PAPER FAILS IN FUNDING PROBE

CRUMBRIA: 12/04/2025

HAS Eden had its fair share of levelling-up cash? thundered Penrith snoozepaper The Slumberland & Westmoreland Imperilled in a page one ‘splash’ this week.

Shocky horror!

Had the struggling weakly broadsheet really got an “Exclusive” where elected Lib Dems and overpaid town hall directors were mercilessly hauled over the coals?

Of course not, you fool – this is The Imperilled!

Let’s just say that if its scoop was a game of golf, the paper wildly shanked its first shot and then spent the rest of the game blindly hacking away in the rough looking for the ball.

The article seems to be implying that the Eden area of Crumbria received more than £3m of levelling-up funding, yet just over £500,000 has so far been spent on projects actually in, er, Eden.

Any reasonable reader would think that £2.5m is unaccounted for or waiting to be spent?

Yet the goalposts were then subtly shifted to include spending on projects involving both Eden and OTHER areas, by which time many readers without calculators will have lost the will to live.

The headline that promised so much was buried as the “newspaper” got bogged down in the details.

With ridiculous 2ft long broadsheet pages to fill, this has long been the Herald’s Achilles heel, although it stubbornly blunders on.

By the time paragraph 20 slowly rolled around, readers were drowning in numbers as the original “story” was lost, set adrift in a sea of Freedom of Information figures.

We’ve read the article slowly five times (including once out loud), and we still don’t understand the conclusion that the newspaper is expecting readers to draw.

(Our conclusion? The paper never really reached a conclusion either!)

There’s a golden rule for newspapers. NEVER pose a question in a headline that you don’t then ANSWER in the story below.

Most tellingly of all was the throwaway line in the article that Wokemoreland & Farcical Council was “unable to say” how much of the £3 million-plus funding had been spent in Eden.

If the Clowncil doesn’t know – who the frig does?!?

The story never “followed up” with a knockout blow after this glaring admission.

Sadly, this once great local paper lost most of its teeth five years ago.

Rather than bite the arse and ankles of Local Government, its output now large suggests that it prefers to run obediently alongside, sit, beg, or roll over on command.

That’s despite efforts like this of a public money funding probe that scream of being rushed out of the oven before having time to be properly cooked.

The Herald’s ‘Scoop’ had all the thrust of a collapsed souffle.

It’s the same story on all of our local “newspapers”.

Overworked skeleton staff doing three or four jobs end up chucking half-baked efforts into the public domain to meet a deadline.

Result: ⚽⚽⚽

Reader Indigestion: 1

Local Government Spending: 2

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