A few years back, when we first saw Ventnor’s South Wight Chronicle, we thought is was harmless enough.
If you’ve not seen it, it’s got the quaint look of being produced on a typewriter and then reproduced on the parish duplicator.
It’s a weekly, small-run A4 newsletter mostly made up of a collection of the Isle of Wight council’s press releases and local adverts – all sweet enough. No one offended there.
Over the last year or so, it seems to have changed considerably.
Changing
Early signs of this was the appearance of a weekly letter from (now ex-) Cllr Perks, which continued up until the time he left his concession at the Winter Gardens to open his new wine bar.
With its regularity and placement away from the rest of the letters, it gave the impression that this wasn’t a letter, but a column, although it was never labeled as such.
The Chronicle’s coverage of the audit report into the previous Ventnor TC (that laid clear unlawful activity and a £35k rent discount for Graham Perks) amounted to little more than saying, ‘audit report published – nothing said really’.
It was last week’s headline, “Delayed Response”, which opened “Prevarication and delay surrounded item 6 at Ventnor Town Council’s meeting on Monday Night” which has led to us writing this article.
Who’s writing it?
Where their reporting comes from is a mystery. No reporter from the Chronicle attends the VTC meetings, so quite how they’re supposed to provide a balanced view of what happens at the council is, to say the least, confusing.
Given this, are we to assume that these ‘reports’ are written by someone else, if so where is By-line on the article.
(At 4pm today we wrote to Anne Munt, who puts the Chronicle together, to find out the details. At the time of publishing this, nearly six hours later, we haven’t had a reply. We’ll tell you when/if we hear back.)
Inaccuracies
As well as being questionable, the article is also inaccurate. Part of the way through the article it claims a reason for ex-councillor Brian Lucas resigning.
Knowing this not to be the case, we called Brian Lucas, who said he wasn’t going to make comment on how he was misrepresented in the Chronicle, as he was now involving himself in other projects around Ventnor.
This week?
After the resignation of three councillors at this week’s VTC, what will tomorrow bring in the Chronicle? Or who indeed will have written it?
