A bit of a sweeping statement, why I dislike local papers but if you look at the thoroughly good working over that the Hull Mail have given to Paul Smith of the excellent hu17.net you will see why.
I don’t know Paul but I do hope he comes along to the Talk About Local Un-Conference in Leeds in April because I would love to hear him give his version of events.
Paul it seems is a web developer, who has, due to market demand created some ‘adult’ sites. At no point does it say that Paul has run these sites, just that he has designed and published them. I would guess that he has done this as paid work, we all have to do something to earn a crust.
Adult sites exist due to demand, personally I have no problem with them in general, the adult sites you can find by doing a search are fine, consenting adults and all that. Anything more seedy than that then yes I have a problem with but that is not the point here.
It seems because Mr Smith has designed a number of adult sites, the Hull Mail does give some site titles, then it is fair game for them to have a pop at him. Now if Mr Smith had just been going about his business the paper would not have bothered with this story at all, let alone get one of it’s female reporters to play the part of an escort girl to get prices for creating her website out of him.
I can only think that the reason why Mr Smith was so interesting to the Hull Mail is because he runs hu17.net a hyperlocal news site, which could be seen as competition to the Hull Mail or more that it has taken a share of the market that Local People venture was hoping to clean up.
For those of you who don’t know about Local People they are local websites that are being set up by AND part of the same company that owns the Hull Mail.
The more you read the Hull Mail article the more you can see little prompts to make you add 2 & 2 together to make 5.
An example,
Launched last year, the site features photographs of junior sports fixtures as well as news events.
However, the Mail can today reveal Mr Smith has designed thousands of hardcore pornography sites.
So the HU17 site is doing what a good hyperlocal site should do and covering junior league sports, something that local papers really can’t be bothered with. But read it again, photographs of junior sports fixtures quickly followed by hardcore pornography these two phrases are put together to conjure up and image in the readers minds that is thoroughly distasteful.
The editor can’t make accusations about Mr Smith but he can word the article in such a way with leading phrases like those above that people could maybe misread or make a totally incorrect assumption about Mr Smith. At best it could ruin his reputation at worst, well lets not even go down the route of people being beaten up or whatever because of misinformation fed to them.
John Meehan editor of the Hull Mail has tried to defend the actions of his paper by saying that it is ‘in the public interest’. Personally I think it is part trying to discredit a local website and part just a cynical way of getting some traffic on to the Hull Mail site.
Are hyperlocal publishers journalists? Some are most aren’t and I would think that those who aren’t are quite proud of that fact and would never stoop so low as the Hull Mail.