THE CRUMBLING NEWS

By Phil Classifieds

ONE part of The Cumberland News doesn’t know what the other part is doing.

In this Friday’s edition, a long and tedious page lead article on page 19 is also used VERY PROMINENTLY on Page 26.

This is what happens when the head of the pantomime horse is not in the same room as the arse.

Told on the paper’s piss-poor “Business Pages”, it’s worth remembering that one business story you will never read are the struggles of Newsquest’s own titles in Cumbria!

Which makes the use of this article twice in this week’s paper very revealing.

It tells how Crumbling News owners, Scroogequest, hosted a recent “networking night” with Cumbria Tourism.

The actual attendance at the event was conveniently not included but appears far from overwhelming.

That is if this blurred, underlit, contributed ‘Smartphone’ photo on Page 26 can be trusted (below).

Photo: Stevie Wonder, page design: Ray Charles.

One interpretation could be that Scroogequest laid on this event in the mistaken belief that a warm glass of Cava and a show of photos in Friday’s paper might be sufficient to winkle out some extra advertising revenue from the Lake District tourism machine?

Beancounters at NQ could be in for a surprise. Hotels and tourist attractions here have very deep pockets but extremely short fingers.

Most visitors travel to the area from outside of Cumbria. So businesses in the Lake District long ago cottoned on to the ineffectiveness of placing over-priced adverts in The Aspatria Daily Dispatch or The Egremont Bi-Weekly Bugle, etc.

Tourists also stopped buying local papers in meaningful numbers a long time ago.

Yet these hard facts of life never stopped visiting Lancashire-based Advertising managers from gaslighting the Cumbrian ground troops.

Many ex-sales reps here will testify of being told by their superiors that the land of milk and money is all around in the Lake District – if only they’d pull their fingers out and sell some space.

The weekly “Shit Show” readers are witnessing in the paper are the inevitable results of Scroogequest policies now coming home to roost.