David Ottewell, chief reporter of the Manchester Evening News, used his day off today to launch an attack on hyperlocal news websites on his MEN blog. He singled out Salford Star Online but didn’t mention any of the other half-dozen or so hyperlocal ventures currently publishing in Manchester. One wonders why not, given his claim that “they end up simply regurgitating press releases, or ripping off stories from local newspapers, because they are one-man bands run by amateurs”. If he believes this, then why not name and shame?

Unsurprisingly, fairly soon after he posted his blog, critical comments from hyperlocal journalists, including two by me, began to appear below Ottewell’s blog. Many hyperlocal news operations work hard. I know of none that rip off stories from local papers, although no doubt many use press releases where appropriate as a starting point for a story. We certainly do at Inside the M60, the hyperlocal venture I co-founded with my colleague Nigel Barlow earlier this year.

Surely Ottewell is not suggesting that the MEN never uses press releases? Pretty much all newspapers rely heavily on press releases for content these days, now that they are understaffed and experiencing severe financial pressures. Indeed, while the MEN has a good track record in digging out exclusives, a glance at the paper any day of the weeks shows that a lot of content does derive from press releases.

Ottewell also suggests hyperlocal sites shouldn’t commentate or editorialise. Why ever not? Every newspaper in the land has an editorial column and employs commenters to write opinion columns. Yet, for some absurd reason, he believes hyperlocals should not. Indeed, at Inside the M60 when we ran a comment piece on city council leader Sir Richard Leese accepting a police caution for assaulting his teenage step-daughter, we came under extraordinary attack on Twitter for commenting publicly on this and reminding readers that Leese had launched a zero-tolerance campaign against domestic violence three years earlier. We felt it was fair comment, sad as the situation was for Leese.

In fact, since even before we launched Inside the M60 officially at Easter, we have come under sustained attack from other local journalists who have used Twitter to call us names and question our fitness to find and publish local news. Many of those attacking us are not even direct rivals but working in quite different sectors of journalism. Do we really scare them so much?

But I digress – let’s go back to Ottewell. He had approved nine comments on his blog post by 3pm, including two from me. I replied a third time but my comment is, at time of writing (5pm), still awaiting approval.

In the interim, conversations on Twitter revealed at least seven other people had posted critical comments and were awaiting approval. David Ottewell appears, however, to have gone to ground.

Sarah Hartley, the Guardian’s Local Editor, got fed up waiting for her comment to appear, so blogged it on her own blog. So did my Inside the M60 partner, Nigel Barlow – you can read his reply to Ottewell on his own blog.

Journalism tutor and hyperlocal champion Paul Bradshaw, highly respected in the journalism sphere, tweeted his as yet unpublished comment: “I said “Don’t throw around vague generalisations to which the Salford Star is an exception. Name names.” ”

Also still awaiting comment approval are @Journopig, @philipjohn and @JosephStash (for the 2nd time).

Just why has the MEN gone so silent? Surely it can handle a bit of criticism?

I shall, of course, update this blog post if the MEN ever does approve its backlog of comments on this…

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*Edited to add that just as I posted, a rash of previously unpublished comments appeared on Ottewell’s blog.

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Several zillion words were written yesterday on the sale of the Manchester Evening News to Trinity Mirror – the details, the commentary, and the rest of the speculation. I’m not going to rehash what’s already been said.But, as a freelance journalist working in my adopted city of Manchester, I’ve had time to ponder what it might mean now I’m past my first wave of fury.

Fury, yes. I’ve not written for the MEN but know many who have. It’s a good, solid, regional paper, albeit one that’s been in gentle decline in recent years chiefly due to neglect by Guardian Media Group and its shameless milking of MEN profits to prop up the loss-making Guardian. It’s only 18 months since the MEN moved into its shiny new HQ in the heart of Manchester city centre – when I visited, it was so new the building still had that strange whiff of new electricals and pristine carpeting. Barely seven months later, the axe fell on 150 staff – half from the MEN itself, the rest from the stable of local titles based in Greater Manchester’s outlying districts. I was angry then, angry that much local news would no longer be reported. So it has proved – those local titles have become shadows of their former selves, while the MEN itself has carried far less comprehensive coverage of the metropolitan area’s affairs.

Trinity Mirror’s purchase does not bode well for the paper’s future. TM has a history of asset-stripping its purchases, slashing staff and then shutting titles. Many TM journalists are rightly incensed by TM’s claims in recent years that it’s been too broke to give them decent pay rises, decent staffing levels and decent kit, because TM doesn’t seem to have had any trouble conjuring up nearly £8m in cash for GMG as part of the £44.8m deal. That £8m could have gone a long way to supporting TM’s existing titles and the staff that produce them.

But what does it mean for the MEN? For Manchester? Rumours were rife today that operations would be moved out to Oldham. It would be disastrous for Manchester if true. A daily paper covering an area populated by 2.5 million people and with no city centre presence could not possibly be expected to maintain even the existing (reduced) standard of coverage. TM has claimed that it’s looking at various options and the Oldham move is not set in stone. Manchester-based freelance journalist, Nigel Barlow, offers a different perspective, suggesting that a move out of town could be beneficial for city reportage, although I’m not convinced myself. I agree with him, though, that it offers a great opportunity for hyperlocal ventures to spring up, take ownership of a patch or beat and flourish.

I’m currently temping at BBC Radio Manchester, which has just received some of its best-ever RAJAR figures.  I think it’s fair to say that BBC regional stations don’t always do local very well, but Manchester does do community pretty well – that’s certainly been my overriding impression over the last 6 weeks on the inside. Obviously, BBC Manchester can’t be a substitute for the MEN although it has always sat comfortably alongside it. I do wonder if the BBC might mop up some of the MEN’s readership if predictions for the paper turn out to be true and it plunges even further into doom and gloom. Time will tell but, for now, the city’s large media sector is watching developments with very keen interest…

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At risk of stating the obvious, we’ve had a lot of snow this week. News coverage of the cold snap generally has been at saturation levels, often at the expense of more important stories such as the Robinson scandal – I’m surely not the only person fed up of news footage of people telling us how much snow they’ve had in their town or press websites asking readers to send in their pictures of the weather. It’s winter, it’s supposed to snow and be cold. And, ideally, things should run more or less smoothly like they do in the rest of Europe in mid-winter. Unfortunately, however, things tend to grind to a halt at the first flakes here. It’s a cliché but only because it’s broadly true.

And precisely because things fall apart in the UK when we get more than a centimetre of snow, local news sources are vital for keeping people informed about what’s going on, or not as the case may be. Here in Manchester, we were particularly badly hit by the weather with some 8 inches of snow falling overnight on Monday/Tuesday. Manchester was chaotic on Tuesday morning. Even main roads were barely passable and, unsurprisingly, public transport was in severely short supply. The GMPTE website had almost no useful information, if you could even load it. If you wanted to know anything at all – which buses were running, whether schools were closed, or what officialdom was doing – there was only one place to turn. Local media. (Well, two, actually, as Twitter became an excellent source of real-time updates. More on that in a bit.)

The Manchester Evening News reinstated its live weather coverage using Cover It Live blogging software and had pretty good real-time updates on public transport services collated partly by the paper’s reporters and partly from aggregated tweets. BBC Radio Manchester turned its breakfast show into a rolling news service as it kept Mancunians informed about school closures, traffic updates and statements from the police, NHS and council about the changing situation.

I must disclose here that I’m currently working at Radio Manchester as part of the inFUZE programme (which aims to provide professional journalists with additional skills) and I’d started there only the day before. So when the snow fell, I was determined to get to the BBC by fair means or foul. I left home early, expecting my 20-minute bus ride to take considerably longer. Even before I stepped outside, I’d used Twitter to crowdsource information on the buses and knew I might not be able to catch one. Mancunians were using Twitter as a form of public service announcement platform – incredibly useful for those few of us on the move. As I waited in the still-falling snow, I joined in passing on what little info I had.

When I finally arrived at the newsroom (by cab, and by luck), only a skeleton staff had made it in and the phones were ringing non-stop. BBC reporters worked incredibly hard to get the news out (and I did my bit monitoring Twitter for them to get updates on bus services, closed institutions and the like). Tuesday’s radio schedule was completely rejigged to stay abreast of the news and key staff stayed in a nearby hotel overnight to ensure the news would be out on Wednesday as well. And so it went for the rest of the week.

An internal memo at the BBC on Thursday indicated that page impressions on the various regional news hubs on the BBC website had rocketed up to 23-fold, while figures for radio and TV audiences tuning in for local coverage had also gone through the roof. No doubt MEN’s website has seen similar traffic. All because of a few inches of snow. The Cumbrian papers combined forces during the autumn floods there to share real-time information on the internet, using reporters, aggregated tweets and updates from the emergency services to keep Cumbrians up to speed on the disaster unfolding there. It serves to prove that in such situations, only local media can provide the kind of on-the-ground hard facts that local people need.

An unprecedented number of local papers closed in 2009, or made drastic staff cuts in order to stave off closure. Communities without local media are left bereft, not just of the day-to-day news but also a focal point when there’s a crisis. Hyperlocal news is the buzzword for 2010 – most media pundits agree that hyperlocal news will fill such gaps where papers have closed and many also agree that this will be the year that sees many self-employed journalists setting up their own hyperlocal ventures. While few will have the kind of clout enjoyed by the BBC regional hubs or papers like the MEN, they will undoubtedly play a crucial role in keeping communities informed on the things that matter, particularly in a crisis situation. The snow will be gone in a week or so, but the need for solid local reporting will remain forever. It matters not whether that reporting is on a small-scale hyperlocal basis or by a long-established newspaper or radio station. The only thing that matters is that local people continue to be able to get quality local news.

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I read an intriguing article in today’s Media Guardian about a London scheme for selling more newspapers. News International has started offering top-up publications alongside subscriptions for some of its own stable – the Times and Sunday Times.  The free delivery scheme actually started last July but has now been expanded to include non-NI publications such as Grazia, the Radio Times, the Economist and NI’s tabloids (the Sun and News of the World).

At present, the scheme is only available within the M25, but it could serve as a useful model across the UK for boosting newspaper sales, which have been in decline for a long time. Despite being a journalist, I rarely buy newspapers any more. I purchased the Guardian twice last week as I was out of the house both days, but being on the move is the only time I buy a physical copy unless I have had something published in the press. Otherwise I do what so many others do these days – I read the papers online, for free.

I have little incentive to buy a paper when my nearest newsagent is a good 8 minutes walk away but my PC is in my front room. But I do buy a lot of magazines and my local newsagents stock a very limited selection of titles, so I usually have to head into Manchester city centre to buy the mags I want. And I’ve just purchased a year’s subscription to the Radio Times because I struggle to find even that locally.

The beauty of the NI scheme, apart from free delivery, is you don’t need to spend masses of cash in advance on a lengthy subscription. You can buy what you want, for as long as you want, and top it up to suit. You can change your order the night before and you can do it all online. Just as well, when it’s increasingly difficult to find a newsagent that will deliver.

Rolling out this kind of option further afield and offering more magazines alongside could be a winner when it comes to encouraging readers to return to a paper. I know that such a scheme within the boundaries of the M60 and offering a good selection of magazines alongside would certainly get my vote – and my cash. I’d love to hear the sound of my favourite paper and magazines gently plopping onto my doormat at 7am, ready to be pored over with my breakfast cuppa.

News International has failed to convince me so far that paywalls on its newspaper websites are the answer. I’ll simply stop dipping into the News of the World for a free skim of the celebrity gossip once I have to pay. But this plan, which seems to be doing well so far or why else increase the range of magazines you can buy alongside the Times, could just do the trick in helping up sales of print editions. No doubt NI is already planning its next move for this scheme. I for one will be keeping a keen eye on its development.

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I took part in the second JEEcamp in Birmingham yesterday. Last year, it was very much an experiment to see what might happen if you stuck 50 journalists in a room and let them unconference for a day about how to create a new journalism for the future. I’d been mapping plans for an online journalism venture in my head for a couple of years – JEEcamp was inspiring and I came away enthused and keen to put my plans into action. Unfortunately, a change in my personal circumstances put paid to my ideas.

Twelve months on and the journalism universe looks very different now. A year ago, we were just seeing the start of the recessionary effects on our industry – job cuts, papers closing, freelance budgets being slashed. Since then, literally thousands of jobs have gone and the changes are not over yet. Give it another 12 months and the landscape will look different again. None of us knows what it might look like, but it will be radically different to the traditional model of print media funded by advertising. The online revolution has already meant massive changes in how we work – in the future, online is almost certainly where pretty much everything will be happening, whether it’s the tools we use or the content we publish. Journalists are going to have be enterprising and create their own opportunities to take advantage of irrevocable changes.

The keynote presentation at JEEcamp 2009 came from Kyle Macrae, who gave a really interesting account of his attempt to set up a picture agency (Scoopt.com) trading in citizen journalists’ photos and what happened when it all went horribly wrong after partnering with Getty Images. The Q&A that followed was also enlightening, with lots of questions about venture-capital funding, business models and exit strategies.

I missed most of the breakout sessions, using the time to network instead with some people I wanted to talk to. There were a couple of really good panel discussions, to wrap it all up, about the future of journalism, particularly about paid-for content models (Rupert Murdoch had just annnounced his own thoughts on this), the problems with council-funded newspapers and the kinds of enterprises journalists might want to engage in.

Andy Dickinson, who teaches journalism at UCLAN, was bang on the nail when he said we can’t exist in isolation. For all we network on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, there’s no substitute for getting together face to face to exchange ideas and find new ways of working. Next year’s JEEcamp should be charting progress in that direction.

Me, I have no plans yet to develop a new online enterprise, after abandoning the last one. I’m still settling down after all the upheaval of the last 12 months in my personal life. One thing’s certain, though, I will be starting something online at some point. I just need to figure out what it might be..

Thanks to Paul Bradshaw again for organising such a creative and useful event.

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When Wilmington announced yesterday that it was closing Press Gazette permanently, quite a few of my colleagues blogged about how sad they felt at its demise. Dave Lee, Alison Gow, Kristine Lowe and even Roy Greenslade all wrote at length about what PG had meant to them and why it would be missed.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say I’m not that bothered. Yes, PG’s passing is a reflection on the parlous state of the media right now. With papers and magazines closing down in increasing numbers and those still going slashing their staff, it’s no great surprise that Press Gazette has gone the same way. With fewer journalists around, that means fewer readers.

But Wilmington must have been mad to think last summer that turning PG from a weekly to a monthly would help it survive. The huge mistakes it made included firstly, withdrawing newsstand availability and turning it into a subscription-only publication, at a stroke making it less easy for those in the industry to pick up a copy, and secondly, not adjusting the subscription level. As a weekly, PG cost around £115 a year, working out at around £2.70 a copy (I’m doing these figures off the top of my head so they are very rough). It was pretty good value at that price – lots of news, some great features (especially The Knowledge section, aimed at freelances), plus industry gossip.

As a monthly, it became too expensive – the subscription remained the same, so the cover price suddenly became nearly £10. Granted there were more pages, but the two copies I saw were not special enough to justify the price. Why Wilmington failed to offer more subscription options I’ll never understand. Most journalists, especially those on consumer magazines and regional/local papers, are on low salaries and forking out £115 in one go was probably beyond most of them. Offering a 3 or 6-month subscription and cutting the price might have attracted more readers.

Me, I decided to cut my losses. I cancelled my subscription almost immediately after the announcement that PG would go monthly. (And I was mighty pissed off that it took me nearly 12 weeks to get my money back from Wilmington, but that’s another story.) I’ve never regretted it – I kept up with PG’s news feed on RSS and Twitter, but my honest view is that much of PG’s breaking news was also available on the Media Guardian, Journalism.co.uk and Hold the Front Page websites and feeds.

Press Gazette became a publication that no longer had much to distinguish it from the competition, and that’s why I can’t shed a tear at its loss.

I’m sorry the staff are going to lose their jobs, of course I am. And I still believe there is room for a dedicated industry publication in print format. But it was never going to be PG in the form it’s had since last September. I’ll be interested to see what, if anything, happens next – will someone buy it? Will a new publication launch to fill the gap? Or will Media Guardian and co expand their existing coverage to include more features, particularly on freelancing?

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Anyone who pays any attention to the news cannot have failed to hear of the swingeing cuts in staff being made at newspapers and magazines up and down the UK. Thousands of journalists jobs have disappeared over the last year. Some papers and magazines have been closed down. Over the last couple of weeks, people have suddenly started to realise that when reporters are shed from the local press, local news and thus local democracy is threatened. One example – if no journalist is available to sit in on a council meeting, how do constituents know what their councillors are doing?

Just over 2 weeks ago, it was announced that 150 jobs are to be slashed at Manchester Evening News and the 22 weeklies in and around Greater Manchester, that are all owned Guardian Media Group. Of those job losses, 78 will be journalists – 39 journalists at MEN will lose their jobs (that’s half the journalists there), the remaining 39 cuts will be spread across the 22 local titles. Some local weeklies will see their premises shut and staff transferred to MEN in central Manchester. So this really does mean that much local scrutiny will no longer happen. The reporters from the Accrington Observer, for example, will need an hour to get to Accrington from the MEN office and an hour back again to write up their stories. So it’s not unreasonable to assume that many meetings of Accrington Council will simply not be covered. And people living in Accrington won’t know from reading their paper just what their elected representatives may or may not be doing.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is an unhealthy situation, or to work out that local communities will lose a lot of their history as it will no longer be preserved in the local newspaper archives.

I’m not going to blog here about national job losses or the future of newspapers. Others have already done it very eloquently elsewhere in the national newspapers and on media blogs.

I spent two hours this evening at an NUJ meeting called to discuss the cuts and see what can be done to try and save these jobs. More than 100 people crammed into an overheated room at Manchester Town Hall – people were sat on the floor and side tables when the chairs ran out, and at least 20 were forced to stand. We had a round of speeches from various local and national union reps, chapel heads from outside the region fighting similar cuts and some stirring support from Manchester City Council’s deputy leader. Then the floor was opened.

This is where it got very interesting. Most of the union speeches were not the usual hot air but basic setting out of the facts of what’s happening. So it was really gratifying to discover that many on the floor were local councillors from across Greater Manchester, local community activists doing great things in their neighbourhoods, ordinary locals who just really care that they might no longer have a local newspaper covering their area. Even the Tory prospective parliamentary candidate for Cheadle turned up to stand shoulder to shoulder with self-declared union Marxists because he recognised the importance of having a local paper. Sure, there were quite a few journalists crammed into the room, but I suspect they were outnumbered by the ordinary public.

These are the people who will go home to spread the word about why local papers matter. What they may achieve is likely to be far more important than the forthcoming ballot on strike action at MEN. Because they will be the ones writing to the letters page of their local paper asking awkward questions about cuts and closures, among other things. The next few weeks will be crucial for local journalism in Greater Manchester and that grassroots support for these 23 papers may be a tipping point. We’ll see. I’m usually quite cynical about union meetings but I left tonight’s feeling a little more hopeful that all may not be lost. The only downside was the pair of Socialist Workers trying to flog their own paper outside before the meeting, who then had the cheek to come in and sit through it for 2 hours without saying a word before a second attempt to sell the party rag as people left. Parasites.

* This will be the first in a series of sporadic posts about Manchester media. Despite the shockwave across the city when the MEN cuts were annnounced, Manchester is the UK’s biggest media hub outside London and new publications are still launching here. Only lack of time has stopped me blogging sooner about some of these initiatives, but watch this space…

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Yesterday, when there was a fatal plane crash in Amsterdam and several British soldiers were killed on duty in Afghanistan, one other story dominated UK headlines – the death of six-year-old Ivan Cameron.

Normally, I’d consider it inappropriate for such a private tragedy to be given priority over other news that is arguably far more important, particularly when it involves the child of a serving politician as I don’t generally consider their children any more deserving of column inches than the children of the not-famous.

Yet, for once I was pleased that Ivan’s death pushed everything else off the radar. Ivan was profoundly disabled, diagnosed from birth with Ohtahara’s Syndrome – a rare and extreme form of epilepsy that is virtually untreatable and guarantees an early grave. Disability is seriously underreported because it is not “sexy”. When it does make the papers, the disabled are usually described as “brave” or “plucky” or something else equally patronising. There’s nothing brave or plucky about quietly getting on with living life to the best of your abilities despite what fate has thrown your way, because it’s just normal. More than anything, the disabled long to be seen as normal.

If Ivan Cameron achieved anything in his short life it has been to highlight awareness of disability, the possibility of living a meaningful life even when as severely disabled as he was, and the realities for thousands of parents of being a fulltime carer of a disabled child who needs constant looking after. Even David Cameron, born to privilege and educated at Eton, could not be cushioned from that. Yesterday’s coverage rightly included reports on how Ivan’s disability had changed his father’s views and experience.

Epilepsy is the commonest neurological condition, yet often shrouded in myth and stigma, and much misunderstood. There are 450,000 people in the UK with epilepsy and around 70% will gain good to complete control of their seizures through drug treatment. Sadly, 1,000 will die every year from SUDEP (sudden unexplained death from epilepsy), and 400 of those deaths are preventable. Few new patients, when diagnosed, are ever told of the risk that they can die from a seizure.

Perhaps Ivan’s death will now mean that more funding finds its way into epilepsy research so that better treatments can be developed. Perhaps it will mean that more help will become available for carers. Perhaps it might even lead to those who need to claim disability benefits not being treated as potential fraudsters. And maybe, just maybe, if the Tories return to power, it might mean a little more care being taken of our wonderful NHS, which served the Camerons daily for six whole years.

Sifting through some journalistic comment late last night, it was disappointing to see the predictable complaints about “tabloid hysteria” over Ivan’s death and coverage of the Dutch plane crash and other stories being pushed further down the agenda. Such cynicism makes me want to cry. Journalists should be looking for stories that resonate with readers. Ivan’s was a profoundly human story that will have done just that for millions of families in the UK who deal with disability on a daily basis.

The press should remember that. At a time when the industry is in crisis, it’s not a good idea to alienate the readers who help keep journalists in work.

RIP Ivan.

(Declaration of interest: I have epilepsy and will shortly be publishing a book about it.)

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Shortly after 9.30 this morning, I learned – via Twitter – of the plane crash at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. A Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 came down short of the Polderbaan runway, where it promptly broke into three pieces. It was a miracle that it didn’t turn into a fireball and that so many passengers escaped uninjured (at time of writing, there are 10 confirmed dead – including two pilots and four cabin crew – 6 seriously injured and another 70-odd with injuries ranging from moderate to walking wounded, out of 143 on board. Early eyewitness reports suggested the plane had seemed to just fall out of the sky, rumours followed that it had run out of fuel. These are all matters for the crash investigation team.

Apart from the fact that just two months into the year there seems to have been a high number of plane crashes in 2009, I have a personal interest in this crash. I lived in the Netherlands for nine years, mostly just outside the capital, Amsterdam, in a small commuter town within spitting distance of the airport. Schiphol is a big and busy airport in a small and very crowded country (16 million people in an area the size of Switzerland, which has less than half that population). It’s the fifth busiest airport in Europe and has six runways. Compare that to Heathrow, the busiest, which has only two runways.

The hinterland around Schiphol is crowded with commuter towns that have sucked up the overspill from Amsterdam – Badhoevedorp, Hoofddorp, Abbenes, Nieuw Vennep, Zwanenburg… Everyone lives under a flight path and it’s possible to hear aircraft passing overhead approximately every 90 seconds during the day. Everyone lives in fear of a crash in their town – it was only in 1992 that an El Al Boeing 747 crashed into a tower block on the Bijlmermeer housing estate in south-east Amsterdam, killing an estimated 47 people. And still the airport planners want to expand Schiphol. When I left the Netherlands in 2004, there was talk of building an extra runway off the coast, in the North Sea. They are still talking about it today, and still the locals are fighting the expansion plans. Today, the locals had a lucky escape – eyewitness reports suggest the pilots tried hard to land safely, but if the plane had come down even half a kilometre away it would have hit an urbanised area and the fatalities would have been far higher.

As the Netherlands mourns the dead, the powers that be must also consider the safety of the population. Schiphol has an extremely good track record in safety but it is unsafe to my mind to even think of further expansion in such a confined space – even when I lived in the shadow of the airport there was a running joke that towns were built inside the airport, rather than vice versa.

Taking a different tack, I logged into the Dutch news feeds as the story rolled out, as well as the #schiphol hashtag on TwitterSearch. It does appear that the story broke first on Twitter and even CNN confirmed it had learned of the crash there. It was quickly apparent, though, that the #schiphol feed was full of noise – wild speculation, “facts” that had no confirmed sources and general chatter as people expressed their shock and condolences. Finding hard news on TwitterSearch was difficult. Turning to the Dutch sources, I found the tabloidy broadsheet de Telegraaf to have the most reliable, and very frequent, updates, while Dutch news service NOS had rolling TV/internet coverage.

My Dutch is somewhat rusty these days (not that it was ever fluent to start with), but in between proofreading a book, I tweeted English translations of the most reliable updates I could find. At one point, I appeared to be scooping BreakingNewsOn, which was seemingly tweeting my updates just minutes behind me. I didn’t mind, except that I’d rather they’d retweeted me. Whatever – it’s not a competition. I was only interested in passing on relevant news, given that most people don’t speak Dutch.

I’ll end by saying my thoughts are very much across the Channel tonight. Whatever caused the crash, I hope the authorities will not increase the chances of another one by continuing to construct yet more runways across what’s left of the Harlemmermeer polder. People will always be more important than planes.

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Press Gazette and the NUJ have started a very worthy appeal. To help journalists get the news out of Zimbabwe, they are asking for hacks here to donate any kit such as laptops and cameras to their counterparts.

If you can donate anything – an old mobile phone, an outmoded (for the UK) laptop – please do. I know it’s coming up to Xmas and every charity out there is competing for your attention, but to paraphrase that well-known cliché, democracy is for life, not just Christmas. Unloading hardware you no longer need or use will really help make a difference in a country where reporting what’s happening has become extremely difficult.

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