Meet The Squirrelizer

Continuing our silly season theme, it seems that the now-famous photo of an American couple on holiday in Canada has turned it into 'Squirrel Season'.

For those of you still unaware of what I'm talking about, check out one of the countless stories about how a playful intruder gate-crashed the duo's holiday snap.

The photo has inevitably gone viral and one intuitive techy type has launched 'The Squirrelizer'.

The concept is simple: enter the web address of any photo on the internet into The Squirrelizer and it will add our new friend - who's called Nuts apparently - to the image.

Hint: To get the web address of the image, right click your mouse over the photo and scroll down to properties. The address should be there.

Online social media guide Mashable.com is running its own Top 10 of squirrel crasher pics. And here's our entry to the collection - an adaptation of a big cat pic we featured in last week's Friday Funnies.

You can tell it's August....

After more than 20 years in journalism I'm not sure whether I still believe in the idea of a 'silly season' when it comes to news. The fact is, as has been highlighted both on HTFP and on this blog over recent months - remember the Whitstable custard shortage and the dead cat that united a Midlands town in grief - you can find daft news stories in the local press at any time of the year if you look hard enough.

Nevertheless, the current spate of stories about big cat sightings in the regional media is probably indicative to some extent of the time of year.

It all started in the Scottish town of Helensburgh when Ministry of Defence policeman Chris Swallow claimed to have captured footage of a large animal sniffing its way up and down a railway track.

But the story quickly moved south, with the Derby Telegraph carrying news of one of the fairly frequent big cat sightings in God's Own County.

Then it was the turn of the Croydon Guardian to get in on the act following a sighting of the puma-like creature in Crystal Palace, with the paper helpfully providing an 'artist's impression' as noted in our regular Friday Funnies page last week.

The elusive feline(s) have also been spotted in Carmarthenshire, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, and Welwyn Garden City.

There seems little doubt of the existence of big cats in the UK, with the likeliest explanation that they originated from creatures turned loose following the passage of a piece of legislation banning the keeping of wild animals as pets in the 1970s, but the fact that no-one has managed to capture irrefutable evidence of one on film - and that papers are reduced to providing 'artist's impressions' of them - probably demonstrates why they still make news.

As a friend of mine pointed out the other day, it's Nessie I feel sorry for.....

Council audits remain a closed book

Earlier this year HTFP carried a story about a news agency's laudable attempt to provide a comprehensive list of four-week council audits taking place this summer.

Under the Audit Commission Act, local authorities are required to open their books for public inspection for 20 working days each year.

Since councils are obliged to provide the actual receipts and supporting documents behind each accounts entry, they are a rich mine of stories for journalists, with councillors' expense claims being a favourite hunting ground for hacks who are into this sort of thing.

Unfortunately some councils do little to publicise the date of the audit, beyond the bare legal requirement to publish a public notice in a newspaper on a single day - prompting Orchard News agency boss Richard Orange to write to every council in the country asking for the information.

Richard's website shows he met with mixed success in this, with some councils resorting to the most mindless blocking tactics to prevent the information appearing.

For instance, Richard wrote to Middlesbrough council on 2 July asking them for the date. They replied on 30 July - the day before the audit was due to end. Milton Keynes council was even less helpful. Its reply did not arrive until three days after the books were closed.

Most of the four-week audits have now closed until next summer - but Richard's site reveals that there are still a few that are open for inspection.

So if you're a journalist in any of the following English local authority areas, it's not too late to get down to your council offices armed with a copy of the Act.

Open for another week

Bristol
Barnsley
South Tyneside
Sunderland
Barking & Dagenham
Brent
Kingston upon Thames
Redbridge
Southwark

Open for another fortnight

Reading
Hull
Bournemouth
Salford
Hounslow
Lambeth

Open for another three weeks

Bedfordshire
Cambridgeshire
Devon
Bromley
Haringey
Waltham Forest

A good response

Susan Greenwood Twitters that a recent advert for a trainee reporter on the Yorkshire Post garnered no fewer than 262 applications.

It's probably indicative of the state of the jobs market in the regional press over recent months, but for what it's worth I'm glad the YP got such a good response. The job ad appeared on HTFP for a fortnight last month and received more than 2,500 page views.

Being a journalist really can benefit your health

Knowledge gained is never a waste and what journalists write about for their papers may sometimes serve them well in their own lives.

So it proved for the health reporter of The Bolton News who has recently been laid up on her sofa with a bout of swine flu.

In a first person piece, Cherry Thomas explains that her partner came down with all the classic tell-tale signs of the flu bug.

Proudly wearing her health reporter's hat, Cherry knew exactly what to do having spent weeks writing about it for the News.

But no sooner had she handed over the necessary drugs to her partner, than she was struck down by dizziness, aches and temperature - and therefore was stuck with Jeremy Kyle and the four walls of her flat.

She wrote: "The strange thing is, I'd had lots of conversations with health professionals galore in recent weeks.

"I knew swine flu was no worse than seasonal flu and had been at pains to make that point in my stories.

"Yet somewhere, at the back of my mind, was a little bit of fear and apprehension at having swine flu. I wonder if I'd read too many scare-stories in the national press?"

Thankfully, a couple of weeks later everything was back to normal and cases of swine flu are also dropping, she reports.

That's enough Enders - Ed

I have blogged before about the American-born media analyst Claire Enders and her prediction that the next four years will see the loss of 650 of the UK's 1,300 local and regional newspapers.

My instinctive reaction to her pronouncements is that it must be very nice to be paid large amounts of money for spreading doom and gloom about other people's job prospects, but I'll try to let that rather uncharitable thought pass.

In her defence, Enders has been uncannily accurate in some of her previous predictions, such as forecasting the dotcom crash at the turn of the millennium, and that's probably why the business media seems to have accepted her analysis at face value.

But for all her undoubted intellect, she seems to deal more in sweeping generalisations and soundbites than in hard facts, her latest interview in yesterday's Guardian, in which she likened newspapers to fax machines and CD players, being no exception.

The facts are that 50 local newspapers have so far closed this year, almost all of them freesheets. If that rate continues for the next four years, we will see perhaps 200-300 close, although Enders clearly expects that rate of closure to accelerate.

As Dominic Ponsford points out on Press Gazette's blog, The Wire, it would be interesting to know whether she believes the closures will continue to come mainly from the free newspaper sector, or whether she thinks the 400 or so paid-for dailies and weeklies are under the same level of threat.

At times, Ms Enders' statements can gives the impression - intentionally or otherwise - that there is nothing the industry can do to avert the coming apocalypse, but even if that is the case, there is surely lots it can do to mitigate it.

What, for instance, does she think of the potential for saving titles through asset-swapping or further industry consolidation - or for that matter, through alternative ownership models as advocated by the NUJ and others?

In summary, I think it's time Ms Enders spelled out in much greater detail where she thinks the axe will fall, and by implication, which half of the industry she thinks still has a viable future in the digital world.

Failing that, she should consider taking the advice which Clement Attlee famously proffered to Harold Laski: "A period of silence on your part would be most welcome."

Credit where credit's due

Will Green, my successor-but-one as political editor of The Journal, scored a notable exclusive by persuading Minister for the North-East and Labour Chief Whip Nick Brown to go on the record with his thoughts about Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley.

The story, in which Brown effectively told Ashley to get out of Toon, was followed up over the weekend by several national newspapers.

But as Will reveals on his blog, while the Mirror's version of the story duly credited The Journal with the original scoop, the Daily Telegraph's version failed to include such a hat-tip.

Strange, that, given that the entire regional press has spent the summer busily hat-tipping the Telegraph over its MPs' expenses revelations.

Is Digital Britain turning into a dog's breakfast?

After some confusion as to whether Sion Simon or Stephen Timms would be taking over the Digital Britain brief from the now-departed Lord Carter, Downing Street has now ruled in favour of Mr Timms.

But anyone expecting any degree of clarity from the government over which Whitehall department will be ultimately responsible for implementing the plans will have been sorely disappointed.

The story so far is that Timms will remain in his current role as financial secretary to the Treasury, but with additional ministerial responsibilties at Lord Mandelson's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

In terms of his Digital Britain responsibilities, he will report to the Business Secretary, rather than the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Ben Bradshaw, whose department has hitherto led on the Digital Britain report and who personally delivered it in an oral statement to the Commmons back in June.

Meanwhile Mr Simon, as creative industries minister, is to undertake some ill-defined supporting-role in relation to those aspects of Digital Britain which are still the responsibility of the DCMS.

The upshot of all this appears to be that Mr Bradshaw, a former Exeter Express and Echo reporter who has recently made some welcome comments about the threat to regional newspapers posed by council propaganda sheets, has been well and truly sidelined.

A cynical interpretation of this would suggest that Bradshaw, who is also a former BBC reporter, was deemed insufficiently impartial to rule on the vexed issue of whether the BBC licence fee should be top-sliced to fund new regional TV news consortia in which the local press is expected to play a part.

Either way, with so many departments and ministers now apparently involved, the words "too many cooks," "dog's breakfast" and "camel designed by committee" all spring to mind.

Paid-for content: Will the regionals follow suit?

Much excitement in Medialand today about Rupert Murdoch's announcement that, from next summer, he will charge people to read his newspapers' websites.

Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford reckons it could herald a new 'Murdoch Revolution' 23 years on from the one that crushed the print unions, completing the transformation of the 'Dirty Digger' from UK journalism's public enemy number one to its potential saviour.

We've not covered the story on HTFP thus far because, as things stand, it's a strictly national newspaper story, but it is certainly going to have big implications for the regional press further down the line.

If Murdoch, against the odds, can find a way of making money from online content - regarded as something of a Holy Grail in the industry - it is hard to believe the regionals won't eventually follow suit, but we're in unchartered waters here to some extent.

My own instinct tells me that while Murdoch may well find a way to successfully monetise 'exclusive' content such as The Sun's celebrity scoops and The Times' star columnists, it is going to be very hard to do likewise with hard news, in view of the sheer number of free-to-air news sources out there - and I'm not just talking about the BBC.

What do readers think? Let us know in the comments section below or by emailing editor.htfp@and.co.uk.