Thursday, August 28, 2008

Save local cricket reporting!

Its come to my attention that Trinity Mirror, who own most of the local newspapers in the west midlands including the Birmingham Post and Mail and the Coventry Evening Telegraph are cutting back staff and will no longer devote time and resource to local cricket from September. Brian Halford and George Dobell, who of course cover the travails of the Bears and Pears, will no longer be dedicated to cricket and may not even continue working at the newspapers.

Sadly another sign of the football-mania that inhabits the media, its all football football football and other sports only make an appearance when things go really well or really badly. I am a big football fan myself before anyone asks but i can't see the point of endless pages of transfer speculation (which are usually nonsense anyway), boring player interviews and columns (which so often arn't written by them anyway) and insider info (so to speak) on groin strains.

Anyway it has been suggested on a forum that e-mail addresses you can write to are steve.dyson@birminghammail.net and Marc.Reeves@birminghampost.net though this is part of a wider cutting back in regional media. The overall trend in many areas in this country for decades now has been the homogenization of the country, getting rid of local brands and replacing with national and international ones. Thats why so many town centres are the same.

Its a blow to county cricket in any case, another example of the game disappearing from mass view. The ECB made a long term mistake when they plumped for Sky only for cricket, now their coverage is great (apart from Bob Dylan Willis) but the game has vanished domestically for so many people. The Premiership Rugby has just negotiated highlights with ITV why couldn't there have been at least T20 highlights somewhere terrestrially? Of course the ECB will say no one apart from Sky bid but maybe they didn't think it was worth it and that Sky were already the preferred choice because of before?

Oh well off to the Home Of Cricket ((c) Nick Knight) to watch the Bears against Derby later...

4 comments:

Simon said...

If it does happen that either or both of the reporters go it will be a really dark day for Warwickshire. I already don't think there is enough reporting, opinion and news on WCCC about (which I guess is how we managed to get an audience!), but if there is even more limited professional coverage no-one will get to find out anything apart from match reports.

I don't think Cricinfo have done a dedicated Warwickshire story all year they didn't rob off George at the Post!

Good blog by the way; I only came across it this week. I especially like Ian Bell Watch!

Kris Davies said...

Thanks very much, i'm still trying to get the "voice" right for the blog.

To be honest print is dead ((c) Ghostbusters), local blogging is the future of local news so maybe this blog and yours are a glimpse of the future? Well i would say that.

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