Fire Brigade Rescue Seagull in Ramsgate and the news in Ramsgate

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.    

Here in Ramsgate there were live animal export protests last night, see http://www.courier.co.uk/live-animal-export-protest/story-29613170-detail/story.html personally I am not happy about this trade.

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.     

There is a subsection of this website called http://www.courier.co.uk/thanet which brings up some Thanet stuff but not the live animal export article.

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.

Added to this I occasionally put a link to my bookshop blog http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/ where the real hard sell goes on. 

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.