Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Thursday 29 May 2008
29 May 2008
The internet has changed journalism forever. Instead of being fixed in the role of audience, passively and unquestioningly consuming whatever 'truths' are intravenously fed to us by the editors and media owners who control the news agenda, we are now participants in the process, making and disseminating the news ourselves through the powerful and influential portals of blogging, real-time online discussion and those comment box things at the bottom of the pages on the Grimsby Telegraph website. And casting off the shackles of our traditional supine role in the journalistic process means a revolutionary redistribution of media power to the people - power to challenge prejudice, to fight injustice, to question the very assumptions on which our society and economy are built, and to start daft rumours about Alan Buckley being about to retire due to ill health. So it is that this particular item of 'user-generated content' has ended up leading the back page of today's Telewag after Tory Town chairman John Fenty (Con) decided the rumours were serious and urgent enough to justify denying in an official club text message at four o'clock this morning (25p per message or £4.99 a month if paid by direct debit). "Perhaps someone saw me in Boots a couple of weeks ago and have put two and two together. I was buying some suntan lotion, by the way," sounds like something the Diary would make up but is what Buckley really said.
Town look set for the first of many failures with regard to the club's reported early transfer targets this summer. A Mariners World interview with Lord Buckley reveals that former GTFC loanee Sam Hird is likely to win an improved deal with Doncaster after impressing in their third division play-off campaign, extending beyond the one-year mark Town's current spell without a permanent right-back on the books. And, supposing for a moment that the Mariners are remotely serious about their purported interest in Northampton's Adebayo Akinfenwa and it's not just a ploy to shift a few season tickets when they finally go on sale, Leyton Orient manager Martin Ling has been giving it the old "no disrespect to the likes of Grimsby" spiel in declaring to the world at large that his club will be favourites to land the beefy striker. "We are bigger club in stature," is the Ling quote wrongly transcribed by an underpaid hack and then depressingly copied and pasted everywhere else without being corrected.
Lastly for this week from me, before good old Guest Diary takes the reins tomorrow, we have an email from Neil Drakes. "I have just found a new reason for our end-of-season collapse," he writes. "The Third Reich was to blame, and here's a Wikipedia quote to prove it." Neil quotes from the GTFC Wikipedia entry: "Many have noted that Hitler's influence on the British football scene, regarding the Second World War possibly prevented Grimsby becoming the modern day Manchester United" (sadly, this gem of objectivity and grammatical perfection seems to have been removed since Neil's email arrived the other day). The unfortunate truth, of course, is that when Town were relegated from the top flight in 1948, they had been statistically the worst supported club in Division One for the past 13 years - proving that even when they had a top-class team to support Grimbarians were still the worst moaning faithless bastards in the country.
It's true about running a car, by the way.