This was all going on as I passed the town centre, I guess
that I am a bit inclined not to bother with “cat up tree” stories, but I was
passing and took the photo.
The seagull had got stuck in the netting to prevent birds
from nesting in this bit of modern architecture, which appears to have been
designed with plenty of shelves for birds to nest on.
Who to blame for the seagull’s interesting day? The architect,
the person who put the nets up, goodness knows.
And of course the line here, in terms of how much we can do
to protect our wildlife, I have seen several small birds that have fallen out
of nests recently and have gone down the leave well alone road, was that the
right thing to do?
A very well turned out hearse and pair this morning outside
the shop, the building workers in the new council flats there were making a lot
of banging and grinding noises and I wondered if I should go and tell them that
I could make the horses bolt.
But how far do you take animal welfare? Anyone who has had
to deal with a child worried about their stick insect, that hasn’t apparently
moved for some time and want's you to take it to the vet, will know what I mean.
I have to be very careful not to be hypocritical
over this one though as I drink milk, particularly in tea, and of course most
milk is produced by getting the cows pregnant, slaughtering the calves, and
then milking the cows.
On the press front though I do wonder why this local
press story from Isle of Thanet Gazette team doesn’t appear on their website http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/news
but appears only on a website covering the whole of Kent and Sussex, meaning that
it is pretty much impossible to find most of their Thanet related stories on
the internet.
Then I thought I would give the IOTG a ring, perhaps report
a cat up a tree, so I looked on their contact us page http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/contact.html
not much luck doing that the main news number is unobtainable and no one
answers the rest.
What I think I am getting at here is that we are slowly
going down the road of how does anyone get paid for writing anything? And
particularly how does anyone get paid for writing local news articles.
I mean this started out as a Ramsgate news article about a
seagull up a greengrocers, most people who read it know that I get paid – as it
were – because the people reading it know that I run the main bookshop in the
area.
So I can cover the cost of my time writing this blog because
when people read the article it reminds them that I am still alive and my
bookshop is still selling books.
The local paper websites have tried to deal with
this issue by having advertising on them but this eventually reached the point that
it became impossible to read the news articles, without first installing an app
to block the advertising and pop up pages.
Of course, back in the day, the journalists were
paid out of the money people paid for buying the local paper.
Now I think the most interesting aspect of local
journalism was that I found I couldn’t actually contact a journalist by phone
at 4pm on a Friday afternoon, yes I could probably tweet them, email them say
something on their Facebook page. Weird ain’t it.
Or you could try the number in the paper 01303 850999 or mine 01303 851690 as I have now been shifted to an office in Folkestone. A new website is being launched, kentlive.news
ReplyDeleteIf you want to know the merits of all that, well, we'll have to wait and see.....
I have no idea why this has signed me in as Margate Rock. Kathy
ReplyDeleteThanks Kathy? I started out by reading your article on on live animal exportsvia the Facebook link and later after the pigeon incident when i tried to get back to the article using the IOTG website I found I couldn't do it, so I tried to ring the paper using the phone numbers on the website. I didn't actually buy this weeks Gazette until I got to Waitrose after work and lats weeks had been recycled.
ReplyDeleteI guess you were signed on to google at the time and it picked up your blogger ID