Oh it’s just the lounge they always sponsor at all the conferences. So it’s just “reform is now a major party conference, while UKIP never was”. Checks out.
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Oh it’s just the lounge they always sponsor at all the conferences. So it’s just “reform is now a major party conference, while UKIP never was”. Checks out.
Can’t tell if this says more about Reform’s status or that airport lobbying wars are back. Back in 2015 Heathrow/Gatwick were both throwing so much £££ around that they basically funded most internet UK political media. “Oh yeah… we have a podcast… two MPs have listened to it… £200k for sponsorship”
Please do update when we know which three bits of British history they’ve chosen for the hotel themes, excited for my stay at the Abdication Crisis Aparthotel or whatever.
Pom Bears are actually wrongly classified as a child’s crisp, enjoying a nice bowl of them tonight while watching the cricket.
Many congratulations to my beloved Mumbai Indians (London) on their cricket win.
The thing is news of his death when it comes absolutely will be broken by that cat turd account so who knows.
Nitrous oxide driving, with drivers using balloons behind the wheel, feels like it’s on the rise in London - backed up by what medical experts told us about referrals. But the scale of the issue is obscured because of how crashes are recorded in police stats. www.londoncentric.media/p/nitrous-ox...
Bus then walked three miles along verges of suspected clunk area. Thought I’d founded Excalibur and saved the day as I gathered the various smashed bits from carriageway but turns out it’s so electronic it’s just still fucked. Anyway I’m idiot, cars are stupid, hopefully someone’s amused/informed.
Postscript: Walked along busy road, amazingly spotted a smashed set of car keys in road. Retrieved the metal emergency key. Turns out… there’s no physical ignition nowadays so even having a physical key doesn’t mean you can start an engine. Rental car now abandoned. May one person learn from this!
A bus was involved!
The edge case concludes with me spending an hour jogging along a rural A road in the rain looking for bits of run-over key in the gutter and finding the chipboard and wondering how I’ll explain this to the rental company.
Today I learned, through an unfortunate chain of events, that it’s possible to start a car with the keys on the roof, have the keys stay on the roof for five miles, ask “what’s that clunk” as they fall off, continue for a further 20 miles, then find you can’t lock your car and it won’t restart.
Never bought a book faster.
I’m totally obsessed with a TV ad they showed in the uk a few years ago which (from memory) was footage of a dad playing with his 12 year old daughter and a voiceover along the lines of “YOUR LAST CHANCE TO TAKE HER TO DISNEYLAND WHILE SHE WILL STILL TALK TO YOU AND DOESN’T HATE YOUR EXISTENCE”.
More than a lot of things. I made the case to DCMS they should send the SoS for a visit to their office. Mixed response.
OnlyFans’ accounts for 2024 have finally been published. They expect to pay c£130m in UK corporation tax. That’s about the same sum that Camden council earn from council tax. A successful taxpaying UK media company! *based on pre-Trump exchange rate at end of accounting period
I get it as an earworm once a week, mainly whenever I read the word “onus”.
Honouring Grimsby by listening to one of the best ever songs about football. petegreen.bandcamp.com/track/the-ba...
'PoliticsHome analysis of Hansard shows that the phrase “I rise to speak…” has been used 601 times across the Commons and the Lords so far this year – compared to only 131 in the first eight months of 2024...' www.politicshome.com/news/article...
Yeah and mainstream liberal-ish discussion still talk about it like “on social media” rather than “this is the mainstream”. My tweet here is obviously a bit “well duh” as I forgot to say LOCAL OUTLETS as that’s the real change.
Underrated point! Collapse of written news into traffic chasing via a small number of algorithms (Facebook, Google homepage, whatever bollocks your browser is pushing) rewards super-simple clicky headlines. If you’re under pressure to hit a click target, the Reform narrative keeps your boss happy.
Big money! Or at least comparatively big money compared to other forms of ads!
(Sadly the hard work of the reporter and the "news you can trust since 1897" banner and... if we're honest... the credibility of the story itself in the eyes of lots of readers... are undermined by publisher National World being paid to put this fake news shit at the end.)
Horrific story that shows the need for local journalists being able to check out tips and ask questions about stuff that might otherwise just have floated around local WhatsApp groups. www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/people/...
Yeah the village I grew up in was suspicious of the nearby market town that was very suspicious of the decisions made by the councillors in Northallerton who didn't understand their life. The people in York definitely didn't get it, Leeds was an alien land, and that's before we get onto LONDON.
Time to mainstream Kibbo Kift!!
I fear you might be adopt this approach this approach and get away with it, not clear outlets have leverage and a belief enough new outlets will be craven enough to acquiesce. Local papers/BBC will still politely do their best. Only hope is no access pushes journalists to source-based reporting
They haven’t here and I thought it was a pretty measured piece.
Reform leader of Nottinghamshire council bans all communication, including by officials, with the main local paper. Nottingham Post/Nottingham Live ban also includes BBC-funded local democracy reporters. www.nottinghampost.com/news/news-op...
You may have seen this story blowing up about Will Smith using AI to generate fake audiences to promote his latest tour, but the truth is more complicated. The audiences are real, but the footage was manipulated: first by Will Smith's team and then, without permission, by YouTube itself.
“And this is what she could learn from the New Labour government”
Some news, some commentary, some interesting maps. www.londoncentric.media/p/will-wildf...
Just very exciting that the new gazillionaire owners of south London's leading cricket franchise Mumbai Indians (London), née Oval Invincibles, are running an absolutely enormous zoo containing hundreds of lions and elephants that is facing money laundering allegations.
Allowed myself 15 minutes on this and powered by years of 'can you name all the football teams in england' 'all the rugby league teams', trainspotting, and by-elections got me to about 70 of the 100k+ towns and I can only assume there's just a large swathe of the midlands I do not know about.
The first time I used the internet I got given this jolly badge for doing so, which with every passing year feels a bit more like “My First Bubonic Plague” merchandise.
love this story - and would like to know more about the "Society of Mudlarks, a separate secretive group with special privileges"
London's mudlarks at war: feuds, fights and slurs on the shoreline. It's a Bank Holiday so for one day only, I'm making this brilliant piece by @susborne.bsky.social free to read. There's also an experimental one day flash sale for the first 25 people! www.londoncentric.media/p/london-mud...
Deep post-Brexit broadcast newsroom paranoia that “real Britain” is being unfairly ignored, mixed with editors spending all their time on X where it would FEEL they are massive and nationwide.
London's mudlarks at war: feuds, fights and slurs on the shoreline. It's a Bank Holiday so for one day only, I'm making this brilliant piece by @susborne.bsky.social free to read. There's also an experimental one day flash sale for the first 25 people! www.londoncentric.media/p/london-mud...
something very funny about the very very serious tone of the off-the-record Nottingham Forest briefing to the BBC about how offended they were by a TRULY DISGUSTING banner And then you read what the banner was saying
Impressive to be relying on a livestream of a non-protest that’s taking place a 3min walk from the Express office.
Telegraph app has been rebuilt around personalities and short take vertical video; it’s basically a paywalled right wing TikTok influencer land for the olds, you’re encouraged to follow your favourite personalities.
Think their headquarters is in the same tower block where I spent four hours in April sitting in a windowless children’s play park writing about the Woolwich Ferry so now I’ve spent ten minutes googling how crappy T-shirt exporters can afford central HK real estate, thanks for the distraction Bryce.
A successful void!
That’s just the app isn’t it?
I'm doing them chronologically this week because why not and Simon Usborne popped to a medieval jousting tournament at Arundel Castle because my lord the English are strange. I really do commend the portraiture in this piece - you want to click on.ft.com/4fQcm9r
It’s almost always the local radio newsdesks filing to a global website through a different editing structure.
Also the Tel is suddenly way more influential (and smarter as an online politics news product thing) than the Mail.
Only took me a three day round trip!!!
I know no one follows me on here for this stuff but Dean Wareham just did the songs of Galaxie 500 with Sea Power as his backing band and there can be few things better in the world and everyone should know that.
Yeah it’s not chickening out to think “if I do another one of these type of stories it will mean I don’t have the time and resources to do a dozen other stories”
I like how everything appears to be currently subsidised by a campaign for nuclear sludge storage
Yeah I spent half my life in a tiny village with no phone signal or bus or whatever so i know of what I speak!
The thing you don’t see about lengthy libel cases like this is the mental impact on witnesses - and on news outlets’ willingness to do similar stories. Respect to all the women who chose to go to court to defend this story - plus Sirin Kale, Lucy Osborne, Paul Lewis and the Guardian team.
The Cumbrian coast has to be the weirdest bit of England (compliment)…. Just completely cut off from anywhere else, barely any tourists… just stone circles and Sellafield, sheep and narrow gauge railways, plus some… interesting… towns.
Okay. I've got admin bits to sort today. So to distract me while i wait on things to run at various points: For every few likes this get, a fact about university websites and how gen z and below interact with information, as proven by testing/data. (Most of which unis aren't handling well yet)
i’ve spent a few days in london being a tourist recently, and keep thinking about jim’s reporting on asif aziz and i think the galling thing is that he’s profiting off a london that he’s never contributed to. aziz hasn’t opened a club or put on a show - he just bought some buildings.
Efforts to redefine which locations are in scope for London journalism continue.
Yesssss Sunder mix the analysis of online hate with livetweeting York matches, we can achieve unity.
I find it really interesting how many of the anti-Muslim commentators want to live in Dubai and would love to read something on how that is viewed in the UAE, or if no one gives a shit given it seems to be the top place to be a grifter/scammer/tax evader/fugitive mafia boss.
So I can loudly tell people like you happy they make me! So kind of you to subsidise their education for decades to come through your taxes! Cheers mate!
Nursery bill just dipped beneath £1,000 a month for the first time in five years making it merely "excruciating" rather than "teeth removal without anaesthetic". And all it took was Jeremy Hunt making wild unfunded pre-election promises that Labour was forced to keep.
Ah yes I meant *tax free in terms of what gross sum the employer can pass on* but I'll look to see if that could be phrased better.
It's definitely not evasion! Don't see anything illegal here!
The real reason for the introduction of 4% service charges on pints bought at the bar in London pubs. www.londoncentric.media/p/why-london...
Definitely the number one thing I hear when I go out reporting on housing in London!
The gang failed to smuggle the migrants into the UK after they "were caught after failing to get insurance to drive in France".
Hard to tell which of the following to blame in media 1) X gone toxic, and loads of MP/journalists have had their brains pickled ending cordon sanitare 2) short form vid taking over everything means race hate = £££ (think Instagram gets overlooked) 3) old uk media now chasing +radicalised readers
Just looked… Robinsons tweet is on 650k but it’s a rip of a different racist aggregation instagram account purporting to be defending Irish culture, which i doubt is the original source… the honest thing is probably just £££ - the mislabelled video is confusing enough to make people stop scrolling
I don’t want to overplay the “this is the mainstream media now” line but there’s no way this or ANY written Guardian report could get more views than the viral videos that caused this situation.
We’re so fucked: 1) TikTok being used to upload family videos which are inadvertently shown to big numbers because peoplestopped flicking for half a second 2) The profitability of libellous “what’s up here” Blue Tick X 3) the fact the whole town had seen it means this looks a lot like the true MSM
Er you told me over some wine a few months ago.
Oh no, earned income is very basic and easy to guess, the real revolution is when Land Registry becomes publicly indexable and everyone's Google result has their property wealth next to their name.
This reminds me of the American student intern in a newsroom in 2013 who was spending her weekends visiting Rotherham and other towns from Arctic Monkeys songs.
Don’t believe so but London Centric is doing an experimental “local news on holiday” story next week about connections elsewhere!
If you want to get the measure of Asif Aziz, whose company is the landlord of many tax evading gift shops in central London and is also redeveloping Dalston Kingsland shopping centre, I think his knock-off Forrest Gump shrimp restaurant sums him up. My story from a court hearing in March…
Asif Aziz almost forced out London’s Prince Charles Cinema earlier this year. Is he trying the same again with Picturehouse Central - and is another major central London cinema under threat from the same landlord? www.londoncentric.media/p/picturehou...
As the nearest thing to an actual teenage A-level student on Bluesky, and I failed to nuance the pledge, would you like to claim your celebratory pint. Congratulations!
Sam Smiths are expensive now!
That’s not what the BBC push alert told me!
Sadly cancelled due to Labour’s VAT raid.
I will send the price of one (1) celebratory London pint to the first person who posts on Bluesky and is an honest-to-god A-level student who is celebrating their results. Offer stands until midday. Results voided if signs of parental prompting. Think my money is safer than if I bid for a live dodo.
This sounds glib but “prominent people being mocked online and hating it” is suchhh a driver of so many things in media/politics right now!
And, indeed, 2019 Liz Truss.
What’s your assessment of this one then? www.londoncentric.media/p/lime-ebike...
So despite everything I am a massive fan and fear the lack of enforcement dickhead externalities and corner-cutting by the company will lead them being taken away. Dan Hancox had an argument about them being the clearest route to critical mass in central London.
Honestly I think an individual council banning it is even dumber! And I doubt we’d have got this very useful form of transport without the initial free for all element. But yeah, it’s just the Uber model all over again. Establish facts on the ground then allow regulation to lock down market lead.
There’s so much good about hire e-bikes… but London is also currently being used as the battlefield for a California tech company trying to grow like crazy and IPO before an impending regulatory crackdown.
Issuing a correction: I’d previously argued that Lime’s e-bike accident insurance policy in London was effectively useless, as customers had to lose an entire kidney to claim. And who could lose a kidney riding a Lime bike? Then a reader got in touch! www.londoncentric.media/p/london-lim...
So we did. I just checked and found some content. Just checking if it’s ok to post this? Possibly as a subscriber-only type thing?
If only there was a podcast still available online featuring both of us that would prove which of us was right. Oh well neither can be bothered to check.
Jonn do you remember that day we walked the entire route of the line a few months before it was originally due to open and made a podcast saying “it’s incredible that this is going to open in a few months, everything is half built” and entirely missed the story. shows.acast.com/skylines/epi...
You, a slack jawed Neanderthal: Duhh my tik tok where I make a weird face just made a million dollars. I'm going to eat a gold crusted steak to celebrate Me, a modern philosopher: I've crafted a magnificent sentence on a website where my only reward is getting yelled at. I live for this shit
I still feel bad that I blagged a free ticket for his show a few years ago so there’s definitely some cosmic balance repaid there, thanks for letting me know!
The tiny Oxfordshire hamlet where JD Vance is staying has three notable residents on its Wikipedia page. Didn’t expect the third.
I once wrote a very insidery story about David Attenborough backing a campaign to keep channel 4 in public hands that the Guardian push alerted at a quite random time and everyone with an Apple Watch just got “BREAKING NEWS DAVID ATTENBOROUGH HAS—“ Soooo many complaints.
