Our Local Rag (Lancashire Evening Telegraph)

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Product:	Lancashire Evening Telegraph
Date:	15/02/01 (151 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Local news daily

Disadvantages: None

Most towns and cities have their local means of publishing and broadcasting news to the citizens in their area and North East Lancashire is no exception with Radio Lancashire, originally called Radio Blackburn and The Lancashire Evening Telegraph.

Published six days a week in tabloid format, the LET is centred on Blackburn and covers the east Lancashire area at 27p a copy.

Established in 1886 the paper was printed in Blackburn until a few years ago, when Newsquest the current publisher took over and transferred the printing to Bolton, yet still manage to put each edition on the streets by around noon each day. If there is a breaking news story the 4.00pm edition will reflect this, not as a stop press bulletin but as headline news on the front page.

Although business adverts appear on every page, the bulk of the white space is taken up with local news where most reports are accompanied by the reporter’s name and in some cases his or her e-mail address. And yes the reporters do reply to e-mails even if it is only to acknowledge receipt of the e-mail that a citizen has sent.

On Thursdays and Fridays the LET has a special “pull out” section dedicated to Homes and Cars respectively. Thursday is also the best day for jobs. Each day some ten pages are set aside for classified ads where the local community can advertise their wares for quite reasonable fees. A basic classified ad of one column inch (5 lines) will cost around £6 per day or £12 for two days with the third day free. A novel feature to help keep the cost of personal advertising down is that should the article for sale be sold, a phone call to the office before 8.45pm the same next day will have the ad pulled and subsequent days not charged for. And as a little extra all ads placed in the Telegraph are also published in the local free paper, The Citizen, at no extra charge. Placing an ad is as easy as phoning Blackburn 54321, an easier number to remember I ca
nnot imagine.

Like all newspapers the Telegraph has horoscopes, a crossword, the day’s and tomorrow’s weather and the day’s TV and radio schedules as the pull out centre page. The Helping Hand column provides a list of chemists that are open after normal hours, hospital visiting hours in the region’s hospitals and a series of emergency phone numbers. Even though the town is land locked you can find out the time of low and high tides at the nearest coastline, that being the Preston estuary.

Sport from around the region and national sport is comprehensively featured and even very minor and very local sporting events are catered for if the organisers send in the results. A few years ago, from our local community centre, we ran a five a side football league for 3 age groups where the matches were played on a Saturday morning at the local sports centre. I would present the results of the day’s play together with league tables and a 200 words report that would be published on the Wednesday. It gave the kids a big kick out of seeing their teams and individual names in print. In fact on one occasion the Telegraph sent up a real reporter to see what it was all about from the professional’s viewpoint.

The voice of the people can be found on “Your Letters” page where the citizens of the area can vent their spleen of any subject under the sun and the best letter of the week is awarded a nice crisp tenner. It’s a cheque actually. Letters are accepted by e-mail, snail mail and telephone and there is no real restriction on length although a 300 words letter will have a greater chance of being printed than a 1,000 plus word tome. Of course I do, so don’t ask.

In years gone by when the Telegraph was still printed in Blackburn it would be rushed out on a Saturday evening as a “pink” to arrive, with the ink barely dry, at the news stands on the Boulevard, just in time to greet t
he bulk of the supporters getting off the dozens of buses coming from Ewood Park after the match. The “pink” had all the day’s national football results, league tables and full reports of the local team’s matches. No mean feat that as the matches had only finished some twenty minutes before the paper hit the streets. Sadly this service is no longer.

To complement the LET there is an excellent web site at: http//www.thisislancashire.co.uk where you can not only read the daily news on-line but also use the first rate search engine to read news from days gone by.

To sum up this local rag has everything that a newspaper reader requires of a local paper, except national news, although on the odd occasion a major national news item will be featured.

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