So long Courier....

Welcome everyone to Alternative Tonbridge blog. It seems that my mentioning T blog in my Courier coloumn this week has caused the site to temporarily crash due to it having "exceeded its bandwidth" whatever that means. Actually I've come to the conclusion that it means the site administrators (123-reg) get more money if they send that message up every so often. I've already topped up the meter this month so they're not having any more! Why have I stopped writing my column in the Courier? Quite simply they were taking the Micky Bliss; they sent out a general letter to all us community correspondents saying that they are no longer going to pay us but that they wanted us to carry on writing the column anyway in the form of a blog and then they would choose the best bits for the weekly bit in the paper. Well guess what Courier? I'm already blogging and I beat you to it by two and a half years. In any case yours will probably be highly censored and not really reflective of the views of the good people of the town. Oh and they also wanted us to sell advertising to local businesses on their behalf to go along side the blog and we could keep the revenue from that. I'm afraid that I'm not the only one who has been outraged by this suggestion. If you look carefully at the end of the community columns this week you'll see that many of the long standing columnists have mysteriously decided that now is the time to jack it in. They include Philip Codd of Bidborough and Geoff Watts, Hildenbourough, both of whom have been putting their columns together tirelessly and faithfully for the last 13 or 14 years. I'm a mere novice with only 4 years under my belt! It beggars belief that they think that just because as they said in their letter to us that "...in responding to our recent survey, many of you told us that money was not your motivation for becoming a community correspondent...." Of cause it wasn't YOU WERE PAYING US TEN QUID A WEEK, what the hell did you expect the response to that question to be. But that doesn't mean that we'd be happier with nothing does it! The money isn't that important to me, but I suspect that for a few of them the £500 a year might pay for Christmas or even the family holiday. So I've decided not to write it anymore on principle. By the way what about the people, like me, who didn't fill out a questionaire and what about those people, like Mr Codd of Bidborough, who I happen to know (cos he told me) said that money WAS the most important reason. I suspect that they'll be very few local columns in next week's newspaper, let's wait and see. As the man at the end of each failed Dragons Den pitch might say "Good luck with that Courier!"