Lesson one in editing a newspaper must surely be to put the most important stories on the front page and to pick out the most important of these with the biggest font.
Having seen the most recent edition of the County Press, you’d be thinking that 18 people objecting to the forthcoming Madness gig was the weeks most important news event on the Island.
The CP gave it a quarter of their front page (but apparently not enough space to have the balancing quotes of the event promoter on there. These were tucked away on page eight).
The national and international press appeared to think that the biggest story on the Island last week was the protest at the loss of jobs at Vestas. Others might think that the IW Council revealing that it was doubling it’s costs for their grand PFI scheme was equally important.
Different reporting styles
With VB selling tickets for the Summer Madness gig, we’ve of course kept an keen eye on how it’s reported elsewhere on the Island.
Many of the County Press reports have felt questioning, to say the least, while people like IW Radio have been fully behind it.
As a side note – we wrote to Jon Moreno, who wrote the first piece on the Madness gig, asking him if he’d support an Island business and point out online that tickets could be bought from VentnorBlog, but he didn’t.
It will be interesting to see if this week’s Country Press covers the granting of the premises license to the Madness gig with a similar sized front page headline.
Aaaaanyway
Of course, to those objecting to the Madness gig, it probably was the most important story of the week. We’re wondering if it was for the other 130,000 people who also live here.
Aaaaanyway, just my view …. and what do I know? I’ve only been a working journalist for nine years.
