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October 23, 2008updated 23 Aug 2022 6:50pm

Grey Cardigan: Nothing personal, honest

By Grey Cardigan

I sometimes feel that my only role in blogging life is to take the piss out of The Guardian (and the undischarged debtor Piers Morgan, of course). It’s not deliberate; it’s just that the newspaper, its contributors and its website offer up such a rich vein of material every day that it’s difficult to resist.

Take today. The usually amusing Media Monkey site quotes The Independent as saying that ‘after The Sun ran a story about the coffee chain permanently running taps, Starbucks pulled its deal with sister title The Times in 300 stores”. Not only that, but ‘the in-house Starbucks at Wapping may be moved into a gloomy area near the printing presses”.

Two small problems. The story in The Sun ran several weeks after Starbucks made the decision to switch allegiance from The Times to the … err … Guardian (although pure spite should not be ruled out). And there are no printing presses at Wapping, so God only knows where the in-house Starbucks will end up.

Of course, these aren’t Guardian errors, because they were quoting The Indy, so that’s all right then.

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And then there’s dear Professor Greenslade, the master blogger and industry conscience on whom we mere regional mortals can only gaze with awe. But what happens when even he oversteps the point at which you can parody him?

I bring you one of today’s items, without much further comment: ‘Yubaraj Gautam, a journalist with the Nepalese paper Sandakpur Daily, was beaten up by a bus driver because of a story alleging that some drivers were charging more than the public rate. The driver later apologised to the reporter.”

Goodnight all. Sleep soundly, knowing that whatever misery your management’s pursuit of silly margins might bring you tomorrow, there’s still someone out there monitoring the things that really matter in Scunthorpe, Stockton and Skelmersdale.

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