Press release

A press release has been sent to both the Chester Chronicle, which is distributed across the county, and the North West Enquirer.

Follow-up phone calls will be made today.

More later!

Petition goes live!

The online petition has now gone live and can be signed here.

Please add your signature and any comments. We need numbers to make our demand a reality.

Contacting the BBC directly

Some people have already made complaints directly to the BBC.

If you wish to do so, you can contact the powers that be using the contact form on the Feedback page of the BBC website.

The direct url is http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedback/bbci_comment.shtml

Some statistics

On 17 July, I did some research.

Not terribly scientific - I simply typed in "Chester" on the BBC search engine to see what came up.

The results showed a total of 10 Chester stories since 1 January this year , almost all trivial, such as new arrivals at the zoo. In 2005, the total count was 23 - that's less than two a month. Again, many of these stories were trivial (zoo news, Duke of Westminster's daughter marrying at the cathedral...). Given that we are more than halfway through the year, it's fair to assume our total news count for 2006 will be less than for last year, unless we are unfortunate enough to have a grisly murder here.

The campaign starts here!

As a regular reader of the BBC News website for about as long as it's been online, I am enormously frustrated by the fact that as far as Aunty is concerned, my county does not exist. If I want to find local news on what is, arguably, the most important and popular news website on the planet, I have to browse either the Merseyside or Manchester news pages.

As Cheshire is sandwiched between Liverpool and Manchester, seeking local news involves trawling the Merseyside or Manchester pages. Alas, on the rare occasions that the BBC covers anything happening in Cheshire, it is invariably a story emanating from Warrington or Runcorn, two towns which just might be considered part of Merseyside because of the industry there. Chester is just 28 miles from Liverpool, but culturally and physically worlds apart, due to the intervening barrier of Liverpool Bay. On the Manchester page, there is even less coverage of Cheshire towns south of Manchester.

I've been e-mailing the beeb on an irregular basis about this. Of all the English counties, Cheshire is the only one not to have its own dedicated page. My first three e-mails clearly fell into a black hole at the BBC News HQ as I received no reply. The last one, sent around 2 months ago, was answered about 3 weeks later. Clearly, my e-mail had been sent around the newsroom as the response I received was at the top of a string of internal e-mails which all said, more or less, "I don't know why this is. Can you pass this on to X?". The response addressed to me said it would be looked into. I guess that means nothing will be done.

I now see this as a personal mission to correct this appalling oversight. I intend to pester Aunty on a regular basis now until the situation has been corrected.

Our local paper, the Chester Chronicle, is fairly good (as I have said before), but it's a weekly. It publishes a free midweek edition, the Midweek Chronicle, which is supposed to be distributed on a Tuesday. Most weeks, I don't receive a copy - I guess they lack distributors. On the rare occasions it falls through my letterbox, it's on a Thursday, the day before the Chronicle itself is published. A fat lot of use that is.

I'm not a fan of local radio, which does cover local news, as I can't stand the ads and cheesy presenters. What I want is to be able to read local news on the internet, on a daily basis - I want somewhere that I can dip into at intervals in my working day to find out what's happening in my area. As a BBC licence payer, I feel deprived. And angry that my corner of the world is routinely ignored. To take a case in point, the BBC weather map for Liverpool places Liverpool itself at the bottom lefthand corner of the map and covers a territory as far north as Glasgow! Chester, just a few miles south, is not marked. Nor does Chester merit a mention on the weather maps for North Wales or Stoke/Staffs... On the BBC homepage, where I have actually managed to set the weather forecast for my local postcode, there is a link offering me the opportunity to find local information. You guessed it - the link is for BBC Liverpool! And if I click on the links below, to find out what music is happening in Cheshire, I get a counties map of England that shows - no Cheshire!

How can it be that a whole city, nay county, does not deserve a mention?

The campaign starts here!