A paper boy turned national newspaper editor has claimed he used to deliver more copies of a regional daily than are sold now across its entire patch.
Piers Morgan ended up in a Twitter spat with The Argus, Brighton, ahead of Sunday’s FA Cup football match between Brighton & Hove Albion and Arsenal, the team which he supports.
Former Mirror editor Piers posted on the social networking site it would be a”conflicting day” and claimed Albion were his “second team”, having delivered The Argus as a boy in the Sussex village of Newick, where he grew up.
The Argus replied it would welcome him back on the staff if he was “up for the challenge”, and joked he could have been employed to sell copies of the paper outside Albion’s home ground.
However, the former tabloid editor responded: “Kind offer @brightonargus – but I used to deliver more copies in Newick than you now seem to be selling in the whole county.”
The Argus account then questioned whether Morgan had heard of the internet, to which he responded he had 4.3 million more Twitter followers than the Newsquest-owned title.
Undeterred, the Argus then suggested it was “Sussex’s bggest news source”, with Piers posting he looked forward to its website breaking the news of Albion’s Cup exit later in the day – adding he hoped the team would put up more of a fight than the paper.
However, other users on the site leapt to the defence of The Argus, calling on Piers to be supportive of local newspapers and not belittle them.
After the match, which Arsenal won 3-2, he took to Twitter again to question if The Argus needed help with its headline.
No response from the paper has yet been forthcoming.
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Reproduction of a string of tweets is so boring. It will be a good day when the current press (and public) obsession with Twitter fades into oblivion
What used to be Fleet Steet is becoming Tweet Street and regional/local publications spend too much time copying inconsequential chit-chat instead of finding real news.
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Not really a true headline is it?
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Slow news day.
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Tout Suite – you are so very true! The current obsession with Twitter is getting boring and i hope papers/media in general will move on to reporting proper news!
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Morgan wasn’t even being rude, by the way. It was just banal, non-witty banter. But the previous posters are right. Not worthy of repeating.
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Can somebody important please tell the BBC not to keep advertising Twitter and Facebook all the time…with my licence money???!!!!
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But I bet loads of people read it. We all did. And that’s what matters. It doesn’t have to be edifying, or useful, or important; it just has to attract clicks. That’s the digital mantra. Nothing else matters. Look at Mail Online; hugely popular, we’re always being told, but take away the shots of Kim Kardashian’s bum and Jennifer Aniston’s cleavage and Uma Thurman’s boobs and watch the readership drop off a cliff. To paraphrase the usual misquotation of HL Mencken’s famous aphorism, no one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the British public.
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Tout Suite for Prime Minister – person who talks common sense!
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A twat twittering as he has no real job now.
Piers Morgan, whats the point of him?
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At its peak the Argus sold well over 100,000 a day average across Sussex. It now sells about 14,000 a day average. So Morgan’s claim to have sold more copies in the small village of Newick than it does in Sussex today is typical of the rubbish he spouts. Never has so little talent made so much money.
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Is this the same Piers Morgan who lost half the Mirror’s circulation, produced the worst front page in the history of British journalism, and got the sack for an error of judgment you wouldn’t expect from the lowliest junior on the Kidderminster Shuttle?
Perhaps we should be told…
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Dear Pot,
Easy to have a snipe at the free-fall circulation of the Argus. What happened to the Mirror’s circulation while you were its editor? Yours sincerely, Kettle
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It should be noted too that the only reason he’s a household name is because he lost his job for not even bothering to do cursury fact checks on a hugely controversial ‘story’, the kind either a work experience kid would do. Before that he made his bones peddling Hollywood gossip.
I wouldn’t listen to anything he has to say about journalism or journalists, any more than I’d listen to Millie Vanillie’s views on cracking the charts.
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Milli Vanilli were class.
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I seem to have a memory that when Piers Morgan was editing the Bizarre column on the Sun in the 1980s and he had his first child, he peppered his page with congratulatory messages from his celebrity friends. I think this was due to the fact that Mr Morgan is and was a Very Important Man. I would like to think that all national and regional organs will continue to carry stories about Mr Morgan. The day when people, Mr Morgan especially, are not talking about or writing about Mr Morgan it will be a very sad day, indeed. He is worth every penny of the licence fee. I would gladly sell my house and all my possessions…
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