SHADOW Home Secretary Chris Grayling has been rightly castigated for his intemperate remarks which compared Liverpool and Manchester with the American city of Baltimore depicted in TV’s cult series, The Wire.

Grayling suggested that the level of lawlessness in the two Northern cities was comparable to the fictional bloody, drug-ridden slums of the US city.

Although it may suit Grayling’s political purposes – and attract easy media headlines – to launch such an outburst, it is so way off-beam as to be faintly ridiculous.

So we shall move on.

However, one aspect of The Wire, currently showing on BBC2, which does stand comparison is in its depiction of the current state of  the media.

The fictional Baltimore Sun is closing offices, losing gifted, connected staff and missing important stories as the money men in charge grapple with the onset of the internet.

Swap Baltimore for Bury, Birmingham, or Basildon and the story is the same. Same pressures, same environment, same profane language.

The Wire’s depiction of frustrated but ambitious reporters itching to get out, supine management, declining editorial standards and a supremely cynical City editor, Gus Haynes (pictured above) is strikingly authentic – even for Britain.

As one senior North West journalist commented the other day: “It’s so accurate, it’s almost uncanny. Completely spot on.”

So if you want to find out what life is really like on your local newspaper, tune into The Wire next Monday night. You won’t regret it.

IS the BBC in favour of unfair trade?

That’s the question after the Corporation forced newscaster George Alagiah to quit as patron of the Fairtrade Foundation, a registered charity.

Seems the Beeb thought there would be some conflict of interest because Alagiah, who is unpaid and who was approved as a Patron in 2002, is due to front a programme on food later this year.

The Fairtrade Foundation, of course, helps producers in developing countries to win a fair price for their work – rather than being routinely exploited by corporate conglomerates. More on The BBC blunders over George Alagiah and the Fairtrade Foundation

THE presses will roll for the last time at the Liverpool Echo on Saturday morning as printing is transferred 40 miles outside the city, to Oldham.

More than 100 jobs have been axed in the cost-cutting move by owners Trinity Mirror, which on Thursday announced half-year profits of £49.1million.

The closure of the Old Hall Street plant brings to an end 154 years of printing in Liverpool.

Both the Liverpool Echo and its stable-mate, the Daily Post will now be printed on presses at Trinity Mirror’s huge plant at Hollinwood Drive in Chadderton, Oldham, in Greater Manchester.

Trinity, publishers of the Daily Mirror, say that the move out of Liverpool will mean “a better, brighter Echo for readers and better long-term prospects for the staff and the business.”

But union leaders accuse the Echo of “hypocrisy” and say it is betraying Liverpool by taking jobs out of the city and harming the Merseyside community which the paper serves. More on 100 jobs axed as Liverpool Echo moves printing to Oldham

CONGRATULATIONS  to journalists at Trinity Mirror in the Midlands for averting threatened compulsory redundancies at their newspapers.

The threat of a one-day strike by journalists this Thursday, seems to have brought Trinity bosses to their senses.

The strike has now been called off after Trinity, publishers of the Daily Mirror, agreed to withdraw compulsory job losses in an effort to maintain the company’s massive profits.

But the closure of a series of Trinity weekly titles in the Midlands has still gone ahead -  just like at other Trinity regional and local newspapers nationwide.

The Birmingham victory is a small but important step forward in the campaign to stand up for local newspapers, which are often the lifeblood of local communities.

Unfortunately, we cannot find any report of the NUJ’s victory in the Trinity titles, the Birmingham Post and Mail.

However, it is to be hoped that the news that  job losses are not inevitable in the recession will spread further afield and help encourage other union members to unite and campaign against the cuts in local newspapers.

Meanwhile in Liverpool, Trinity Mirror will next week switch daily printing of the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo from the city, along the M62 and past the centre of Manchester to Oldham, as another cost-cutting measure in a series which have already included job losses, pay freezes and newspaper closures on Merseyside.

• Trinity Mirror made a £196million profit in 2007 and  has paid out £520million to shareholders in the last ten years.

EVER wondered how the giant corporate Public Relations and advertising agencies win business?

Now you can get a valuable comedy insight, courtesy of YouTube (or ‘MyTube’ as perhaps it should now become known).

Congratulations to Jon Mason, aka Jollywise, for his hysterical take on the corporate advertising world in ‘The Truth in Ad Sales’.

With almost half a million hits and hundreds of comments, it seems clear that for many the video has a certain authenticity.  Watch, recognise and cringe…

WARNING: NOT RECOMMENDED FOR THOSE OF A SENSITIVE DISPOSITION

The Truth in Ad Sales

A FASCINATING insight into the workings of Government is provided by the right-wing Spectator magazine in its blog ‘Coffee House’.

It tells how Cabinet Minister Ed Balls, a close confidante of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, rang up the magazine’s political editor, Fraser Nelson, to complain about an earlier article which had branded the Children’s Secretary “a liar”.

It is not for us to pronounce on the rights and wrongs of the complex dispute over debt between the pair. Readers can make up their own minds.

But it is quite astonishing that Labour’s Mr Balls, who is in charge of the nation’s schools after all, should take the time and trouble to phone up a Conservative journalist and angrily demand that a blog post be withdrawn. Allegedly.

More on It’s not the internet – its Balls!

A SALFORD social enterprise has become the first in the North West to win the prestigious Social Enterprise Mark.

The fair-trade style Mark has been awarded to Unlimited Potential, after it demonstrated that its work benefitted local people, rather than anonymous shareholders or owners.

Profits made by the company are used to tackle social or environmental issues in the city.

Unlimited Potential, which is one of Sound Communication’s clients, joins other ethical businesses, such as the Eden Project in Cornwall, in winning the new Social Enterprise Mark.

More on Salford’s Unlimited Potential first in North West to win Social Enterprise Mark

THE fallout over the Damian McBride smear campaign continues apace – not least amongst the Labour Party’s online community.

They are anxious not to panic and throw the baby (new media) out with the dirty bathwater (McBride’s smears) by suddenly rejecting the web-based campaigning epitomised so eloquently by Barack Obama.

The disgraceful online activities of McBride, Gordon Brown’s closest adviser has of course left Labour extremely vulnerable.

So the Fabian Society have put together a comprehensive and commonsense defence of blogs and the blogosphere, assembling a variety of Labour-linked bloggers in its support.

They celebrate the internet as a force for good, empowering people who have been disenfranchised and alienated, giving a voice to those who have been silenced and cannot be heard.

They also put forward an extremely robust defence for using the internet to expose the wrong-doing, lies and hypocrisy of the powerful. We couldn’t say it better ourselves: More on Blogging – a force for good

THE Pope’s outburst about condoms and AIDS has understandably caused a firestorm of controversy.

An online petition protesting at the Pontiff’s position has now been started by the excellent global campaigning organisation, Avaaz.

It is clear about what Pope Benedict actually said about condoms on his flight to Africa, where 22 million people are infected with HIV.

As the controversy raged, both the BBC and the Times also seemed fairly categoric.

But then a familiar phenomenon took place. It became a process story: about the Vatican’s press office. More on Does the Pope need a new spin doctor – or a new message on AIDS?

ANY self-respecting journalist will shudder at the prospect of getting a terse ‘no comment’ from the subject of their latest exclusive.

It’s bad for the reporter (s/he looks easily fobbed off); bad for the story (it looks unbalanced); and bad for the subject (s/he/it looks like they have something to hide).

Our advice to any client, almost whatever the circumstances, would always be: “don’t say nothing, at least say something”.

To stay schtum or refuse to comment can sound the death knell for reputation.

We thought this lesson had been well-learnt by the media-savvy corporate world – until this week.

That was until the giant computer company Fujitsu, the employment agency Kelly Services and Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue all combined to commit the cardinal sin.

In triplicate.

More on When ‘no comment’ speaks volumes…