The Local Rag

These are the offices of the Hull Daily Mail, a sprawling block at Blundell's Corner, the junction of Beverley Road and Spring Bank, that used to house a much bigger operation than at present. The paper is no longer printed here, that being done somewhere outside of Hull and then the papers trucked back for sale in the city. Don't ask how much it costs, I haven't bought a copy since Margaret Thatcher resigned! It claims a readership of 170,000 and is the largest regional newspaper in Yorkshire.

Now it has to be said that though it is called a newspaper much of what is reported by this institution is far from being new or even newsworthy. It is often wrong on facts, its standards of grammar are quite lamentable, it is not above copying stories from other sources without attribution. (I know plagiarism is the basis of all culture but when I found a senior HDM employee Tweeting my photo as if he owned the image it was a bit too much too far! Still waiting for some sort of apology for that.) Its reporters, if we may call them that, seem to have scant local knowledge and often misname places and streets. I could go on but you get the gist.

You can check out its web site here, but be warned, I'm told that the mobile site is a jumble of popup adverts that make it unusable, it often gives request timeouts and is generally poor. The only good thing on the site is the comments from readers which run the full gamut of sceptical denial of just about everything to rallying positively behind everything Hullish. I should just add here that I do not read the sports bits so that might be quite superb but somehow I doubt it.

Now having said all that, it came as no little surprise to hear that HDM has won awards for being the best regional newspaper. The judges said it was "delivering a newspaper completely in tune with the communities it served"; well quite! Makes you wonder how bad the other papers are.