The story the Echo tried to kill...

It's been quite a week

Hello lovely subscribers, all 70 of you. I don’t know who many of you are, but I know you must be some very, VERY important people. Because this week, the Echo have been trying so hard to make sure I never have a career as a journalist they’ve threatened to make it impossible for anyone without a degree in Liverpool to ever get the necessary qualification. They knew I had this huge platform and suspected I was going to destroy them with my powerful influence so, with seemingly no knowledge of the concept of the Streisand Effect, they are trying intimidate me into silence. I think. Frankly, their actions have been so inexplicably strange I don’t know what they’re trying to achieve. So I’ll explain what’s happened.

Since September, I’ve been studying the 18 week fast-track NCTJ Diploma course at City of Liverpool College. Part of this course is doing two days placement at the Liverpool Echo. I had some misgivings about this, because I don’t like the Echo, I’ve criticised lots of their journalists on Twitter (sometimes swearily) and I made the college aware of this. However, what’s two days? I completed the first day on 31 October and it passed without incident.

Then on Monday (7 November) I went back for the second day. On arrival editor Maria Breslin (who’d not been there the week before) met myself and a student from another college at reception and took us upstairs to the office. She sat the other student down, introduced her to everyone then took me into an office, where she told me she knew who I was and that I didn’t like the Echo, and that I couldn’t work there. Then she threw me out.

It seemed to me that she had known who I was for a long time (I’ve tweeted nothing controversial since the course began) but instead of simply telling the college I wasn’t welcome, she wanted the opportunity to confront me. I like to think I held my own in the showdown, but afterwards when the gravity of the situation hit me I was incredibly shaken up. Finding out the Echo, a newspaper that your parents have bought daily since before you were born, has a de facto anti-Wilk policy is like discovering you’re in a beef with one of the Cathedrals. No matter how awful it’s become, it’s still a Liverpool institution, a major brand. And it was clear that Maria Breslin hates me. I felt like she was barely restraining herself from reaching over the table to throttle me. And not only does she have the power to put a major stumbling block in the way of my education and career, she has a huge platform - a website that gets 3.5 million hits at day with dozens of journalists working for her. As I revised the IPSO Editors’ Code of Practice for my exam it struck me very pertinently that not many other professions need guidelines reminding them not to harrass, invade privacy, intrude into someone’s grief or shock or use clandestine devices and subterfuge. I was in a David and Goliath battle, only Goliath worked in the same job as Piers Morgan.

It gets worse

I told my college what had happened. I was invited to speak to the Head of School and I wanted to raise a complaint. But it soon became clear that it was me who was in trouble. The Head told me that Maria Breslin had contacted my tutor and told them that they did not want to continue their professional partnership with the college (hosting the obligatory work placements and offering ‘masterclasses’) as long as I was part of the course. To put it another way: the Echo issued an ulimatum that unless I was expelled, they would sabotage the education of my classmates and possibly any future students. The Head, who seemed as bewildered as I was about the whole situation, said she would look at ways to help me complete the course, possibly online, and see if the Echo would accept that compromise, but that the meeting classed as a ‘warning’. When I got home I received a text message summoning me to a ‘Final Disciplinary Hearing’. I still don’t know exactly what the ‘charges’ are against me. When I asked the Head of School what I could have done differently she just said, “I don’t know”. She did say that she thought Maria had told the college “I don’t know if she’s here to take us down”.

She has a point. I did plan to write a devastating post about them on here, as a follow up to my riveting series on how the council spends money on skips. Something about local journalism in the age of clickbait. How the staff meetings were wholly concerned with page hits and on the day Lula was elected in Brazil no one thought to ask some Latino-scousers how they felt about it. I reckon I could have got my subscribers up to 75 with such exclusive insights.

Instead, the Liverpool Post, with its 10,000 subscribers, have picked up the story. I’ve left some details out here so you should go and read it, and if you can, I would urge you to take up a paid subscription. Without the Post this story might never have been covered at all. And most importantly, Liverpool needs a mouthpiece that doesn’t treat its readers like they’re thick.

Just one more thing… a lot of attention seems to have centred on my Twitter presence, however last year I wrote this piece about dispersal zones at the Pier Head and the way the Echo wrote about them. I got a lot of good feedback - I was asked to talk about the issue on Radio Merseyside and participate in a public art project for Writing on the Wall, and I strongly suspect Liam Thorp read it because a month later he wrote a piece addressing many of the points I made, which I was pleased to see, because ultimately all I want is for the Echo to be better and the paper the city deserves. Now I know it’s even further from that than I ever could imagine.