blog isn’t really up there with war crimes.

After sleeping on it, I felt less comfortable with the idea of outing the agency. After all, one employee isn’t representative of the whole company.

The thought also occurred that if this had been a piece of journalism for publication I would have at least made an effort to get the accused’s side of the story before going anywhere near the publish button. And if, as I’ve often said, bloggers aspire to be journalists, then they should hold themselves to the standards journalists have as well. Even if journalists regularly fall short of these themselves.

So I emailed the director of the agency, who emailed back promptly, with an invitation to talk over the issues on the phone, which I did.

And I now consider the matter to be at an end, and I’m really satisfied with the response (and no, I didn’t demand any action against the perpetrator. It’s not my place to tell a company how to conduct their own HR).

Why? Because ten minutes on the phone was productive. The director came across as very switched on and took the issues seriously. I came away with a very favourable impression.

What’s more, we both agreed to keep each other’s contact details. They’d contact me if they thought it would be useful, but would also take me off the general mailing list, and I know that there’s somebody at the agency I can contact if I’m writing stories on certain topics, which I may well do in the future.

A win-win situation, really.

So, what’s the lesson (other than don’t try and post childish comments on a blog during work time).

While there’s a lot wrong with PR, there’s also a lot of good, sensible people working hard in the industry, doing their best to make connections with bloggers. And to a certain extent they have to tread on eggshells while doing this.

A wrong move with the wrong blogger, no matter how well meaning or unintentional and you can find yourself passed around Twitter, mocked by all and sundry. There’s no guarantee that if you catch the blogger on a bad day with a bad move, they won’t take umbridge and blog about it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with calling out bad practice, when appropriate.

But it did make me stop and think. How many bloggers have burned bridges or got themselves a reputation for being difficult for happily blogging PR fails.

Yet could they have improved things and actually developed a good long-term relationship with a good contact if they’d taken a step back and tried to resolve things behind the scenes first. It’s not as if anybody was going to beat them to publishing it, in a lot of cases.

One line from an old news editor of mine always sticks in my mind – “[Competitor x] may be first. But we’re always going to be right.” In other words, I’d always prefer to take a while longer to establish and verify the facts rather than rush to publish. Today was no different. I’m glad I did.

I consider today’s conversation confidential, although I think it’s worth quoting one line from my conversation. As an agency, I was told, we’re committed to treating bloggers the same as journalists.

I like that, I think it’s a good attitude. It’s something I’ve said roughly the same in the past, although you obviously have to make allowances for the different medium you’re working with.

And although bloggers are very good at calling out bad journalism, both blogs and journalists can be even quicker to call out bad PR – whether it’s justified or not – or calling out anything they consider wrong in general.

I’ve seen plenty of examples over the last couple of years where bloggers and PR have got into very public spats over something that has always struck me could have been dealt with without having to go public.

There’s a lot to be said for making an effort to build contacts and relationships rather than losing it quickly (although equally you can say that PR in general could avoid a lot of these issues if people from the industry didn’t continue to make elementary errors).

I’ve always maintained that others should be treated with the same respect you’d hope to be treated. I’d like to hope that, God forbid, should I make a similar fail one day, that the blogger has the good grace to contact me and give me a chance to talk over the issue before hitting publish.

I’d be interested in hearing your views on this one. Do you think bloggers hit publish too quickly? Should they blog first and ask questions later? Or is it only fair? What would you have done?

I don’t think there are any right answers, personally, but I’m very glad I took the time to contact them. Given the chance I’d much rather try and work on developing a relationship rather than kill it before it had the chance to succeed or fail.

Quite simply, judging by the majority of pitches than have landed in my inbox, general PR from companies looking to take advantage of the World Cup has ranged from poor to truly shocking. Most have made no attempt to remotely engage.

At least one email has been so laughably bad, I’ve sent it on to friends and colleagues so they can marvel that, yes, some agencies are still much worse than had previously been imagined.

I’m not in the habit of naming and shaming, but at least one agency has come close to me breaking this general self-imposed rule. Not that they’d know – judging from their emails I’d be shocked if they’ve even ever bothered to read anything I write.

Here’s a few selected highlights:

• An email starting with the words: “Hi, we’ve created some virals for your blog.” No, no you haven’t.
• An fairly obvious copy and paste email email urging me to cheer on England three days after they were knocked out.
• A general assumption that I was a fanatical England fan. I support Wales. This is fairly obvious.
• An email asking me to send a copy of my publication to agency x if I ran a piece on the product they were hawking.
• The PR who sent a pitch during the opening game. We had better things to do at that stage.
• Several emails that had nothing to do with the World Cup, other than a hastily added sentence to include a reference. You’re fooling no-one here.
• All bar two emails started with ‘Hi’. Not ‘Hi Gary,’ or any attempt to make it personal. Just ‘Hi’.
• One insinuating I would be so desperate for content during a two day break of football that their pitch was the only way I could keep my readers hooked.
• Hardly any emails made any reference to the fact I write for half a dozen places at the best of times. It was always ‘for your blog’. Do they mean this place and its five readers?

There have been two exceptions to this general trend – two well-crafted, engaging pitches where the PR had clearly read the type of things I write about, read my profile and made a general effort.

They were the only two I replied to – and if they’re reading, you know who you are, and I’m sorry I’ve not been able to write about the information in your pitch. It was simply a case of lack of time. But I really did appreciate your emails and the personal touches. If I was using good examples of how to pitch to bloggers, these would be among them.

Speaking to other bloggers, the trend seemed to be depressingly similar. They too had received endless pitches from PRs labouring under the illusion that we were so excited about the World Cup, we’d write about any old tat that mentioned it.

They were half right. We’ve all been very excited about the World Cup.

I’d even go as far as to say that once the World Cup kicked off, unless the pitch was something very pertinent to the general narrative of the tournament, then football bloggers should have been the last people to pitch to.

The reason: we’ve all got more than enough to write about. With three games a day for the first two weeks, and then a couple more a day for a week after that, it’s really not as if any football blog is struggling for content during the World Cup. And as most bloggers generally have day jobs, unless it’s a pretty spectacular, the pitch is likely to be deleted, assuming it even gets read.

The really smart PRs – and there have been a few – would have got their campaigns and pitches in at least a couple of weeks in advance of the tournament. That stage is a bit of a deadzone, with a lack of any content or decent talking points.

And – on a small tangent – twofootedtackle’s Chris expressed amazement that I’d received so many general PR pitches. I’m such an infrequent writer, and aren’t fixed to any specific publication that I’m not an overly easy writer to target. Quite often the editors of the places I write for receive the same release, which is a bit of a waste of an email. There’s really not a great deal of point sending me a general release at the moment.

I’d like to stress that I’m definitely not PR-unfriendly – quite the contrary, if it’s a well-written, personalised and targeted pitch then I’ll make an effort to write about it, although this isn’t always possible. I’ve written some very interesting and enjoyable pieces off the back of good pitches.

But as somebody who has done plenty of blogger outreach, and still does the occasional bit in this area, I’m far less tolerant of badly done pitches, especially because I know that this stuff really isn’t rocket science and really isn’t hard to do well.

And at the end of the day, I can just hit the delete button. The guys at the brand who’ve paid for blogger outreach – and have no doubt been told that x number of blogs have been hit – are throwing thousands of pounds down the drain for incredibly bad PR and probably don’t even realise it.

UPDATE:

And the day this is published, the PR company I’ve already requested remove me from their mailing list, sends me another email inviting me to something I don’t want to go to. In Manchester. Next weekend. It’s fairly obvious, that I don’t live in Manchester. Or Birmingham, where the same thing I don’t want to go to is happening, but the weekend later. I have plans both those weekends. Exactly how many bloggers do they expect to get to this event? Or are they just box ticking?

My bad. I misread the email. They’re not inviting me to go to the events. Just write an enthusiastic blog post about them. Which is even less appealing.

Also, Chris O, as a final post on the excellent – and soon to be departed – Some People Are On The Pitch blog has done a list of every company that’s pitched them to write about brands that, if you ever read SPAOTP, you’d know they’d have little or no interest in writing about.

Luis Suarez’s handball on the line in the dying moments of Uruguay’s quarter final against Ghana struck me as fascinating in so many ways that I sat down and wrote a rather large essay on it.

That essay can be found at Pitch Invasion. It contains ruminations on moral philosophy and football, economics and football, and what the sport can learn from rules from other sports.

Unsurprisingly, it says a bit more than just Ghana woz robbed.

Let’s put the sentimental aspect of a former GCap employee out of the way for a moment. This is a further blow to teenagers and graduates wanting to start a career in broadcasting.

Local radio, especially commercial radio, is an excellent breeding ground for new talent. In part because of the lean operation that most commercial stations run, anybody on work experience can be expected to get a chance to really immerse themselves and get proper practical experience. It’s great for inspiring a passion in broadcasting.

Similarly, for broadcast journalism graduates, local radio is a fantastic place to start your career (and indeed continue it).

Again, due to the lean operation, you get pitched into everything competing against other local media with far greater resources. It’s one of the best ways to learn the craft in a very short space of time.

As you can guess, I’m a huge fan of local radio. It may have plenty of faults and detractors, but when it’s done well it becomes an essential part of community.

Yes, I’m biased have started my career in local commercial radio, but it was one of the most enjoyable parts of the job when people told you how much they enjoyed listening, how much they appreciated the local chatter and the support for events that other media may well ignore.

And what really made it worthwhile were the times such as when a local councillor told me she’d always make a point of speaking to us first as when we covered an issue, she always had a surge of enquiries on the topic. Local radio can make a difference.

Obviously I’m coming at this from a journalism point of view, but everybody – the DJs, marketing team, everybody, played their part in making a station a hub and barometer of the community.

And that hub has gradually been eaten away at over the past few years.

Yes, we know times are tight. Yes, a parent company of a commercial organisation will always want to do what’s best to protect its bottom line. But that has increasingly come at the expense of what makes these stations unique: local content.

Without it, why would a local audience tune in to a station that plays the same pop music they can find elsewhere yet has little-to-no relevance to their area.

A well-run commercial radio sector is good for the industry, but a sector that cuts back and cuts back, takes away the most unique aspect of their offering and then complains that regulation favours their competitors isn’t going to win fans or listeners.

Interestingly, during my time in the South West, we were always told that the Devon stations were profitable and that they had the greatest local reach, especially in the more rural areas.

Quite whether that’s still the case, I have no idea. And commercial radio is always a lean operation that has to fight to make money.

And there are some DJs with a great local touch who, along with the journalists, know and care about their patch and connect with the audience. A ‘personality’ in a studio in London (or even Exeter, if you’re in Plymouth or Barnstaple) doesn’t quite have the same relevance.

I fear for the future of my old colleagues.

I suspect I may be one of the few people on Twitter lavishing praise on what I experienced that Friday evening.

And, yes, because I like blogging about food – and have been cooking a lot recently as well (prawn massala curry and a delicious moussaka have been particular highlights) – all I really want to do is make a few notes on tonight’s food.

Sadly, because I’m an idiot, I forgot my camera. So no pictures.

Easily the best thing sampled was Mennula’s handmade egg maccheroni with braised shoulder of Scottish lamb, pecorino and summer truffle. I can still taste it now and, despite being stuffed, could happily wolf down another plate.

Perhaps it’s because Italy is still a recent memory in my mind, but this was sensational. The pasta was as good as I’ve had anywhere and the lamb was so tender it melted into the maccheroni and onto my tongue, while the truffle just rounded everything off. What’s more, this was a simple dish with bold flavours that I could imagine tucking into at a decent trattoria. Delicious.

Following close behind was The Modern Pantry’s garlic snails with chorizo mash. Frankly, it would have taken some extremely hard work for me to dislike this dish. The snails were perfectly cooked and the garlic sauce slowly seeped into the meaty mash. A complete winner, and one I might try to do myself at some point.

If you’re talking desserts, then the torta al cioccolato con crema di mascarpone from Theo Randall was the kind of gooey chocolate heaven that makes sharing seem like a chore. We were practically snatching the pot from each other to lick out every last drop. And I’m not generally a dessert man.

Predictably Gaucho’s Argentinian black angus sirlon with humitas chimichurri was exactly what you’d expect from a Gaucho’s steak. Tender, grilled to perfection and bursting with meaty goodness. The chimchurri was a nice addition, with a crisp, fresh corn taste that nicely offset the heavier meat. Definitely one of the best steaks I’ve had over the last year.

The Cinnamon Club’s spice crushed bream with masala mash and tomato lemon sauce was the first dish we tried and set the evening up nicely. The flavours were light and playful, while the mash tingled in the mouth and complemented the fish perfectly. It was a delicious concoction, albeit one that would get outshone as the evening went on.

I enjoyed Awana’s Malaysian slow-cooked beef curry with coconut milk a lot, and there was a nice delicateness to the dish (plus it was easily the largest portion of the evening). But given other offerings on show, it trailed down into ‘quite nice’ on the list of dishes tried. A good quality curry, for sure, and no doubt a decent meal but it didn’t have the same spark as, say The Cinnamon Club’s dish. Not that it was in any way bad. I’d have happily polished it off in the restaurant with no complaints.

Bringing up the end of savoury dishes was the pan-roasted scallop with sardine pie and cauliflower puree from The Grill at The Dorchester. It wasn’t that this dish was bad, but I probably expected a little more given the restaurant’s reputation. There was nothing wrong with the perfectly done scallop nor the pie. Both were nice. But they didn’t quite sit together as a dish and I’ve had many more interesting meals involving scallops than this one.

Finally, the biggest disappointment was Asia de Cuba’s Mexican doughnuts with butterscotch sauce and mojito sorbet. Perhaps the cold rain didn’t help the rather nice sorbet aspect, but the whole dish was a bit nothing. The butterscotch barely made an appearance while the doughnuts were… doughnuts. Nice street food, I suppose, the kind of thing you’d buy on a whim from a trader on the South Bank. Given everything else we’d eaten, it just didn’t do anything for me, which is why we made a bee-line for Theo Randall’s for a second dessert.

Sadly, stomachs and funds running low meant there was no chance to try L’Anima’s rabbit Siciliana, a delicious sounding Stargezer monkfish green pea aubergine and corn curry from Busaba Eathai, and Colony’s half shell grilled scallops with chilli, garlic and yuzu butter.

I’m now heading to bed a happy man and, in what’s possibly an omen, my Sky Plus box decided not to work meaning I can’t watch England’s draw with Algeria. Clearly the food gods have decided there’s no point in spoiling my night.

Look at the screenshot of The Sun’s World Cup Blogger Sweepstake above. If you were a PR who’s been pitching football bloggers recently you might skim the blogs and think “Wow, that is a pretty impressive line up of bloggers. They’ve even managed to get some notoriously hard-to-reach, popular and high-class well respected blogs on board. I wonder how they managed that?”

Short answer: They didn’t.

Sure, they spoke to some bloggers. And some bloggers said no, and left it at that. And then saw their blog in the pages and on the website of The Sun.

Chris Taylor from It’ll Be Off was one of those bloggers. He’s not best pleased:

“I ignored this email, hoping that if I didn’t respond, I wouldn’t be involved in all this savage wankery. But sadly I am. My blog is now apparently Chile, and The Sun have publicised this site in a YouTube clip and on their website. I received another email from them yesterday asking for a little coverage of all this on my blog. So here you go:

I want to make it abundantly clear to everyone: I have nothing to do with this. I want nothing to do with this. And I am furious that the good(ish) name of my little blog, that ceased to be a concern some six months ago, is being used by the worst of all tabloids as some fucking publicity machine for their horrendous sweepstake generating iPhone app, and their even more horrendous newspaper.”

Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion picked up on Chris’ post and it quickly became apparent in the comments that several other blogs, namely Unprofessional Foul, Run Of Play, Sport Is A TV Show, The Onion Bag, and Two Hundred Per Cent were all included without permission as well. And none of them are particularly happy about it.

The Ball Is Round and twofootedtackle (the latter of whom I write and podcast for) agreed to enter into a prediction league but not the sweepstake and didn’t give their permission to be included or to use their logos.

There may well be more.

So what, you may say. Surely the bloggers should be happy that The Sun’s giving them free publicity. Surely they’ll gain readers and make more money and the like from this?

Possibly in same cases, but that isn’t really the point.

I’ve got no problem with the blogs that were happy to take part and are publicising it on their blogs. It’s their choice and they’re happy to take part. That’s fine.

But for those who declined or didn’t respond there’s several reasons why they’re well within their rights to be unhappy.

First off, The Sun has used their logo and blogs without permission. There’s a huge irony here given their owner, Rupert Murdoch’s, criticism of Google for stealing content on their news aggregation pages. So it’s not ok for Google but it’s fine for News International.

[EDIT: Sian asks in the comments what the legality of this is. I'm not entirely sure. It may be that The Sun haven't done anything wrong, legally, in using the names of logos. I'd be fascinated to hear from anybody who is a little more clued in than me on this]

Also, it’s then incredibly cheeky to use these logos when permission hasn’t been given and then email said blogger and mind if they’ll give it a bit of publicity on their blogs.

Secondly, the sweepstake isn’t just a bit of fun. It’s being used to promote an iPhone app. The implication here is that these bloggers, by taking part in the feature, endorse the application.

This leads to the third point. Several of the blogs The Sun’s included have built their reputation on independent, thoughtful analysis and have positioned themselves very much as an alternative viewpoint to the tabloid football frenzy, often criticising these writers. They are a world away from The Sun and often don’t take advertising and will very rarely, if ever, accept PR pitches, especially for something like an iPhone application.

In short, it affects their reputation. Especially if, in Chris Taylor’s case, they have serious ideological differences with The Sun and are critical of their coverage.

Finally, aside from the above, the whole thing is massively patronising to the blogs involved, especially those whose analysis and writing regularly outdoes the national press.

The “aren’t you lucky to be taking part” attitude sticks in the craw, the taking logos without permission then expecting an uncritical link back is sheer chutzpah and the prize for winning this sweepstake – an interview with The Sun’s chief sports writer – is a piece of condescending bone-tossing from old media to new media, to remind bloggers of their place in the hierarchy.

It does a disservice: to the bloggers involved who said no to the original request, to the readers who will assume that these blogs endorse The Sun, and to any hardworking PR who has spent ages building relations with these blogs for a very tiny mention, especially PRs from other papers.

(Disclosure: I have, in the past, been one of those PRs. And I worked hard to ensure any pitches were respectful and non-condescending and were more than just “we’re a big company, write nice things about us”. And I know several PRs from other papers and similar companies and they also adhere to the above.)

The sad thing is, there are so many football blogs that with a bit of time and research they could have probably found 32 bloggers willing to take part AND promote it on their sites. And if their initial blogger outreach was better and there was a better incentive at the end of it, they may have even got more bloggers onside.

Hell, it could have actually been fun, if you were one of those who wanted to get involved. (I wouldn’t have been but it’s not my place to tell other bloggers who they can and can’t endorse).

Instead, we’ve got some very unhappy bloggers.

Not, you suspect, that The Sun care much. After all, they’ve got a World Cup Sweepstake app to promote.

UPDATE: Arseblog makes a pretty decent point in the comments of Tom’s post:

“I’m no huge fan of The Sun but it’s not like we’re being hugely exploited here. To be honest, I don’t think anyone who reads the paper gives the slightest shit about any of the blogs and they’re hardly using our logos to make money.”

Which is a fair point and it’s worth putting perspective on this. It isn’t the end of the world. But it’s also very bad practice, not to mention manners and it’s only by pointing this sort of thing out that you might (ha!) get a change of tune. It’s the principal of it all, innit.

He’s probably right that the majority of Sun readers probably don’t really care or read the blogs involved. I’d love to see them tackle one of Brian Phillips’ wonderfully cerebral pieces at The Run Of Play though.

UD 2: Brian’s pointed out that The Sun don’t even do them the courtesy of linking, so none of them have seen ay surge in traffic. It now appears that they do, through clickable images. Although I can’t find this, but I’ll take Brian’s word for it.

And, as Fredorraci points out in the comments below, despite this being billed as the UK’s top 32 blogs, several aren’t based in the UK. Brian’s site, for a start, is an American site.

It also seems that the total amount of traffic blogs have received through this has varied between nothing and not very much at all.

I only mention because ever since last month there’s been an ongoing debate rumbling on, started mainly by Ed Ceasar’s Sunday Times piece, Hold The Front Page, I Want To Be On It, where he details the lengths – and financial pain – journalism graduates have to go through to get onto a national paper. The picture painted was somewhat bleak and depressing.

Since then, others have contributed to the debate. Adam Tinworth notes that Ceasar is very narrow in focus and omits vast swathes of the media:

“Journalism is a very, very broad church – and it was so long before the internet came along to knock down some walls, pop in an extra transept or two, and generally widen the whole place. Radio, TV, newspapers (local and national), consumer magazines, business magazines, niche subscription-only titles. Online news sites. Blogs. And now the whole, growing world of hyperniche and hyperlocal sites.”

Roy Greenslade partly agrees with Adam on this point, but also says that in his experience, most of his journalism students aren’t interested in these opportunities:

“I may exhort them to think about entrepreneurial journalism. They may learn about successful online news start-ups. They often tell me that mainstream media controlled by big, bad, profiteering moguls is a danger to press freedom. But these so-called “digital natives” still want to work for mogul-owned media.”

And Laura Oliver from journalism.co.uk, who is one of those people who, hopefully, acts as an inspiration to other recent graduates feels that the focus of the journalism postgrad courses are too narrow.

“I graduated from City’s newspaper journalism course in 2007. I applied for graduate schemes on national newspapers along with the rest of my classmates, but largely because I felt I had to. I wanted to work online and for a smaller newsroom/company where I hoped I could make more of a mark. But from day one it felt as if the expectations of our course were national or nothing – and I know from speaking to other recently-qualified journalists that it wasn’t just my course that pushed this view.”

Of course, this is nothing new. I sketched out a few thoughts on the subject just over two years ago and it doesn’t seem like much has changed. If anything, the world for new journalism graduates is even more unclear now than it was back then.

There’s a lot I recognise in all viewpoints. Ceasar’s article is all too depressingly familiar and chimes with the experiences of a lot of friends and colleagues.

Even those who managed to get themselves onto the nationals did so with a hideous level of debt that they’re nowhere near to repaying, and jobs in the market aren’t really offering huge salary boosts. When I applied for a interesting position, with an unspecified level of pay, a while back, I backed out after realising I’d have to take an £8k pay cut. And this was for a relatively senior role.

But then again, there are so many more opportunities, so many more publications online and the boundaries of media and the online world are so vague that willing graduates could find themselves in an excellent job that gave them plenty of training and experience if they’re prepared to think beyond the usual suspects.

And these kind of roles don’t necessarily mean a job on the nationals is beyond you. I’ve met a variety of people from a variety of ages ranges who’ve all made it to national media through completely different means. And yes, while increasingly a postgraduate is necessary, the path post-degree is of varying length and direction.

But for me, still, what it comes down to is money. Or lack of.

No matter how many different opportunities and different media and organisations there are out there, you still have to pay the bills – and your student debts – somehow. And that’s getting harder to do these days.

Not that pay will rise anytime soon. Universities are still churning out a large number of media graduates and even when you take into account the postgraduate courses, the job-to-graduate ratio is still at the stage where employers can keep their wages low – they’ll always be another talented, well-trained eager young thing willing to get that first foot on the ladder.

This doesn’t even take into account the large number of websites and web-only publications. It’s unlikely many of these will pay vast sums of money, either for freelance pieces or permanent positions. Partly because a lot of these places are so small that they don’t have the cash, and partly because there are enough people who’ll happily accept the odd low-pay commission for a bit of extra cash.

Put simply, no matter what the ideal situation is or how many opportunities there are out there, the economics of media pay do not paint a rosy picture.

As for the national positions – the national papers, the BBC TV and radio prime reporting positions, those big name magazines – those with the talent and drive to get there stand a good chance of doing so, although those with some cash stored away and a place to stay in London will always have an advantage. Unpaid internships and just being able to have that flexibility to come into the office helps.

(Not that it’s much different outside of London. I got my first freelance shifts after essentially coming in and working for free every day for a month at my local radio station. Not that I begrudged this – they didn’t force me and I had nothing else to do that summer, plus I really enjoyed the work. But I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t done the unpaid, unrequested work.)

I can’t speak for B2B publications and websites as I don’t have any direct experience of these, although general impressions are these are an excellent place to start on a decent salary, especially if you know finance, economics, or science. They’re also probably a neglected option by many graduates, sadly.

As for locals – and here I definitely disagree – plenty of postgrads I know or have trained with have been happy to go onto the locals. I was delighted to get a job in local radio. It’s an excellent training ground and I’m immensely proud of my work and background there.

As much as anything, just as there were those who were determined to make it to the national media, there were also those who were happy just to get offered a job, or those who saw it as a stepping stone to bigger things.

Locals are a great training ground and, mostly, a great place to work but ultimately, again, money plays a huge part. Salaries are typically low and pay rises are rarely forthcoming.

This is fine when you’re fresh out of university with no commitments and the debt something that can be dealt with at some other time. But eventually you start having to make important decisions like settling down (with a partner), deposits and mortgages, kids, career and just how much disposable income you want.

It’s at that stage where idealism fades into practicality  - and pushing yourself to get onto a national has, perhaps, a slightly more limited window of opportunity, if that’s the way you want to go.

That said, I know so many different people who work for so many different media, all of whom juggle the issues listed above that it’s difficult to generalise, as I’ve inevitably done above. But that doesn’t mean that money doesn’t hang over most media professionals’ heads.

To paraphrase one journalist, as we were chatting post-twofootedtackle podcast about the diversifying new media and the number of people prepared to work for free, “The media is changing and I’m not sure if I like it. I’ve embraced it, but I don’t necessarily like it.”

I think all of us have had that thought at one point or another.