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.