Saturday 4 June 2011

WhatEver Happened to the Isle of Thanet Gazette?


Their website that is usually at www.thisiskent.co.uk/thanet seems to have gone, I asked Mr Google who usually seems to know where websites have moved to but he doesn’t know either, nor does Mrs Bing.

Can one lose a newspaper’s website on the internet, does this sort of thing happen to The Fun Loving Sun? I ask myself.

This is my fault really, I usually buy a copy on Fridays, but I forgot this week, I do sometimes and then I cheat by looking online.

The http://www.thisiskent.co.uk website has a section called “Where I Live” this lists Canterbury Cranbrook Faversham Rochester Sevenoaks Tonbridge Tunbridge Wells Whitstable and Crowborough. No sign of Thanet, perhaps we have vanished and not the newspaper.

5 comments:

  1. As far as I can tell, the place name links go to the citizen journalist "XXX People" sites. Think all of the Kent news has been put together into categories.

    Looks quite good and hope it works well!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Neil, yes I see that and living in the Canterbury area you can follow the Canterbury link to http://www.canterburypeople.co.uk/home but Thanet seems to have just gone.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Maybe you should ask them on Facebook? They're always posting on there: https://www.facebook.com/thanetgroup

    ReplyDelete
  4. We have still not got to the truth of the recent Thanet Gazette billboard error.

    Outside shops were posters promising a headline about the inquest evidence of David O'Leary's partner.

    David was murdered at his home Lydden Lodge Valley Road Margate 1st March 2008. The Inquest was 5the January 2010.

    What appears to have happened recently is that billboard posters of January 2010 were somehow put out in error.

    But (and apparently this is coincidence) it just happens that recently I drew up a properly interested party application, for David's father Dan O'Leary, to apply to HM Coroner for copies of Inquest testimony.

    And it just happens, a week after the Gazette made its strange bill board errors, that HM Coroner supplied the testimony.

    HM Coroner has a Copyright on the testimony and issued with it a permission for it to be used in County Court proceedings at Thanet County Court. Dan O'Leary versus Chief constable and Emma Terry (Partner of late David O'Leary)

    Permission is being applied for to HM Coroner to use the testimony additionally in support of further complaint to IPCC against the conduct of the murder inquiry.

    I have reported to HM Coroner, upon examining the evidence transcripts, that I think that Police evidence given at Inquest was misleading. And that I wish to take that up with IPCC.

    I also emailed Rebecca Smith editor IoT Gazette to question the accuracy of the Gazette report of the Inquest proceedings January 2010.

    She replied that the report was written under "Absolute privilege". And I replied about the meaning of that and the requirement that the report be contemporaneous and ACCURATE.

    In my opinion the report was seriously misleading and may have tended to persuade persons with information (Particularly neighbours in Valley Road area)that the snippets they may know would be of no interest to the murder inquiry.

    We have previously circulated the Valley Road area with letters requesting information but we were unable to be specific (Because we were relying on the Gazette report of Inquest proceedings)

    People who were unable to help, nonetheless took the trouble to reply extending condolences to Dan O'Leary. That was quite moving. It shows that human decency does reside in Thanet after all.

    We have some specific questions now which may be put in person to immediate neighbours.

    The next time criticism is made of blogging, that implies newspaper journalism adheres to higher standards of accuracy determined by absolute privilege ? Take the criticism with a pinch of salt.

    Not an auspicious time for the Gazette.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.