News for Cheshire

News for Cheshire is the blog of the campaign to get the BBC news website to provide dedicated news coverage of our county, which it doesn't do. Currently, users of the BBC's news website have to hunt on the pages for Merseyside, Manchester and Staffordshire if they want Cheshire news. Other contributors are welcome, just get in touch if you'd like to write for the campaign.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Crewesing for news

The BBC's latest idiocy is to post this tragic story on the news page for Staffordshire. The report clearly states that Crewe is the location and that Cheshire Constabulary is the involved police force. I'm left wondering why on earth a Cheshire story has been filed with news for a totally different county. Crewe is only marginally further from Chester, the county capital, than it is from Stoke on Trent, but that hardly justifies filing the story on a page many Cestrians wouldn't bother to look at.

But we already know why - we don't have a Cheshire page for news from across our county. This is yet another classic example of the absurdity of having to search for local news - our news - across the news pages for three different counties.

How much longer is this ridiculous situation going to continue?

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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

BBC scoops Chester Chronicle

For once, the BBC were actually ahead of local news services when reporting this story from a week and a half ago. Last Saturday, I was anxiously scanning the Chester Chronicle for what I expected to be a quite detailed and lengthy report into the Ermine Road stabbing. I couldn't find it, so I went through the entire paper a second time. Not there. It looks as though the Chronicle failed to report on what has been one of the most violent incidents in a very long while. I was quite astonished that they managed not to cover it, not even in the news-in-brief columns. So, that's a heads up to Aunty on this occasion.

Today, BBC News Online reported another knifing incident in Chester. Wonder if that will get local coverage...

In the meantime, random scanning of the BBC's pages for Manchester and Staffordshire to check for coverage of Cheshire issues in those sections reveals that there is no improvement. So, it's still mostly business as usual. Which means very few Cheshire news stories at all.

Monday, April 02, 2007

A shift in policy?

Looking at the BBC news website today, there are another two stories on the Merseyside portal that feature Chester news.

The first is another zoo story, of which we seem to get an inordinately high amount. I refuse to believe Chester's sole claim to fame is its zoo. Granted, it's a very nice zoo and doing groundbreaking work in the conservation of rare species, but I remain unconvinced it's worth the high level of coverage every time another creature is born there or gets given a new home.

The other item is about the change in prescription charges for Welsh and English patients. Now this is definitely interesting, as the Welsh border runs through the north-west of Chester and thus the legislative change affects many Cestrians depending on where they live and with which GP they are registered. I would imagine that this change affects quite a few other places on the Welsh-English border - the BBC could have chosen to feature any of them. But it opted for a Cheshire focus instead.

In the three years I have been monitoring news coverage of Cheshire on BBC News Online, I cannot recall ever before seeing 4 stories in the space of 3 days where Chester was the source of the news.

Are we seeing the beginnings of a tentative shift towards more balanced coverage of our county? Could this be a result of my email exchange with Hugh Berlyn? It would be nice to think so, but let's not jump to conclusions just yet. More monitoring is required, including on the news portals for Manchester and Staffordshire to see if there is a shift there too...