Quality news reporting takes time to collate, sub and edit but it’s time well spent
KISS! KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID! It’s one of my favourite adages in life – and, in today’s increasingly digitised, globalised virtual circus of a maddeningly crazy world, it’s never seemed more appropriate to me.
There is little doubt that “the local rags” around my neck of the woods in West Sussex desperately need, if you will excuse the tabloid cliche, the “Kiss of Life”.
The Chichester and Bognor Regis Observers, where I cut my teeth in newspaper reporting in the mid-Nineties (see previous posts), are a pale shadow of their former selves seemingly held together by a skeleton news-team.
Of course, Chichester is famed not only for its 11th-century awe-inspiring cathedral but for its Chichester Festival Theatre – “a Mecca” for theatre-goers since Hollywood megastar Sir Laurence Olivier helped put it on the world stage in July 1962 – the year of my birth just a stone’s throw away in Donnington.
A week or so ago, I joined my poetry group at the RAFA Club 381 when I chose to recite Shakespeare’s All the World’s a Stage from the playwright’s pastoral comedy “As You Like It” penned in 1599.
And this quote from the play (with added Woke/PC pronouns), like the KISS adage above, sums up how powerless and insignificant I feel today as the unstoppable Big Tech industries continue to destroy local journalism.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, They have their exits and their entrances; And one man (and woman) in his(/her) time plays many parts”.
If you, the reader, had a bird’s-eye view of me today, a 62-year-old lady sat in my armchair at home in my PJs, wearing much-need reading glasses, you’d pretty much agree that Shakespeare got it spot on about “Sixty-somethings”.
“The sixth age shifts. With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon…”
A decade ago, and you’d have witnessed a very different scene when “little me”, an out-of-work Fifty-something, sought retribution against Plc-run newspapers and increasing regionalisation with its vicious job cuts in our creative industry.
Once again Shakespeare got it bang on:
“And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lin’d. With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances;…”
As you can see from the quote by the American poet William Faulkner (1897-1962) posted on my Hilary Gavin About Me blog page, the literary genius is attributed with saying: “If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
Over the decades so many ordinary people, like me (and you), have felt that our stories, and voices, were not worth sharing with others so we kept schtum leaving the “great and the good” to hog the centre-stage.
Today, as I sit at home on a lazy Sunday afternoon in Hunston in March 2025 – again a stone’s way away from my birthplace – I feel this is my cue to pen my own story beginning with my David vs Goliath fight to help revive local papers.
Over the coming weeks, I will be posting WordPress blogs recalling my roller-coaster journey in this seemingly futile quest almost a decade and a half ago now, and, I hope that my tale of highs and lows during this rocky period of my life resonates with you, my fellow readers and storytellers.
By Hilary Gavin, copyright 2nd March 2025
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