BBC too late again

The BBC today decided to cover the story of Daniel Larkin's attempt to get a boxing licence. Daniel lives in Chester and, as a diabetic, feels he is being discriminated against. Aunty is a whole week late on this story, which broke in the county-wide Chester Chronicle last Friday. There's no point publishing old news, although hopefully the belated national publicity will help Daniel. Just think, it could have been covered much earlier if the meagre space allotted to Cheshire stories on the Merseyside news page hadn't been littered with the latest McCann reports (we have nothing against the McCanns, we'd like to point out, only the filling of the regional pages with their story, which would be best kept on the UK and international pages).

Elsewhere, we note that the grid-cover thefts in and around Chester have been reported on. No doubt the Chronicle has, for once, been scooped on this, but then the Chronicle is only a weekly...

Bizarre policy

While we fight for a dedicated news page for Cheshire, let's take a look at what we consider to be a rather bizarre policy of using up limited page space to plug stories that have only the most tenuous link to a county page.

As an example, here's today's report on the McCann family on the Merseyside news page. It's more than a month since Madeleine McCann disappeared in Portugal while on holiday. Since then, every time there has been a news update on her, the story has appeared on the Merseyside page. Why?

In the beginning, the BBC was reporting a lot of background detail on the family and it emerged quickly that Kate McCann, Madeleine's mother, hails originally from Liverpool. Also, at the start of the press coverage, it was clearly important to put the story on as many news pages as possible to draw attention to it.

Look at today's story and you will see no mention of Liverpool at all. Kate McCann's geographical origins are old news and no one probably cares anymore, anyway, as to where she comes from. So why do the news updates on Madeleine McCann continue to be posted on the Merseyside page?

We have no idea. What we do know is that each McCann story on the Merseyside page is depriving coverage of another local news story - possibly one from Cheshire. This policy applies to all stories, not just the McCann tragedy, and all BBC news pages.

We can see a limited case for putting a story from one region on another regional page: where a prisoner has gone on the run and is known to have links with a particular area, when a story first breaks (as with the McCanns), or when a story is about two places in different areas and it makes sense to cross-link it. But otherwise, cross-posting because of a very tenuous and largely irrelevant link deprives other stories of coverage.

If I were Hugh Berlyn (news chief for BBC Online England), I'd be seriously reconsidering this very bizarre policy.

Campaign update

The campaign has been rather quiet of late. As usual, little Cheshire news gets reported on the BBC website. No change there then... It was gratifying to see this story on Chester's Grosvenor Park get some coverage, but as you might guess it's had considerably more coverage in the local press. If the BBC had a dedicated Cheshire page, many more people from across the county would have been aware of the consultation and taken the opportunity to air their views -it's not just Cestrians who use the park, after all. Still, now that I've aired the report on here, you could always visit the consultation site and have your say.