Quitting the real thing

Hello my name is Lawrence and I'm addicted to Coca-Cola, or rather, I was.

Coke Zero, that was my thing, (I could take or leave Diet and when it came to the full-fat, 8 teaspoons of sugar Regular (classic, original) I steered clear unless it was with vodka). But I could easily get through two 500ml bottles of Zero a day. At work it would be more thanks to the cafeteria or the vending machines downstairs.
One week they ran out of my particular brand, needless to say it caused stress in my life that got me thinking about the nature of this obsession. It's nice tasting, marginally refreshing, but deep down in the back of my mind I knew that it was un-healthy and costly.

I've been reading a lot about the credit crunch/meltdown/recession/end-of-the-world recently and I've been going to some lengths to get my head around what has actually happened to the financial system that has so many people sweating. I'm not an economist or any great follower of the markets so when it all blew up I had no idea.

Then I discovered Mark Thomas.

For those who don't know Mark Thomas he is an agitator of governments, a crusader against injustice, a poker-in-the eye of multinationals and also a damned funny man. In the course of reading,watching and listening to the wave of information about the economy I tripped across his 'It's the Stupid Economy' podcasts. I was hooked.

The podcasts are a series of interviews with people who do know a bit about the economy, markets and global financial systems, they opened my eyes to the abuses and mistakes that lead to the current shambles. I became an avid listener and hope to make it to one of his live shows he's currently touring around England. As an aside I looked him up on amazon and found his book 'Belching out the Devil'.

I'm not one of those people who buy fairtrade, I try to be ethical, I really do but like so many of us I'm a committed consumer. I'd never really gone into what effect the manufacturing of my favourite drink, food or clothes cost. Until I finished this book.

The book outlined Mark's exploration into the business practices of the Coca-Cola company, from their overuse of water in drought-ridden areas of India that, robbing locals of water they need to grow crops and survive on, through their intimidation of a Mexican shopkeeper when she refused to stop selling a competitor brand finishing up with the company's moral ambiguity over a union member who was shot dead in one of their bottling factories in Columbia.

Now I knew that no multinational company was entirely clean and pure, but this book left me feeling a more ashamed and depressed about the kind of people who run the Coca-Cola empire than I was about the bankers, and that's saying a lot.

So I'm quitting the real thing, and I won't be turning to a competitor, I'm also going to be taking a closer look at what I but from now on.

Meanwhile I'll just sit down with a nice glass of water......

Feed The Local Papers - Eat a Media Boss

It's all our fault apparently, across the country small regional papers are folding putting journalists out of work, newspaper revenue is dropping, share prices for the major media groups tumble, and it's all our fault.

You see we've been getting it too good for too long, we've been having too much free content, going to other places for our news, places that are cheap and easy, and like a cheated lover the newspaper community is throwing china plates around the kitchen and screaming bitter recrimination.

Sly Bailey (head of Trinity Mirror Group) recently addressed the Digital Britain Summit with her call for a shake up of the media ownership rules. Sly said because newspaper bosses aren't allowed to merge regional papers making them more economical they are closing them down.

She stressed the importance of local papers, these papers are a vital local resource, they are, she added that soon people won't be able to get local news and have no representation, she's right.

Sly pouted that newspapers just can't compete with the likes of Yahoo or Google when it comes to advertising and because of this drop in revenue the smaller papers that are wrapped up in her gargantuan Trinity Mirror Group are having to fold. She said. "If we are going to compete with a myriad of digital operations, we’re going to need more scale." Adding: "Allowing regional newspaper publishers to merge is the only way to limit the damage to our industry."

Erm....what?

This is the same Sly Bailey who in April 2006 got awarded a 12.9% increase on her £620,000 salary, just months after several hundred of Trinity Mirror's 11,000 staff had been made redundant due to slumps in advertising revenue isn't it?

The same Sly Bailey who received a 41.8% increase in her remuneration package in 2006. At the same time management continued to make redundancies and impose below inflation pay increases on its staff?

The same Sly bailey who qualified to receive 100 per cent of her bonus entitlement, which at £793,000 was equivalent to 110 per cent of her salary and a remuneration package including a further £240,000, one-third of her salary, as her annual pensions contribution despite a loss in profits and the share price collapsing?

The same Sly Bailey who brought in management consultants who recommended the sale of assets including the Racing Post, Midland Independent Newspapers and Trinity Mirror South. Only actually managing to sell the Racing Post, the remainder of the company's Sports Division, and parts of TMS?

Actually I see it now, that failed sell-off left Trinity Mirror with a large amount of titles that they couldn't sell. Wouldn't it be a good solution to package them together under one 'Super-Regional' edition. Something like the 'The Daily Eastern-South-West Echo' that might attract a buyer, and anything will do considering Trinity-Mirror's worth has dropped from 1.5bn down to 250m.

Now, how do we get around that tricky merger law? Oh yes, blame the internet for giving out free news, it's cheap and nasty and is killing journalism.

Of course, it IS local journalism that suffers, the smaller papers will be cut to make way for Boss's pensions and falling circulation, and this is a problem. But merging them into one of the motherships like News International or Trinity Mirror is hardly going to ensure balanced, quality, local journalism.

If Sly is so concerned with their plight, cut bonuses (after all The Mirror believes that Fat Cat Bosses shouldn't get rewarded for failure!!), streamline the operation, I know this will mean layoffs, I know this will be unpopular, but improving quality of the publications may help sell them.

Also I'm sure we all know some 'Journalists' that we could do without.

Sly isn't the only one jumping on the bandwagon, Damien Reece of the Telegraph blames Brown's Digital Britain, Peter Preston in the Observer calls for an 'Internet Licence fee'.

It's that last piece that worries me, not for the rambling nonsense that it deals with but for a quote from the Grand-High Poobah of Media Himself Rupert Murdoch. The quote reads:

"Nobody is making money with free content on the web except search, and people are used to reading everything on the net for free - and that's going to have to change."

Unfortunately he'll probably do it......

3 things you may not know about me....

As the post I want to put up is sprawling all over the place in my mind (it's coming, though I'm just not sure in what form) I thought I'd respond to Em who challenged some of her blogsphere (Blogsphere? Blogamily? Blogchums?) to write 3 things that people may not know about them.

So here they are.

1) As the result of a childhood injury involving my bike's stabilisers and my neighbours bike, I have no interconnecting piece of tissue between my inner top lip and my gums (apparently called the labial frenulum). This was due to my stabilisers locking up with the back wheel of Darren (my neighbour's) bike, flying over the handlebars and hitting a kerb with my mouth in a scene reminiscent of American History X without the follow up boot to the back of the head.

2) I have a blind spot about the difference between where and were and in what form to use them correctly. So typing, 'we were walking down the street where the people were looking at the pub where Oscar Wilde used to drink' holds terror beyond terror for me. Similarly I have no idea what a noun, verb, pronoun or adverb are. I could probably look those up but I seem to have coped thus far without needing to know. (As Vampire Weekend sing 'who gives a fuck about an Oxford Comma?').

3) I am extremely fixated with my feet (perhaps even a bit vain), unlike most men I know whose feet have been battered by years of football, rugby and sheer neglect and have toenails that look like quavers, I keep mine in trimmed aired and in neat working order. (That sounded less weird in my head). I think this was down to an ingrowing toenail I had when I was 16 that I had to have removed surgically. Looking up at the wrong point during that surgery and seeing a lot of blood and no nail has forced me into good care.

Apologies but I've been terribly busy....

I sat down to read a book and realised that I had managed to be halfway through eight.

I've managed to plough my way through the complete Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minster DVD set.

I'm up to date on Lost, Heroes, How I met your Mother and The Big Bang Theory

Just haven't had the time to produce a coherent thought on anything at the moment, though I do have the beginning of a germ of a scrap of an idea on something that I'm feeling jolly annoyed about.

So, erm, until that comes to fruition I'll have to get back to my busy, busy life.