Recycling news feat. Banksy balls

That hotbed of investigative journalism, the Evening Cancer newsroom, has been very busy this week researching original stories by looking on the, er … Internet!

First up – plastered across the front page on Wednesday – The Blogger’s sensational revelation from last week that the council’s planning to produce a pointless recycling DVD.

Indeed so big is the story that Cancer Editor-in-Chief, Mike Norton, felt obliged to whip out his fountain pen and deliver a thunderous editorial that engaged in some recycling of its own in the form of well worn cliches:

If this is regarded as a legitimate way to spend public money and an effective way to encourage people to recycle waste then the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.

Believe me Mike, we’re way beyond anything as ordinary as lunatics running an asylum here. It’s more like they outsourced the place years ago, then set up a lucrative management consultancy with the proceeds and are currently raking it in as the preferred supplier of ‘advice’ to Bristol City Council officers.

Wednesday also found Chief News Reporter, Julie Harding, doing her little bit for recycling … From Bristol Indymedia! An amusing little tale about that notoriously useless employment scheme for postgrads cum regeneration quango, Community at Heart, spending £90k on a water feature and kids slider, neither of which actually worked, could be found gracing most of page 5.

Then moving briskly on to Thursday and we find a tedious party political whinge from Labour MP Kerry McCarthy’s blog (now strangely deleted) about the Lib Dems putting out Election leaflets in St George West – where the Labour Councillor, John Deasy, died recently – has been transformed, with Kerry’s quotes lifted directly from her blog, into an original and exciting page 7 news story.

Well done to all involved. No doubt next week one of the Cancer’s cutting edge columnists will be telling us how blogs are a pointless waste of space that just copy stuff from the mainstream media …

Meanwhile, presumably not wanting to be left out of this golden week for the city’s journalism, this appeared on the BBC Bristol website on Tuesday August 12 at 11:12am:

New Banksy work on city pub wall

A new mural by graffiti artist Banksy has appeared on the outside wall of the Highbury Vaults pub in Bristol.

The tagged stencilled work shows Rapunzel with her hair let down like a rope to allow a hooded youth to climb up to her window.

But wait! At 12:02pm the story changed a little:

New graffiti art on city pub wall

A new mural by artist Nick Walker has appeared on the outside wall of the Highbury Vaults pub in Bristol.

The tagged stencilled work shows Rapunzel with her hair let down like a rope to allow a hooded youth to climb up to her window.

And then finally at 12.22pm – particularly nice touch this – to help people out (like BBC journalists who don’t know one local graffiti writer from another perhaps?) this was appended to the end of the story:

There had been some confusion over who the artist was until the tag was revealed showing the work to be by Mr Walker.

Chris Logan, owner of CPS Services which supplied the scaffold, was the first person to see the new work.

“I was totally shocked,” he said. “It’s nice to have Bristol artwork in a student pub. It deserves recognition,” he said.

“Some of my team thought it was by Banksy at first,” he added.

Nick Walker has worked out of Bristol for more than 20 years and is a contemporary of Banksy.

Phew – some of us could have got really confused there if the experts at the BBC weren’t around to explain it all properly for us.