Editing a provincial newspaper has never been the most intellectually rigorous of tasks.
Traditionally the ability to create an aggressively macho management culture by bullying the work experience girl; grooming a couple of contacts in the local Rotary Club; having some half-decent local knowledge and always taking up populist positions – no matter how barmy – has got your average small town conservative newspaper editor selling enough papers to have a quiet life.
Alas, it seems, such simple tasks are beyond the wit of Cancer editor Mike “News Bunny” Norton. As his hasty and unequivocal support for the BRT route on the Bristol and Bath Cycle Path looks likely to marginalise his increasingly marginalised newspaper – with the drastically plummeting circulation – still further.
Due to his woefully incompetent misreading of public opinion, lacking any grasp of local knowledge whatsoever, Norton now finds himself at odds with over 90% of his own readers who yesterday voted overwhelmingly in a poll to keep the cycle path as it is.
Norton also seems to have ignored the huge and growing petition on the council website, which – big hint this – just happens to be the largest one they’ve ever had on there.
Instead Norton has backed the madcap plan that’s only supported by our lobotomised transport boss Mark Bradshaw, a few First Bus executives seeking easy profits and a load of CONsultants out to make a small fortune for themselves.
Even the Cancer’s sister publication Venue magazine – not noted for embracing the cycling fraternity – today accurately describes the plan as “fucking stupid”.
Poor old Norton. Looks like he’s put himself out on a bit of a limb. How long before we find him delivering a perfectly executed U-turn on the issue then?
Especially when the News Bunny finally catches on that the other part of the BRT plan, which the council’s trying to keep quiet about at present, involves introducing a congestion charge. Something Norton claims to be implacably against!
-the EP editor misses the old railway…if you look at the pro-BRT people, their view is ‘they took the railway 30 years ago’, this will bring it back. We just need to emphasise that if it hadn’t been taken away, they’d be fighting to stop it being turned into a BRT route, the way they were stopped from doing to the shirehampton line because Network Rail stopped them. And they’d be doing fare strikes over the one train an hour service from First GW.
-steve
ps: Please remember its ‘The Railway Path’ not ‘a cycle path’ -walkers and schoolkids make up a lot of the traffic.
A fine example of why our early-rising (9.00 a.m. in the morning) evening organ should stick to it usual vacuous run of non-stories along the lines of ‘Fishponds woman cuts toenails’.
Mr Norton and his crayon-wielding semi-literate hacks are clearly completely out of their depth when it comes to serious matters.
I’d always assumed that the EP editor was a robot controlled by the advertising-purchasing businesses who, for example, are developing (or want to develop) in Emersons Green ttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/somerset/3568579.stm
the volume builders and, ha ha, the companies hoping to make money from running public transport between it and the shopping complexes in New Broadmead
JulieAnn:
I notice your link to a BBC story erroneously places Emerson’s Green in Somerset.
Does that mean Auntie recruits its journalists from the same place as Mike Norton?
I think we should be told.
Oops! My mistake in thinking it was Somerset. The 2 used to be combined on the BBC website.
Still doesn’t stop them being way behind on news stories, an establishment mouthpiece and having less in-depth analysis than the Beano 😉
Norton now finds himself at odds with over 90% of his own readers who yesterday voted overwhelmingly in a poll to keep the cycle path as it is.
Er…no. The figures refer to those who voted in the EP poll….quite a different thing, I’m sure you’ll agree. More facts, less hysteria please.
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