For reasons that won’t be too hard to fathom for both our regular readers, this was all very interesting…

http://www.4ip.org.uk/blog/levellers_fishbones_and_sir_tim_berners_lee/

Not least because these days we can join some of the dots therein… that I was lucky enough to speak at www.2gether08.com which was a kind of warm-up garden party for the full-on launch of the 4iP funding initiative later this autumn…

And we’ve also been round the block with Sir Tim and his partner Martin Moore once or twice before on their success at this year’s Knight News Challenge…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=73

And again…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=89

And, of course, we’ve also crossed paths with the good folks at NESTA.

Which prompted a wry smile in this neck of the woods with that line from the NESTA chief… “Perhaps the best lessons for 4IP came from the wrap up remarks from NESTA’s CEO, Jonathan Kestenbaum. He made reference to Sir Tim Berners Lee’s boss at CERN who had ‘not said no’ and created the environment in which the web could be invented…

NESTA, by contrast….

Leave it, Rick. Leave it. Move on… to this…

“He [Sir Tim] likened it to the odd tangle of things that you get when you eventually find the object that’s blocking your sink: underneath it all there’s something with a clear structure (such as a fish bone) but all sorts of accretions have collected round it. So if the web, and the interactions it supports, is to continue to thrive, its organic development needs to be better understood before its too late…

Because what was fascnating about Sir Tim’s thoughts were how easily they chimed with both the thoughts of Google’s Bob Wyman as we swapped local war stories on Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog…

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/07/17/what-do-you-buy-when-you-buy-a-newspaper/#comments

And, in particular, this from the comments…

@Rick Waghorn: “So they pick a sustainable patch and off they go… Till we try we don’t know where the ‘tip’ point is size-wise; smaller than Loudon County, one suspects…”

I suspect that there are two relevant sizes here:
1. Size of the optimal “news bureau”: Some might have “size” defined by geographic area, others would have size defined by area of interest (”Internet Technology”, “Political Commentary”, etc.)
2. Size of the site that hosts the news: The problem here is one of integration. If the sites are very small, there is a massive amount of duplicate engineering, technical support, ad sales, etc. Also, it is cumbersome for people to move between sites.

My gut tells me that we should have a large number of focused news bureaus which feed into a small number of relatively “large” integrated news platforms. The bureaus would focus on content production and, in many cases, community building while the platform providers would focus on technology, ad sales, support, audience building, marketing, etc.

Partial models for the division of interests can be found by studying Huffington Post, the traditional ‘news syndicates’ (King Features, etc.), “blog networks” and organizations like the AP.

bob wyman

And the whole, cotton-thread-in-sugar-solution thing we had going on at www.2gether08.com… that somewhere within our gloupy syrup and Sir Tim’s blocked sink, we needed to gain an elegance, a coherence and an organisation to clear the way to a better and simpler news experience for our future audience. 

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=107

And that’s where the biggest challenge lies; creating this clean, robust and almost stream-lined platform - one that can glide through this wind tunnel of internet info and endless apps… One without a fishbone in its midst…

In part, that’s where I suspect the CMS certification technology that Sir Tim and Martin are developing with their $350,000 worth of Knight lolly is coming in; that they are preparing to unleash this ‘Domestos’ type application on the Web; one that will clean away the crud and leave just this bright, shiny and original story for the world to enjoy… this is where it all started from… this is the source, minus the  spin…

But then Mr Wyman, too, is hitting a nail on the head; how do we organise all the opportunites and applications that are now on offer at your local parish pump into some kind of sustainable and, above all, efficient platform going forward?

So, someone takes www.mylocalwriter.com/loddon off our hands; someone else grabs www.mylocalwriter.com/marthasvineyard - are they both granted the rights to the same ‘kit’, the same data streams (albeit of a UK and US kind), the same restaurant review functionality, the same way to ad source and sell, etc, etc…?

Or have we now in our rush to innovate merely created this many-headed beast of possibilities that only someone of, say, Google’s ilk can now coral into a useable platform; lop off a head here, a leg here without fear of retribution?

That’s the challenge; bringing order to all this well-intentioned chaos; getting networks to crystallise around a unifying thread… getting that fishbone out of your plug hole…�

First things first; declare our interest - Bob Russell MP is a very valued columnist on our Colchester United site, www.myfootballwriter.com/colchesterunited - and as an ex-local journalist himself, is more than well-placed to put the following early day motion in front of his Parliamentary colleagues…

http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=36391&SESSION=891

…and calls upon them to: ‘…engage with the local newspaper industry to ascertain what steps can be taken to ensure the survival and prosperity of local newspapers in the best interests of the local communities which they serve…

It is a noble cause - the survival of a local news platform upon which the likes of our Bob can be held to account by the community he steadfastly serves is, indeed, a pressing concern. And ought to be a key component of any fully functioning and mature democracy.

The difficulty, of course, comes when Parliament is asked to ensure the future ‘prosperity’ of local newspapers.

How any Government does that is an intriguing question - particularly when an in-coming Tory administration already appears intent on ripping out all those local planning applications and statutory notices out of local newspapers - saving local councils £17 mill into the bargain.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=60

Because whilst local newspapers do, indeed, have a compelling role to play in this whole democratic matrix into which our daily lives are entwined, do we want to be offering state support to US-owned Gannett; granting state hand-outs to Johnston Press now 20% owned by Malaysia’s second-richest man, a man valued at £2.4 billion by Forbes?

After all this is the same local newspaper industry that through the Newspaper Society gave evidence to Lord Fowler’s recent House Of Lords committee and offered their lordships a ‘very upbeat’ assessment of where their industry was… they didn’t seem in any particular need of help then…

And this, of course, the same local newspaper industry whose traditional model of prosperity has been feathering the nests of their shareholders for donkeys years; as a tax-payer do I want to be keeping the provincial newspaper industry in dividends?

Or do I want my money to be spent funding new platforms that are rather more fitting for the world that we live in - on platforms and networks that aren’t over-reliant on staining wood so that fleets of little, diesel-guzzling vans and spotty teenagers can deliver the ‘news’ to my door-step 24 hours late?

Long story, but I went down the central Government funding route via NESTA - the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts… http://www.nesta.org.uk/

Making innovation flourish… is the motto. “A unique and independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative…

So we duly put in a funding request. Was turned down. All very polite; all very well-meaning.

The reason? We were, they said, outside their area of expertise and experience… 

Love Bob Russell to bits, but if a penny of my tax-payer’s money goes to enabling the UK provincial press industry to carry on flogging the same old dead horse - and all for their shareholders benefit - while we get bombed by the likes of NESTA because we were far too innovative and different for their liking and I really will go down kicking and screaming.

Cos that’s just wrong. Just plain wrong.

I like Mark Potts; never met him - just listened from a distance when he took to the stage at Jeff Jarvis’ NewsInnovation gig in New York last autumn.

At which he delivered one of those lines that I have long carried around with me… talking about his experience at BackFence, he said: ‘We knew we were on the right track, we just run out of track…’

It’s a phrase that, as I say, has followed me round for the last 12 months; particularly, funnily enough, each and every time I come into contact with a banker - most of whom couldn’t recognise a new media steam train at ten paces, let alone the track it was on…

So, Mark’s reading of the US newspaper model, for me, is worth a read. Unless, of course, you are a UK newspaper executive for whom it might make all too grisly reading…

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/07/the-vultures-are-circling.html

It was a piece that was then taken up by Mr J…

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/07/17/what-do-you-buy-when-you-buy-a-newspaper/#comment-379520

And prompted another interesting post from another of OWAB’s favourites, Bob Wyman…

But there is a very interesting point therein - just what would anyone be buying if they picked over the bones of a once-great newspaper insitution; what would you see of any value.

Because as TrinityMirror, Johnston et al all nose-dive price-wise, that is the next question - what, exactly, will anyone see of any value to buy once they deem the share price has finally bottomed out?

For me, it’s the journalists. The ‘brands’ that have, over time, worked themselves into a position of trust and recognition within their chosen, specialised subject and their attendant communities - be it sports, business or whatever.

The faceless, young news reporter will, hopefully, be young, eager and adept enough to find a new, online writing niche to service; for those of us lucky enough to have had our many chins displayed on city bus stops for half-a-dozen years, the trick is to step out of the wreckage and find ourselves a decent, digital platform that is print press and geography-lite - and network heavy.

And then go again as quickly as possible - whilst our former audience still remembers our name. 

Apologies to whoever coined the term, but newspapers are unbundling - as they had to. Only right now it’s the economy, stupid, that’s doing the unbundling - just rather faster than anyone ever suspected.

There’s not too much to be gained from going round this block again; particularly if Trinity are getting a bit twitchy on the lawyer front - as the man from The Times appears about to find out…

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/greenslade/2008/07/trinity_mirror_sues_the_times.html

So, clearly we’re not going anywhere neat the ‘Who said what to whom…’ minutiae of Trinity’s roller-coaster ride on the stock-market over the last 48-hours.

But there are some bigger issues out here that events of the last two days merely reinforces…

That brokers and analysts on either side of the Atlantic just don’t like newspaper stock.

Period. End of.

The only time they will like them again is when they suspect there’s a buyer in town. And in the current climate that buyer is unlikely to be another newspaper group - not with, potentially, both the Competition Commission and OfCom on their case.

Why brokers and analysts don’t ‘do’ newspaper stocks any more is probably not too hard to fathom - in every likelihood, bar The Sunday Times ‘Home’ supplement on a Sunday and the Mrs’ love of a good ‘Mail On Sunday’ read, newspapers aren’t part of their world anymore.

They find their news in the palm of their hand - via their latest BlackBerry app or 3G Apple iPhone.

They are very unlikely to get off the 7.47pm from Waterloo and pick a copy of the Brighton Evening Argus on the way home.

And if they don’t, they don’t see any reason why anyone else would - or should. These people are paid fortunes to glimpse the future; to their mind, what - and how - they are accessing news now will be how and what the rest of us lesser mortals will be doing in three, four or five years time.

And the other point is that most of these characters are locked into a US mind-set; they analyse the data over there to then work out the knock-on effect over here… And one quick glance at the state of US media stocks will tell them all they need to know… Dump. Dump. Dump.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/07/15/whistling-taps-in-the-newsroom/

The frightening thing is, of course, is that these boys and girls were fore-casting pretty insurmountable structural challenges to the whole newsprint delivery model long before the current, cyclical challenges took Trinity and Co by the neck and started to squeeze that icy grip.

Put the two together and you get the kind of volatility that have scuppered Trinity’s hopes of a nice, quiet start to the holiday season…

Instead they are left to fire-fight - reaching for the lawyers and the City PR  people in a bid to keep some sense of order and stability into their daily, corporate proceedings.

How long they can steam the tide is anyone’s guess. But there seems to be a fairly basic truth in place here.

Brokers, analysts and - in every likelihood - bankers really, really don’t like newspaper stocks.

They suck.

�

As ever in our household, anniversaries of any sort are the Mrs’ preserve.

http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/full_article.asp?i=3201

But in that lies his success as a web writer; there’s humour and humanity wrapped effortlessly together into a very engaging whole. He’s a writer that not only locks eyeballs in place, but he engages hearts… he writes like he’s your best mate; that we’ve known eachother for donkey’s years.

And that’s a real talent.

And, for me, that’s one big lesson learnt. Write in the kind of cold, sterile and distant format of a newspaper and it won’t translate from print to web; it is - as Will Lewis rightly identified - about personalisation.

Who is this person offering comment on my football club? Do I trust them? Do I like them? Do I want them as one of my web mates?

And that’s the other thought that crosses your mind these days - how much we’re having to play catch up with the audience; how far and how quickly they have moved on without us.

It’s a thought process that, for me, also extends to our learning curve re local advertising - out there in local land, people buy into people; not networks. People like to see a human face on their ad rep; just as people like to sense a human touch on all their scraped in data…

Other lessons? Give people a good, sticky read about their passion and they’ll give you seven minute average visit times; that the trick is in offering an elegant organisation to all we do; it’s not journalism that’s broken, just the distribution mechanism that underpins it - and that same mechanism is broken beyond repair…

That if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then proof that we’re on the right track comes courtesy of TrinityMirror…

http://client.amenworld.com/whois_simple.php?domaine=NORWICHCITYBANTER.CO.UK

…and that out there in new media land, there are all manner of decent folk willing to help in any way that they can; further proof that we’re not the only ones who realise we’re all going to have to swim for it… same old story, that there’s a close-knit community out there.

Don’t think Google is ever going to earn you a journalistic living; people won’t by a car insurance policy while reading a football website - what they will do, however, is buy a train ticket to the next Norwich City away game.

Only try explaining that to the marketing department of a train operating company…

Don’t believe anyone who says they have the answer - they haven’t. No-one has.

And don’t underestimate the power of a well-placed blog; OWAB has opened more doors for me than any PR hot-shot ever could.

Above all, however, the last two years have taught me one, invaluable lesson - never underestimate the power and the love of family and friends. Their faith in me, and our little baby, has been overwhelming. 

For that, I thank every one of them.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/07/10/google-as-the-new-pressroom/#comments

Well, someone had to say it… Google bleeding this, Google bleeding that…

Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great post. Big and thought-provoking. And Mr Wyman remains a very switched on guy; even if he does now appear to work for you-know-who…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=72

But if we guess how the conversation went during ‘Breakfast With Jeff’ there is, to my mind, a very real danger that the powers-that-be down Buckingham Palace Road are allowing themselves to slip into the mind-set of becoming The Daily Google….

Or maybe, that’s the answer.

No, please not. Let’s not go that quietly into the night… Not just yet.

Sometimes you do begin to wonder. You really, really do…

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=41621&c=1

And, in particular, the evidence of Professor Steven Barnett of Westminster University and his contrary take on the proposition: “The only future for print media is online”.

“Barnett warned that the history of technological change in media was littered with wildly inaccurate predictions about the future.

“He said the development of online technology had followed the same pattern as previous technological revolutions in media, which had usually resulted in existing platforms adapting and coexisting with new media….

“…Each time, the pattern is exactly the same – those traditional media adapt and defy expectations by becoming as integral a part of the new media scene as the old.

“The reason each time is that they serve a need that no other media can serve.”

OK. Interesting. Other than giving me a nice, comfortable, lazy - and in the NotW’s case, let’s be frank, a slightly titilating - read on a Sunday, what ‘need’ exactly  does a printed news medium satisfy for the remaining six days of the week that a web-based platform can’t?

It gives me something to read if I sit on a tube or a bus on my way home for work. Granted.

But that’s invariably free - and heavily subsidised, to boot. And if it wasn’t there, I’d settle back into my iPod, read a book or while away half an hour flicking my way across the pages of my iPhone.

But, yes, for a specific community of commuters the printed newspaper word might, just, still service a need. Might.

If I like to read my news 24 hours after the event, it works; if I like to get into my car and drive to Tesco’s every night because the corner shop has closed, it works…

The list goes on and on.

As for the telephone and courier anaolgy, well… uh?

“He quoted 19th-century Post Office chief engineer Sir William Priest, who said that the telephone had only been successful in the United States because it lacked Britain’s “superabundance of messengers” and servants.

“But far from the popularity of the telephone wiping out Britain’s courier industry, Barnett pointed out that according to one report, in 2004 it was worth £14.4bn…”

Where do you start with that one? The telephone probably worked quite well in the US cos it’s quite a big place; am I going to send a messenger from Boston to New Orleans or am I going to pick up the phone?

And as if the healthy state of UK courier industry proves the point… What is it that the booming UK courier industry is actually couriering these days?

It’s the stuff we’ve bought off e-Bay; the books we’ve bought off Amazon…  

The kind of DIY, geography-lite consumer behaviour that crushes the traditional newspaper classified advertising model into the ground.  

Actually,  in fairness, it did prove the point.

The motion was “overwhelmingly defeated by attendees to the debate who largely comprised senior figures from the media…”

Always the same. Just as turkeys don’t vote for Christmas nor does King Canute ever call for a towel…

As I mentioned, I was wandering round www.2gether08.com last week - at which Messrs Watson and Loosemore announced the launch of this…

http://www.showusabetterway.com/

…which I can only commend. Nice if they could have found a way to have added another nought onto the end and given 20 great mashes a little pick-me-up, but there we go.

Eyes down for the full £20,000 it is.

My early favourite was this baby… something that was muttered about in passing last week. But, heh, you go girl, you go…

http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/call/2008/07/war-graves-comm.html 

Unfortunately the party appears to be pooped somewhere in the bowels of the Imperial War Museum with a restrictive copyright, as Richard points out in the posts…

http://www.ukniwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.8

Who knows, maybe that could be one for Messrs Watson and Loosemore to sink their teeth into; get those boys to enter in the spirit of summer ‘08. Get down with the kids and data stream…

But wander round the other ideas and there’s some great stuff in there; real little gems - so many of which deserve a wider airing.

But that was one thing that struck me out of www.2gethero8.com - that this whole mass, this soup of unleashed data still needs an organisational principle.

To the magnificent four people that listened to my 40-minute presentation last Thursday, apologies. You’ll have heard this before.

But with my trusted marker pen in one hand and much-maligned flip-chart steadied by the other, I drew this picture of one of our Tom’s early biology experiments. I guess it’s biology; maybe it was chemistry.

Anyway, it’s the one where you create this saturated sugar solution - this warm, rich, gloupy soup of all manner of goodness, bit like the combined output of www.2gether08.com and www.showusabetterway.com, which you then allow to cool.

But into that gloupy soup you drop a single thread - in our case www.mylocalwriter.com - which then offers an organisational platform for all those beautiful, sugar-sweet particles to re-crystalise around; that given something to hang onto - a platform to which to cling - an order, a symmetry and a possibility is brought to that gloupy soup of ideas and data…

Confronted by this great wall of noise and data, we have to find devices, to find platforms, to find organisational principles to which all this glorious out-pouring of knowledge and information can be framed around.

That’s the basic premise, I think, to www.mylocalwriter.com - that it becomes this communal reading room, a first meeting place with a warm-hearted, smiling local reporter on the door who then merely stands back and lets you the reader wander through the maze of sub-groups and interest hot-spots that lie beyond.

But there has to be a starting place; an entry point; an elegant and sustainable way into those deep, gold-bearing seams of data. 

Add a post-code to every soldier’s name - and all those boys will come home from beneath their foreign fields.

So, Siobhan, go for it girl…

Smash your way into the dark, restrictive vaults of the IWM and I’ll see if I can’t give you a bright, new shiny home for all that gathered data - right where the Preston Pals belong; right at the very heart of their local, Preston community.   

�

It was all jolly japes on Mr Jarvis’ blog the other day - he was busily convincing himself that Google analytics had developed a whole new set of analysis tools. In particular, detecting potential mood swings…

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/07/03/ive-got-issues/

I include the comments because one or two others have found ads popping up on their blogs that bore little or no resemblance to the subject matter in hand.

All of which left Mr Jarvis bemused by the appearance of first anger-related ads and then one giving his readers the chance to meet Jewish singles.

His pal hads something similar going on - only this time it was a gay singles, not Jewish.

For those with a nice university salary to fall back on, and a regular Guardian column up your sleeve, I guess you can afford to bemused by the appearance of such non-related advertising on your site.

Unless our Jeff has a higher-than-average readership of Jewish singles looking for love, that Google-served up ad is unlikely to serve him much by way of a click-through return.

And, likewise, for the person who runs that Jewish singles ad when they bunged their ad dollars Google’s way, I’d be surprised if they thought readers of a new media blog was their ideal target audience… Yeh, put us next to that Jarvis guy, loads of desperate singles looking for love…

We have, of course, been round this block once before as CUNY’s finest revealed some of his Google numbers…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=46

But there ought to be a serious point to be made on all of the above; a suggestion that all too often doesn’t dare to raise its head.

But is Jarvis likely to be earning any money out of running ads for Jewish singles?

And is Mr Jewish Singles likely to be earning any money-stroke-traffic from running ads on Jeff Jarvis’ blog?

So, where’s the benefit for either niche publisher or niche advertiser? What, exactly, is in it for them?

And if the answer is not a lot, then why not try something different?

If it ain’t bust, then don’t try and fix it. But by the same token, if something is bust, then why not try and fix it?

�

For obvious reasons, this fascinates me…

And apologies about being a couple of days out-of-date; blame www.2gether08.com - and fair play to Mr Steve Moore for organising said event.

But anyway, the suggestion that TrinityMirror and Johnston would be best advised throwing their hand in together…

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/sharewatch/market-report-broker-moots-merger-of-trinity-and-johnston-858351.html

Or more particularly…

“ABN Amro said that, given the problems faced by the media sector, “shareholders and management will increasingly press for industry consolidation”. “These are desperate times, and they call for desperate measures: we believe a Trinity/Johnston combination makes sense,” ABN said.

“The geographical fit is no ‘dream ticket’, but Trinity has an urban bias, while Johnston has a rural bias, so geographically the fit is not bad.”

“According to the broker, a merger of the two will bear estimated cost savings of up to £40m, or 5 per cent of the combined cost base.

“ABN also upgraded Trinity to “hold” from “sell”, citing confidence in national newspapers. The stock fell regardless: negative comment from a number of brokers, and an inclement market, took Trinity down by 13.75p to 95.25p. Johnston Press also succumbed to the market trend and lost 5.25p to 46.75p…

The end of the week has brought little imptrovement, of course. Trinity finished the week at 91.50; Johnston at an eye-watering 31.50. Imagine the cold that Deutsche Bank would have caught had they still been sat on their recent position - of under-writing the rights share issue at 53p a pop.

But, for me, that’s not where the interest lies in The Independent piece.

It’s the use of the word ‘geography’. Twice.

Or rather ‘geographical’ and ‘geographically’ - as in the ‘fit’ being ‘no dream ticket…’

It only improves in the broker’s eyes when you view Trinity in an ‘urban’ light; Johnston in a ‘rural’ one.

Which for me, has a slight air of straw clutching to it.

E-bay makes no such distinction; nor does FaceBook; nor RightMove.

These - as we’ve said many a-time before - are communities without boundaries; the web doesn’t do geography. End of. Hyper-local or hyper-niche - yes, potentially.

Hyper-national (stroke global); yes. It does nothing in-between.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=44 

The other intriguing point to all this is the ‘very upbeat’ assessment the Newspaper Society chose to deliver to Lord Fowler’s House of Lords committee; which in turn ensured that their lordships recommended little or nothing that would make such consolidation an easy process.

In fact, quite the reverse. Now you could have OfCom’s mits all over any deal as well….

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=99

But it is clear that both recognise that they have to abandon geography as an organisational principle ASAP; it is, you suspect, what Trinity were thinking with the recent launch of their ‘Banter…’ sites…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=80

Team up with ‘rural’ Johnston and now, in theory, they could have a way of pumping, say, MKDons football content through the Banter brand… provided, of course, that Johnston was happy for its own content to be re-branded in that fashion…

The only difficulty being, of course, that Johnston’s title in the rural, rolling farmland of Milton Keynes is their weekly free paper the Citizen… which then poses all manner of integration issues content-wise if you are seeking a 24/7 digital feed out of a weekly - or, indeed, a bi-weekly title.

Again all of these boys have already - at great expense - built their own, bespoke CMS systems; branded their local sites icBirmingham in one case, PeterboroughToday in the other; their classified ad sections can be icMotors or jobstoday… but if consolidation is ever to drive the kind of savings that they need, then this whole delivery structure needs to integrate.

That way an advertiser in Peterbrough can ‘cascade’ his advert down through Birmingham elegantly and easily.

If not yet through Bristol, Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, Hull or Stoke.

Or, indeed, Norwich, Ipswich or Colchester.

Irrespective of whether or not the OfCom-enhanced Competition Commission of Lord Fowler’s imaginings actually allows the kind of consolidation the market is screaming out for - remember: consolidation doesn’t come at the expense of journalists’ jobs - if the geograpical fit between Trinity and Johnston is no ‘dream ticket’, then you can bet your bottom dollar that fitting their existing advertising and editorial platforms together in a bid to re-organise themselves in a truly, super-efficient fashion will be no dream ticket either.

It’ll be the proverbial nightmare. It’ll cost an arm and a leg and take forever.

Right now few of us have got either that much time or that kind of money.

And as those share prices tumble ever further south, as far as TrinityMirror and Johnston Press are concerned day by day they have even less time and even less money before the darkness descends.