LOST IN ACTION
Working days lost in the newspaper industry because of industrial action in 1983 had jumped to 39,000 compared with 15,000 in the previous year.
PRINT UNION PAYOUT TO SHAH
Eddy Shah, owner of the Stockport Messenger, was awarded £73,653 in damages against the NGA union in the High Court in Manchester. The award covered damage and security costs incurred during the picketing of Shah’s Warrington print works.
OPEN AND SHUT CASE FOR CENTRAL
The Duke of Edinburgh was being proudly shown around Central TV’s new £21m East Midlands centre complex in Nottingham. That was 20 years ago. ITV has just announced the centre is being closed and production switched to Birmingham.
FL ASH, BANG, WALLOP
Sunday World photographer Liam O’Connor was on the receiving end of a left-hook when he tried to snap a defendant outside a
court in Dublin. Irish Independent cameraman Art O’Callaghan caught his colleague’s misfortune and won a prize at the Irish Press Photography Awards.
DONATIONS FOR DEREK
A fighting fund for former Daily Express and News of the World editor Derek Jameson, who had lost a libel action against the BBC, was launched with this ad in Press Gazette. Jameson was facing a bill for legal costs of £75,000 after suing BBC Radio 4’s Week Ending radio show, which had described him as “an East End boy made bad” whose policy was “all the nudes fit to print and all the news printed to fit”. One mystery donor sent £1,000 to the fund from Monte Carlo.
DIMBLEBY PROTEST RALLY
A dispute over the phasing out of three NGA printers’ jobs at David Dimbleby’s Richmond & Twickenham Times newspaper group had escalated into a major industrial dispute. As Press Gazette’s cover showed, the NGA and NUJ staged a mass rally in Richmond. NUJ members and Labour Party supporters threatened to boycott Dimbleby’s proposed Budget Day special at the BBC because of the dispute. The show went ahead after the BBC obtained a High Court injunction against the NUJ.
KEEN AS MASTHEAD
Mark Pearson, a 20-year-old English graduate, was so keen to get into journalism that he had produced a four-page paper about himself. The Life and Times of Mark Pearson included a CV, pictures of Pearson as a toddler and a sports page. Press Gazette would like to find out whether it worked.
FROM POLICE TAILS…
Scotland Yard started an investigation into the source of a Guardian story by Hamish McRae and Victor Keegan that correctly predicted most of the major changes in the Budget.
…TO RECORD SALES
And talking of The Guardian, the newspaper had announced record sales for February of 487,193, up 49,000 on the same month in the previous year.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog