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Ex-hack Michael Cunningham on everything.....
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June 27, 2005

What It Says In The Papers: The Lidl People

It's all sun, sea and travel in this week's Lidl People. The German discount supermarket giant may be downmarket, cheap, and subscribing to the stack-them-high-and-consumers-will-buy credo. But the Lidl People, its glossy full-colour eight-page almost-tabloid, attempts to conjure up exotic worlds.

A few issues back, it was plugging riding gear. Yep. Riding gear.

Imagine the scene.

"Tally ho darling! Now that our Sorcha has a new pony, don't you think we'd better pop on down to Lidl in Lucan and buy her a new crop to go with it?"

"Yes dear - and a hat and some jodhpurs! At bargain prices."

The riding gear was its fastest selling set of "themed" items ever.

Similarly, the main story on pages two and three of this week's Lidl People could be straight out of Thunderball. Or is it Dr No? Headlined "Explore the Deep Blue Sea", it has diving masks, diving knives, underwater acoustic signals, underwater cameras and underwater strobe lights. Everything apart from James Bond's spear-gun.

And if this deep blue theme seems a bit too Caribbean or Mediterranean, the underwater angle gets a more local twist on page four, with 'his' and 'her' wetsuits - "Enjoy the sea without suffering the cold!" it says.

Meanwhile pages six and seven anticipate the final arrival of the good summer weather, with parasols, hammocks and loungers. That summer theme continues on the back page with travel bags, travel hairdryers and travel manicure sets.

So what does all this add up to about the Irish nation? According to the Lidl people, this is exactly the time of year when we will be (a) taking a trip that requires a travel manicure set, (b) going no doubt to some overseas destination with a deep blue sea (which might turn out to be freezing) or (c) lolling about in our sunny gardens.

Or we might not be going away at all, and we want that DVD recorder which takes up most of page one. It has a 120-gig hard drive for 449 euros. And it has... TIMESHIFT! This means something in red type on a blue background that's virtually unreadable, with an added explanation that "you can answer the door, make a cup of tea, take a phone call, nip to the loo etc". While in your new wetsuit no doubt.

In the six-year period to 2004 the Lidl and Aldi discount chains went from having no stores in Ireland to a total of 74 (53 Lidl outlets and 21 Aldi).

By September 2003, according to Behaviour & Attitudes Market Research, 59% of shoppers in Ireland had been inside a Lidl store, with 6% of shoppers using Lidl stores for their main shopping. But look at those two figures. While some two thirds of shoppers now go to Lidl, they're occasional shoppers, for discounts here and there rather than their main weekly shop.

So the Lidl People has a key role in this mega giant's conquest of Ireland. Stuffed into your letterbox with its riding crops and deep blue seas, its a reminder to the occasional shoppers, plugging some of its latest rather seasonal lines in topical dream packages.

But don't get me going about what it's like to work for them. A couple of friends have, and say it was a bleddy nightmare.

Posted by mick cunningham at 05:27 PM | Comments (1)

Car crash woman 'already dead'

Here's a truly mindboggingly bizarre news story.
A car crashes into a concrete wall on a motorway in Sawara, near Tokyo.
The impact throws a three-year-old child out of the car from the front passenger seat. His father gets out of the car, having survived. But both he and the child are struck by oncoming vehicles and killed.
Emergency crews rush to the scene and find the body of the man's wife in the back seat. She's already in a state of rigor mortis - and the cops say she has already been dead for at least a day before the accident happened.

Full story here

Posted by mick cunningham at 05:26 PM | Comments (1)

The Modern Review

In our house we were massive fans of the Modern Review. Despite the shoestring budget, it was a rather elegant magazine - well, mag on newsprint - that took popular culture seriously during the Nineties, bringing an intellectual vigour that was so unusual in British publications up to then.

Its motto was "Low culture for highbrows", it had a two-page mission statement in the first issue ("Mass culture may offend against good taste... but that's what's good about it") and they were clearly into Roland Barthes. Nothing like a bit of a Barthesian ramble before breakfast, eh?

When Toby Met Julie is a new documentary on BBC 4 at 9pm tonight (if fucking NTL aren't on the bloody blink again) about the mag and its three founders Toby Young, Julie Birchill and her then husband Cosmo Landesman.

"Smash Hits edited by FR Leavis," is how Birchill put it at the time. Only survived 21 issues, yet it was hugely influential. Basically it pushed the broadsheets off their high-culture pedestals and prompted the creation of the likes of the Sunday Times's Culture section.

Talking of which, yesterday's edition of the Culture section notes: "Burchill recalls how she rewarded Young on the publication of that groundbreaking first edition with lines of cocaine spelling out the title - and it was just as well for both of them that they hadn't just launched, for example, The Scrap and Waste Reclamation and Disposal Weekly."

Posted by mick cunningham at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2005

Post Celtic Ireland: signs of the times

A GAA match report from page 49 of this week's Blanchardstown Gazette (about St Philip’s National School, Mountview, in the Fingal Schools Football League finals in Parnell Park last week):

"There were some excellent performances on the day for St Philip’s, particularly from goalkeeper Abiola Gbajabiamila, defenders Dina and Yasmine Gray, Andreea Bodiu, and the superb Anna McDonald Agu."

Posted by mick cunningham at 01:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Big shake-ups in regional press

Emap's purchase of Scottish Radio Holdings yesterday for £391m is bound to send big reverberations through the regional newspaper scene in Ireland.

Emap has kept SRH's radio interests but sold on its newspaper titles to British regional publisher Johnston Press for £155m.

So Johnston now owns the Kilkenny People, Leitrim Observer, Longford Leader, Nationalist and Munster Advertiser, and the Tipperary Star. In the North it owns the Morton group - "around two-thirds of the map of Northern Ireland is covered by Morton's weekly newspapers", and they have at least two dozen titles.

Morton Newspapers also has a big printing plant - a full-colour Rockwell Universal 35 press on the outskirts of Portadown, which also prints titles from the South such as the Athlone Voice.

Posted by mick cunningham at 11:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 21, 2005

Spot the homophone (part II)

A couple of years ago you might remember I ran a homophone test. You know the kind of thing, a word that sounds the same as the one that should have been used at that point, but it means something totally different.

But sometimes you have to smile when you come across homophonic howlers in news copy. Here are a few more that seem to crop up all the time...

RIGHT: "just deserts" (from the French "deservir", the same word that gives us deserve)
WRONG: "just desserts" - it's really only OK if you're referring to a pudding ("the restaurant didn't have any starters or main courses, just desserts")

RIGHT: "this menu will really whet your appetite" (comparing it to a whetstone for sharpening a knife)
WRONG: "wet your appetite" (well, the desserts might be very runny)

RIGHT: "bated breath" (a shortened form of "abated")
WRONG: "baited breath" - unless, of course, you're a large cat that eats a rake of cheese and breathes it into a mouse hole)

RIGHT: "a hair's breadth"
WRONG: "a hare's breath" (or maybe a vet is inspecting some poor creature on the side of the road for signs of life)

RIGHT: "wreak havoc"
WRONG: "reek havoc"

RIGHT: "grin and bear it"
WRONG: "grin and bare it" (images of lapdancing clubs spring to mind)

RIGHT: "sleight of hand"
WRONG: "slight of hand" (yet I can see it in a phrase such as "Frodo observed that the troll was quite small, and slight of hand")

RIGHT: "martial law"
WRONG: "marshal law", though some towns in the wild west might have had it at one time or another.

RIGHT: "he's a flair player"
WRONG: "he's a flare player" (major trouser alert)

Posted by mick cunningham at 11:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 20, 2005

Clare People: new newspaper

A new newspaper is taking on the Clare Champion (or the "Champeen") from next week.

The Clare People, presumably parked in cyberspace at Clarepeople.ie, is backed by two young (well, the news reports say they're young) multi-millionaires: hotelier Sean Lyne and aircraft-leasing tycoon Domhnal Slattery.

They've hired the Champion's former editor Gerry Collison. And the Champion in turn has grabbed Michael Sheridan, formerly of the Irish Press and Sunday Indo (and the movie biz), as its new editor. The Clare People will be an 80-page full-colour tabloid.

Champion trivia: Former luminaries of the Champion include the late Dick Walsh and Tom Glennon. The latter was a member of the ill-fated 1984 expedition to plant an Irish flag on Rockall. The three-man crew ran into storm and one of the men, Jack Lavelle, was lost overboard.

Posted by mick cunningham at 11:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 17, 2005

More cuts at the Irish Times...

...but unlike three years ago, when an incredibly inept management had brought the paper to the very brink, this time it's because the company can afford to. Profits for last year are up on the €8.5m recorded for 2003.

The latest voluntary redundancy package is supposed to reduce staff numbers by 35-40 people. Several reports say that "all departments of the newspaper will be affected", but a mate in the caseroom - yep, it still exists - says the editorial departments will bear the brunt this time.

It hopes to do the cuts before it moves from D'Olier Street to the new offices in Tara Street.

Isn't it great the way they manage to skirt around some of the most obvious issues about the company's cost base, such as the outlandish executive pay levels and "performance related bonuses" of its top executives?

Editor Geraldine Kennedy earns more than the Taoiseach and Tanaiste combined (they just run a country), and a good deal more than many London editors such as Alan Rusbridger, the boss of the Guardian (which is, er, a bit bigger than the Irish Times). And why they're still paying a former editor, Conor Brady, €100,000 a year until 2014 beggars belief.

Other journo news: THE IRISH SUN!!! Is looking for an EDITOR!!!

"...Vital qualifications: wide experience of the Irish political, social and cultural scene and a willingness to be based in our Dublin HQ..."

OI! What about the TITS and BUMS???

"...Excellent salary by negotiation. Applications in writing to: Rebekah Wade, Editor, The Sun 1 Virginia Street, E98 1SN..."

Posted by mick cunningham at 05:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tallaght Echo sold, Leinster Leader up for grabs

Congrats to David Kennedy, who has sold the Tallaght Echo to the Leinster Leader group in a deal reported to be 'over €5m'. Kennedy is the sole beneficiary of the sale of the newspaper, which he started in his front room some 20 years ago. He said yesterday: "I feel rather like a parent having watched the Echo grow from small beginnings to its present status over the last 25 years."

The sale looks like it will kick off a good few mergers and acquisitions in Ireland's regional newspapers. The Leinster Leader was put on the market last night right after the deal, and the group could fetch around €65m (but definitely not the €100m being quoted by some sources).

Its main titles are the Leinster Leader and Limerick Leader. It also publishes the Dundalk Democrat, Leinster Express and Offaly Express, and has a majority stake in "security printers" Aluset.

The likely buyers this time around? Maybe John Taylor's Alpha group (which recently bought the Athlone Voice), the Examiner (Thomas Crosbie Holdings), Tony O'Reilly, or Celtic Media - a company set up by Scottish newspaper group Dunfermline Press to manage its Irish interests and owns the likes of the Meath Chronicle and Anglo Celt, and bought the Meath Chronicle a couple of years ago for €30m (so it's probably not very cash rich at the moment).

There are other possible newcomers from Britain, such as the Yorkshire Post. Scottish Radio Holdings is unlikely to be a runner - it could be offloading its Irish titles if it's bought by Emap.

And one British player I definitely can't see returning to the Irish market is Archant, one of the major shareholders in the Dublin Daily. After quitting Ireland, Archant did a deal with the Indo group to buy a mere 27 of O'Reilly's regional papers in Britain - see the Competition Commission report.

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 15, 2005

Physicists' briefcases and 137

The number 137 has a sort of legendary status among physicists. Why? Because 1/137 is an approximation of 1/137.03599976, the fine-structure constant. It quantifies the relativistic (c) and quantum (h) qualities of electromagnetic (e) interactions involving charged particles in empty space (0). Don't ask.

But what got me going on it? Apparently the number 137 usually the combination locks on physicists' briefcases!

See Scientific American.

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sudoku

Since Monday, the Irish Times has been publishing that fiendishly addictive puzzle game called Sudoku. Fancying myself as an assistant codebreaker in Bletchley Park, I've been a big fan of the game for years.

But you don't have to buy the Irish Times to do it - there are plenty of free sites out there such as http://sudoku.com.au. And the official site at www.sudoku.com has a great "How to solve" guide, with lovely rollovers explaining what's what.

Posted by mick cunningham at 11:46 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Anti-poverty wristbands made in... third-world sweatshops

So eBay has caved in to Bob Geldof and banned sales of Live8 tickets on its websites. Meanwhile the anti-poverty wristbands worn by pop stars, sports stars and celebs to publicise the Make Poverty History campaign ("The really important thing is that you just wear it") are actually made in slave labour conditions in China.

The white rubber bracelets are made in sweatshops in conditions that violate Chinese law and the Ethical Trading Initiative. The Tat Shing Rubber Manufacturing Company in Shenzhen (near Hong Kong) uses forced labour and accepts financial deposits from new workers - which is against both Chinese law and the ETI.

It has a litany of offences, from crap pay - some workers get below the local minimum hourly wage of 2.39 yuan, and some as little as 1.39 yuan (http://www.p45blogs.net/spacer.gif) - to bad health and safety provisions, long hours, seven-day weeks, employees cheated of their pay, inadequate insurance, no annual leave and no right to freedom of association.

Geldof says "The charities should pull out of the deals with those companies immediately or set a firm deadline for improvements and pull out if the improvements are not met."

Something to think about, the next time you see the likes of Tony Blair, Claudia Schiffer and Travis going around with these crappy rubber bands saying "Hey wow look at me, I'm a philanthropist".

As for any twat who would wear a "Livestrong" trinket by those Nike scumbags...

Posted by mick cunningham at 11:20 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 13, 2005

Production journalism and students

It's that time of the year. Newspapers across the country are about to be inundated with journalism students doing their work placements. In our production department, though, we sit down and weep.

Sure, the students might know how to bash out a reasonable news report or a feature, and some of them have an eye for photography. But - yeah, yeah, I know, I'm generalising - their production skills are poor to non-existent.

Most of them have never used Indesign, and if you sit them down in front of Photoshop most won't know the difference between RGB and CMYK. Their spelling is atrocious, they don't bother to look at the latest copy of the house style, and if you ask them to whip up a page in Quark they take several hours - yep, HOURS - and it's awful.

I don't really blame them. Postgrad courses only last a couple of terms, so god knows how many weeks (or marks) are devoted to production. So no wonder most students don't even consider working in this area of visual journalism, and wouldn't have a clue about this area where you juggle with printers/newsrooms/photographers/advertising staff.

But look at the market in Ireland - it's fairly flooded with reporters, yet half the journalism jobs in a newspaper are in production. Try finding a good sub - a production person who works with words, type and other visuals.

It's hard enough for a budding young freelance journalist to walk into a paper with an article, but they won't get a sniff of a shift in production unless they already know their onions.

And one of the best ways of learning how to do production is to do it. Hands-on, in a real-life production department. An opportunity which students on placement generally turn their noses up at, but which many more established freelance journalists would die for. It's their loss.

"Sure what use is production to me"? No bylines. No glory. No wee articles to add to their portfolios. And no drive to express their creativity in terms of shaping the visuals of a story, right down to the micro-level of swatches and borders and where the commas go.

Posted by mick cunningham at 08:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Vive les blocs!

According to this morning's Liberation - currently celebrating the release of its reporter Florence Aubenas and translator Hussein Hanoun from captivity in Iraq - the good old Commission générale de terminologie in France has finally come up with a French term for "blog": "bloc-notes".

It's a bit like "scratch-pad", and is abbreviated as "bloc". The commission also gives equivalents of "hoax" ("canular"), "Trojan Horse" ("cheval de Troie", naturellement) and "moderator" ("modérateur"). It hasn't come up with anything yet for "podcasting" though, although in Quebec it's called "baladodiffusion".

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 10, 2005

WYK!!!

Apparently the Romans had no single word for "yes". The nearest equivalent in Latin was "hoc ille" (a sort of shorthand for "he did this").

Fast forward to the middle ages, and Occitan (later to become Provençal) was the first big Romance language to emerge from the mix of Roman and "barbarian" tongues.

"Oc", was the Occitan word for "yes" (yep, from the "hoc" bit). As opposed to the French lads north of the Loire, who said "oil" (with a bit of an umlauty thing on it) - it was more from the "ille" bit, and evolved into the modern French oui.

So northern France had "langue d'oil" (or langue d'oui if you like) and the south had "langue d'oc". Hence the Languedoc region of France today.

Occitan, the language of the medieval troubadors, is still spoken around southern France, Italy and Spain today, and I can almost see an argie-bargie if I don't mention that it's a very close cousin of Catalan and Gascon.

Occitan doesn't have a K, W, or Y (though they're seriously big into the letter X). Funnily enough, from almost completely different origins, the Irish alphabet has no K, W or Y either. What is it with the letters K, W and Y? Are they absent from other ancient languages too? Where did they come from?

W: The letter W is common enough in English, German, Polish, and Dutch, but very much an outsider in other European languages. The Romans - for all their "Roman" alphabet - had no W (or J or V). Apparently it has Anglo-Saxon origins, back in the seventh century or so, in the rune "wynn", or it was invented by Anglo-Saxon writers as a doubled V (which also represented U - confusing eh?).

Y: This was a Latin importation of the eastern Greek upsilon - the Romans used it for Greek words.

K: The letter K's origins stretch back to the Egyptian hieroglyph for a hand. This became a schematic diagram for the Semitic letter "kaph", which meant "palm of the hand" and then stood for the "k" sound. Then, via Phoenician and Greek (kappa) etc etc, it became the letter K. Blimey - you can still see the four fingers in the letter K. The Romance languages have K only in foreign words.

Posted by mick cunningham at 06:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 08, 2005

Sean Doherty R-I-bloody-P

So Fianna Fail's late Sean Doherty was "colourful and controversial", "widely liked", "earned respect", "a man of very considerable ability and a strong personality", "inspired loyalty", "his conversation were sought out and were never ever dull", "a very colourful figure", "a man of considerable skill" (the descriptions in today's Irish Times).

How about "power mad alcoholic bugger"?

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 07, 2005

The Fifth Taste

So the human tongue is supposedly only able to detect four basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and all tastes are supposedly combinations of these. But not so! Some food scientists, and the likes of superchef Heston Blumenthal, believe taste is a tad more complicated, and the tastebuds are helped along by the sense of smell, by the feel of substances in the mouth, and even by the noise that food makes when we chew it.

Almost a century ago, the Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda published a paper on something called umami, nothing less than a fifth taste. (And, er, nothing to do with Rory Gallagher's fifth album either).

Umami is hard to pin down and translate, judging by the number of English words that are often suggested as equivalents - "savoury", "essence", "pungent", "deliciousness", "meaty", etc etc etc. It's also said to involve all the senses, not just that of taste, and a whiff of a spiritual or mystical dimension too.

So, does it really exist? Is it triggered by compounds of certain amino acids such as glutamates or aspartates - especially good old MSG, the flavour-enhancing substance monosodium glutamate?

Umami is the subject of next Sunday's Food Programme on BBC Radio 4 (12.30pm, repeated on Monday at 4pm), when Blumenthal is among those talking about it.

Links/References

The Society for Research on Umami Taste was established in 1982 by scientists interested in research on umami taste.

Ikeda's original paper was published in the Journal of the Chemical Society of Tokyo, 30, 820-836, 1909
Finally, over nine decades later, it was translated as:
New Seasonings in the journal Chemical Senses, (27, 847-849, 2002). This translation also has an introduction of three letters: "A Paper of Historical Significance " (Barry Ache et al., Chem. Senses, 27, 841, 2002), "The Discovery of Umami" (Bernd Lindemann et al., Chem. Senses, 27, 843-844, 2002) and "What's in a Name? Are MSG and Umami the Same?" (Bruce Halpern, Chem. Senses, 27, 845-846, 2002).

Posted by mick cunningham at 08:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 06, 2005

Grania Willis - On Top Of The World

I see from a recent edition of Everest News (never off our coffee table at home) that Grania Willis has become the first Irishwoman to climb Mount Everest's north side. I must explain, as a northsider myself for the past 16 years, that this is technically the more demanding side, and Grania is a very, very courageous woman.

In fact, long before her current role as "Equestrian Journalist" for the Irish Times (you know, all them reports about doped horses etc etc and the showjumping results), I can still remember Grania working away in her corner of the Irish Times caseroom every Thursday and Friday.

She was boss of production in the Irish Field (now owned by the Farmers Journal), and was just about the only woman you'd find in the caseroom. It was the place where the pages were assembled - "on the stone". And it was in the stone age.

This was the 1980s and 1990s, a strange in-between time, between "hot metal" and modern DTP, between a very industrial age and a digital one. And the caseroom floor, with its typesetting devices and big layout boards and very hot waxing machines, was very much the realm of men. Male craft workers - male printers, male typesetters, male readers, mostly male subeditors, and Narky Parky, who was in charge of the machine which spitted out the bromide galleys that only members of the Irish Print Union could handle.

But in this almost totally male preserve, with all the sexism and dinosaur ideas of its day, Grania was brilliant. In fact, I believe that technically it was definitely the more demanding side and difficult slope of the Irish Times.

Posted by mick cunningham at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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