This extraordinary image comes from Sparkle Media and shows a crane collapsed across a building near the Albert Dock in Liverpool.
This is by my reckoning the third crane collapse in Liverpool in recent years. There are reports that the driver is injured but alive and there are people trapped in the building. Here’s hoping everyone gets out unscathed.
Liverpool’s citizen journalists are providing superb coverage of the event, which you can follow here.
It seems the Liverpool Echo is to become primarily a morning paper – a move that puts it into apparent competition with the Daily Post.
The Echo will still retain an on-day edition, but the first will be printed overnight.
Reading between the lines, the change in deadlines is to accommodate a switch from printing in Liverpool to Oldham, at least one hour’s drive away.
The consensus – right or wrong – in Liverpool’s media community is that The Post is on its way out, with sales down to under 10K according to various reports I’ve heard.
Given the difficulty regional newspapers are experiencing, and recent moves by Trinity Mirror to axe several Midlands titles, the writing would appear to be on the wall for Liverpool’s second daily.
But in moving the newspapers into almost direct competition with one another, Trinity Mirror seems to be delaying that move – but is it simply delaying the inevitable?
An email has reached me to tell me about barebones.tv – a live feed of a household of scousers going about their daily lives.
If you’re waiting for a catch, there ain’t one. It’s not a PR campaign, stunt set up by a local radio station or porn channel (more’s the pity). This is a shame, because the reality of watching people doing absolutely sod all for 24 hours a day is exactly as mind-numbingly tedious as you’d expect.
It seems like Liverpool.com has gone the way of so much print media, following a statement on Twitter that the mag ‘as you know it is no more’ and a tip that most of its editorial staff have been made redundant.
This is a shame, most obviously for the journalists involved, as it was a good effort in a genre that’s frequently utterly useless, but the news is hardly that surprising.
Another cautionary tale about Twitter, and about April Fool’s Day – this one concerns Tommy Scott, the bloke was in Space, and an internet rumour that he had died.
Not exactly the height of sophistication, and not remotely funny, and that’s before you factor the new somehow filtering back to Scott’s mother
I noticed this news circulating around Twitter’s Liverpool fraternity last night and though it a bit odd.
An official press release from his record company Antipop had said: “We are sorry for the untimely death of one of our great sons” and detailed that he died of heart failure.
It didn’t surprise me an hour or so later to see that it was, in fact, a hoax.
I’m not going to get in the detail of the Hillsborough disaster, which is nearing its 25th anniversary in April.
I was 11 at the time and don’t remember a lot about it, aside from finding the names of the roads and ends associated with the tragedy disturbingly memorable. Liverpool Guild of Students, of which I was a member, had a memorial on the wall as a tribute to a student lost on that day.
I do not and cannot really relate to the way Hillsborough affected Liverpool, so I have no right to intrude on, or share in, that grief. That emotion is obvious every day when another stack of Sun newspapers goes unsold in Liverpool.
I was playing cricket last year when I expressed surprise that someone had brought along a copy of the Sun and subsequently spent some time explaining why to some local Liverpool lads. They were as shocked by the story as I was that they didn’t already know.
All of which brings me onto the role of the Sun and more specifically, Kelvin Mackenzie.
There’s some fascinating stuff over at How Do regarding the conception of the new logo, which has been given a rather mixed reception.
Since my media nodes, and time, are naturally limited I failed to get any sort of inside scoop, but How Do reports a number of interesting factoids, including:
• Finch was originally to be awarded the pitch without it being put out to tender, resulting in some understandable consternation from other agencies in the region
• A second pitching stage saw three agencies bidding for the roll-out of the branding and launch, using the logo already designed by Finch
• An original strapline reading ‘Alive with Imagination’ was removed when it met with ‘a pretty poor reception from everyone unfortunate enough to have seen it’
• A number of companies competed for various components of the brief, which seems bafflingly complicated
• Phil Redmond has had nothing to do with the branding. He is apparently in a huff after disagreeing with the direction of the branding
“So, we need a logo that mixes the old with the new, the vibrant with the classical, old architecture versus the new architecture. The Beatles AND The Wombats, The Cavern AND Cream, Protestant AND Catholic, Liverpool AND Everton, Yosser Hughes AND Danielle Lloyd, Yin AND Yang, forward not backward, blue and, er, light blue.”
“And we need to have some horrible tower blocks in it for, y’know, business and shit.”
“How about a two-tone pictures of some cool Liverpool landmarks, plus those shit tower blocks?”
“Wouldn’t that look like the Thames TV logo?”
“Yes. But lets get some slebs in to tell us what they think of it. Say Abby from The Zutons, that bloke from Cream, some woman who owns a boutique and the director of the school for Tropical Medicine.”
“What have they got to do with it?”
“Absolutely nothing, but we’ll call them brand ambassadors and say they form a wide cross-section of Liverpool society.”
“Love it! OK, I’ll send this down to design. By the way, how much are we going to charge for this?”
“Oooh. 50 grand? Plus £20K for research. There’s a recession on after all…”
I managed to dig out another old Blackman & Robin, which first appeared in Black+White Magazine over five years ago.
This story is undoubtedly the three of us at out creative peak or our most outrageously self-indulgent, depending on your opinion and involves a slew of celebrity appearances and pop culture references.
The celebs mainly conistsed of people we had a fondness for, but in the case of O’Leary it was simply somone we thought was an idiot. I’ve had always loved Sir Bobby Robson, so he was the obvious choice for a hero. The sadly-departed John Peel and Tony Wilson had been in the news recently, as had Alexie Sayle, following some unfortunate comments about Liverpool.
Pop culture references include Alexei Sayle’s Stuff, Undercover Brother, Ghostbusters, The Five Doctors, Kill Bill, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Beatles, The Royle Family, Ali G and Transformers, though there are probably hal a dozen others if you look closely enough.
Eagle-eyed readers may notice Blackman and Robin and Unclee Bobby sharing a jacuzzi with Sting and Jimmy Nail, both of whom have breasts. I’m not sure why.
As someone who works as an online editor, I’ve become a huge fan of embeddable Flash games, not because they’re any cop but because they’re such as a good, cheap, easy source of evergreen copy that’s inevitably popular.
In that spirit I though I’d round up all the games on the web that relate to Liverpool. Inevitably the ones I’ve been able to find tend to relate to Liverpool Football Club efforts, but there’s a nifty little racer in here too.
Although I don’t have a lot of time for footy sims, Champions League Liverpool Milan is actually pretty decent for a Flash game.
And, by a curious quirk of fate, the Streets of Liverpool against-the-clock racer may be geographically inaccurate, but it starts at finishes at the former offices or Ripple Effect – Number One Hnrey Street – which ahppens to be where I currently work.