When former North-East and Midlands MD Steve Brown left Trinity Mirror in a company restructure earlier this year, the response from his former employees in Newcastle and Birmingham was startling. The NUJ chapel in Newcastle passed a vote of no

Times are tough in the regional press and it’s a constant gripe among the rank and file that wages are low. So no-one can blame Salford Advertiser reporter Pamela Welsh for trying her hand at winning some extra PIN money

Congratulations to Oliver Luft who starts work as online news editor at Press Gazette on Monday, joining from Media Guardian. Having previously worked for Journalism.co.uk, he now only needs to come and work for HoldtheFrontPage to complete a full-house of

Earlier this week the Tories made a bit of a splash in some quarters by announcing plans to allow newspaper groups to provide regional TV news using funding top-sliced from the BBC licence fee. It was of course good to

We’ve had the one about the town that ran out of custard (see previous post) – now here’s the one about the dead moggie that united a Midlands cathedral town in grief. Well, it is July after all…..  

Earlier this year, HoldtheFrontPage ran a piece about a weekly paper in Kent which had published a story about a mum-of-three complaining that the local shops had run out of custard. It provoked a lively debate, both on HTFP and

As well as being one of the best observers of the national political scene either inside or outside the Lobby – check out his blog Outside the Bubble – David Higgerson is an enthusiastic Twitterer in his role as Trinity

Or should that be The Wages of Spin? Thanks to cartoonist Slob for this take on the potential political ramifications of the alleged News of the World phone hacking affair – it was originally posted on my political blog but

We at HoldtheFrontPage always try to be clear and concise in the way we write our stories. So it was with no little amusement that we stumbled upon this titbit from the Plain English Campaign – the lobby group launched

An interesting news item from the regional press has just landed on HoldtheFrontPage’s radar. After 90 years of publishing, the Midlands-based Sporting Star will cease publication at the start of the forthcoming football season. The Sporting Star is owned by

Difficult times at Trinity Mirror at the moment, with the announcement of nine newspaper closures and job losses yesterday, and accusations from the National Union of Journalists concerning the future of two of its traditional morning papers, the Birmingham Post

The sight of regional papers splashing on national and international news always generates a fair amount of debate among journalists. For many, who see localness as our unique selling point, following the national news agenda is something that goes against

Sometimes the decision whether or not to publish a story on HoldtheFrontPage is not necessarily a straightforward one. One such instance was yesterday’s press release from the National Union of Journalists claiming that publisher Trinity Mirror plans to axe eight

Earlier this week, HTFP featured the preliminary results of a survey being carried out by a postgraduate student into the changing nature of press releases. Its key finding was that journalists regard most of the PR material they get sent

An interesting little parable on the ups and downs of football and journalism comes from Lee Ryder, sports writer and author of blogonthetyne.co.uk A few years back Lee spotted an ad on HTFP for a sports reporter at the Scunthorpe

The weekly email bulletin from the Newspaper Society provides an invaluable guide to what our leading regional press industry body is up to, and as such is a regular source of stories for HTFP and other media publications. But just