Not that they are definitely going to do it, but they are at least thinking about it and asking readers what they think. So far the poll on the website shows it to be a bit of a ‘marmite’ issue with 91% in favour of change, 9% against change and absolutely zero votes for “I’m not really fussed”.

That result surprised me at first. I had assumed that most readers actually liked the outdated format and in any case would take a conservative-with-a-small-c attitude of being against change on principle anyway. Then I rationalised it. I imagine that there actually is a large number of people against it almost by definition they won’t be voting in an online poll: they will make their feelings known by writing to the editor by hand, possibly even using goose-feeather quills to do so.

If it is decided to move to a tabloid format then the biggest impact would possibly not be in Horsham but in Crawley. If the County Times went tabloid then how likely would its clone, the Crawley Times remain broadsheets? And if the Crawley Times went tabloid then what would differentiate it from the Crawley Observer which appears a day or two earlier and has mostly the same content written by the same people?

From the front page of the Obby, 26/10/2011

Breakfast was made much more amusing today courtesy of the Crawley Observer and what the youth of today would no doubt call an epic fail.

In such a busy environment as the Obby offices maybe it does only feel like a few months since May 2010…

Despite having been deputy mayor I have no idea what allowances are paid to the mayor and I mean I don’t even know what ball park they are in.  Maybe I am naive but before I took on the job I didn’t even know that the deputy mayor got anything.  It turned out to be about £1100 back then I think, though I may be wrong, and I assume it has risen at about the same sort of level as the other allowances.

I can’t remember it ever being mentioned.  There was always great debate in public about what level the other allowances should be.  I can’t even recall seeing any line in the financial documents. On reflaection, it seems a bit strange that whether some minor responsibility should get an allowance of £300 was argued about but something that is probably thousands was all organised out of sight.

I know the mayor has a budget which is supposed to cover the running of their office, the civic ball, food and drink for the mayor’s parlour and so on, but that is different (and come to think of it, I can’t remember that being debated either) and I assume separate. Mind you, even that is public money and of some interest so we can see if it is going up or being reduced in line with other budget cuts.

So what is the deal?  Is it a secret?  Is it just left off the published list because it isn’t mandatory to publish it? It isn’t something councillors are told to keep quiet about, because nobody told me not to mention it at the time.  It isn’t something I am worked up about I just can’t see why its all so obscure.  I would have thought it was of much more interest to the average council tax-payer than what the chair of general purposes gets.

Of course it is possible that I just can’t remember details from about ten years ago. Perhaps I never paid attention to that bit of the budget.  Can anybody shed some light or do I have to go through the pain of looking at the CBC website for budget documents?

He then goes on a bit longer explaining why he decided to abstain, which didn’t really make sense. He says he wanted to send a clear public message that further large bail-outs should cease. I would argue that abstaining (or voting for and against) is not a very clear message. Voting one way or the other is a clear message. Voting both ways is a mixed message. All it says is “I am against this but I don’t want the vote to go the way I feel because I don’t want to upset the whips and miss out on a junior ministerial assistant job in the future.”

But of course, the real criticism from the Autonomous Mind and EU Referendum blogs was not that he effectively abstained (although they obviously don’t like that either) it was that, having abstained, he tried to give the impression that he had voted one particular way. On finding himself listed as one of the MPs who voted ‘for’ he did not get in touch to say that he had actually abstained: he got in touch and just referred them to the list of MPs who voted ‘against’.

That was the real criticism, and nobody seems to have noticed that Henry’s reply to the Obby avoided that completely but instead answered the much less important question of why he voted both ways. Incidentally, I can never understand why MPs put up with such rubbish. Why don’t they change the protocol so that abstentions can be registered? Building a third lobby would be a bit difficult admittedly, but then why are they still voting by such an old-fashioned, impractical and time-consuming method anyway? Surely Caroline Lucas can’t be the only MP out of 650 who thinks it is time to move to the 21st Century? Even the 20th would be a step forward.

Anyway, the cherry on the top of the cake is the final comment from Henry:

I don’t often read blogs as my time is very limited and I haven’t read any critical blog comments regarding this issue but I respect their right to free speech.

That would be fair enough but… this all started when the EU Referendum blog published a critical comment in the form of listing Henry as one of the MPs who voted for the bail-outs and he sent them an e-mail asking them to remove him from their list. A pretty clever trick if he hadn’t read because, as he says, he hasn’t “read any critical blog comments regarding this issue”.

The EU Referendum site reckons Henry is being “a tad disingenuous” about this so it is only fitting that his response to those criticisms should also be a tad disingenuous. In my mind his response has not answered anything. It has just responded to an accusation of bending the truth with an outright lie.

One councillor, Brenda Smith, claims that the council’s email system is a secure system which you can’t access using your own computer so you have to have county council hardware to access it.

Another councillor, Duncan Crow, claims for broadband but is not supplied with a computer.

Those two things make no sense together.  If it is true that the council’s systems are secured and cannot be accessed using non-council equipment then that broadband expense is a waste since it can’t be used for council business.  If Duncan Crow is conducting council business with that broadband link then Brenda could be using her own PC .

I know Brenda wouldn’t lie about this, but she would happily admit to not being a computer expert.  If she says the system is secure it will be because somebody in the council’s IT department told her so.   I could believe it either way.  There is nothing to stop a council, or company, setting up a secure VPN link in such a way that their system could be accessed from anywhere, but lots choose to make it more secure and limit access to their own hardware.

I’m not sure I like the tone of the story though.  Councils are moving towards providing more and more information electronically instead of printing everything out and the last thing councillors, even Tory ones, need is the suggestion that they are freeloading because they are provided with the means to read those documents.  I have used corporate and council laptops in the past and they are not perks as they are normally useless for doing anything fun.

Crawley council used to have a policy about providing either a laptop or a BlackBerry, which was a bit foolish, though the BB was still experimental at the time.  A BB is great for being able to get emails and check diaries on the move, much easier than opening up a laptop, firing it up, finding a wifi hotspot, but not good for reading a large PDF or writing long documents.  I can see sound reasons for having both.

It looks to me like the News have just read a county council press release, stretched it out, and padded it with some quotes without any attempt to understand what it means or verify any of the technical details with the council’s IT department.  They have ignored the anomalies, possibly because they haven’t understood it enough to realise that there are anomalies.

A decent version of this would have asked:

• How can one councillor get broadband provided without any equipment to make use of it?
• What happens to emails sent to the councillors with no IT provision?  Do they only get read when they visit Chichester?
• Do councillors with laptops get sent less paper than the others?
• Are the non-IT councillors preventing the council from saving money by moving entirely to electronic delivery?
• Could the council save money by letting councillors access systems from their own PCs?
• What sort of security/encryption is there on council-provided laptops to protect information on them or access to central systems from them?
• Is there any scope for county and district councils to collaborate so that somebody who is a member of both can use just one PC and not need a county computer and a district computer?  And has any comparison been made between what dual-council members claim at district and county level – not just in IT?
• What is the £400 annual cost for a laptop for?

I’m sure there are good answers to these questions, but they won’t get them by asking councillors (OK, maybe Bob Lanzer would know the technical side).  That is just off the top of my head.

What could have been an informative article or even a useful investigation is just churnalistic filler.  Funny how it appears a month before some of these councillors are up for election in the Crawley borough elections though.

Newsquest did the same thing last year, and there were doom and gloom predictions that sub editors based in Southampton without local knowledge would fail to spot errors.  I think they were anticipating things like, say, a Hove pub being referred to as a Portslade pub or similar.  In the end the results were much more spectacular, with Brighton itself being referred to as ‘Brighten’.

Given that precedent, I can see how plans for a Johnston Press hub will not go down too well.  Being purely selfish and parochial its good for us here as it means jobs moving here from elsewhere and a fair chance that our local eiditons will be subbed by people familiar with our area, but taking a wider view I can’t say I approve.

Anyway, the letter this week from ‘Brian Gardner’ goes into a bit of a rant, ending with:

It does matter, I do care, I am worried, it does affect how I vote, and I strongly object to being called a bigot and small-minded for supporting moral values.

Oh dear.

I don’t think I can be bothered writing to the paper in reply, but I’m sure lots of others will.  If I did I think I would say something like:

Here is a tip for Mr Gardner.  If you don’t want to be called a bigot or small-minded then why not keep your bigoted, small-minded views to yourself instead of proudly shouting them out in a newspaper?

I look forward to seeing what response there is next week.  Unless it snows again and the council handle it all as superbly as last week.

How would newspapers survive if the trade description act applied to their headlines and billboard posters?  Certainly the Brighton Argus would be out of business in a fortnight.

So.. any good?  A few observations.First of all, I prefer the council’s approach because they didn’t mess with the RSS feed.  The County Times changed their RSS feed twice during the changeover.  I think that re-launches are best done in a big-bang manner anyway.

As for the council’s website itself, it looks OK.   It looks a bit busy, but then all council sites do. It comes with the territory.  They all have information on so many different topics and try to cram links to as many of them as possible onto the front page which they sort of have to.  They don’t know what any particular visitor might want and if they are following some sort of rule of thumb about nothing being more than x number of clicks from the front page they are going to have to flood the page with links.

Given the limitations of the job, the site is quite well laid out,  but it is just as quick to find anything out by using the search function, which is pretty effective.   I was able to get to their terse and unedifying press statement about Mark Hammond with one click.

It is not a stunning design, but I have never seen a local council site that is stunning and easy to use.

The County Times has the same problem as the council: it is a local newspaper and there all local newspaper sites look quite similar, partly down to them all being owned by the same few companies who use the same tempalte for all their titles.   Even without that, all newspapers have certain constraints and readers have certain expectations of what they will look like.

The CT site doesn’t look too bad.  It is clearer than the old site and looks prettier – though that is always a subjective matter.

There is plenty wrong with it still, but there are good reasons for the things I don’t like.   For example, too much of the front page content is ‘below the fold’.   One reason for this is the amount of space used by advertising, which I’m guessing is unavoidable given the economics of local papers.   I’m sure the same reason will account for the biggest drawback, which is the lack of content.

All newspaper websites have the same dilemma: put too much on it and there will be no need to buy the paper, put too little on it and it is not worth using.  I don’ t think the County Times have got the balance right yet.  In the printed version of the paper there are all sorts of stories that don’t seem to get anywhere near the website.  The full page about the Hugls’ vitis to Hiroshima last week, for example, or this week’s article about the affordability of homes in the district.

I can see how they do not want to reproduce them in their entirety online, but I think they are missing a trick.  They could put a very short summary online, with a note saying ‘read the full story in this week’s paper’.   I will admit that when the Argus does that it can be very annoying and frustrating, but that is only because I don’t intend to buy a copy, but it might work to generate sales – perhaps more for a weekly paper like the CT than it would on a daily like the Argus.

If you read through the web site you could easily assume that the paper is just full of stories about cars crashing on the A24, thefts from garages and barns and the odd fire, and be unaware of a lot of the content that is more news feature than news.  The newspaper itself isn’t perfect but it is a lot better than you would know from the website.

So, the main verdict must be that the website is a very poor advert for the newspaper.

Putting in some of the extra content, even just as ‘teaser’ articles would fix that.  As a twist, perhaps the full text of articles could go oline at a later date so that the site was useful as an archive resource.  That would make the site useful for all sorts of people, while also serving as a reminder that there is a lot more to the paper than car crashes and rural burglaries.  For an example, the housing development at Broadbridge Heath by Berkeley Homes has been a hot topic in the area for a couple of years, but search the site for “berkeley” and you do not get a single relevent result.

It is the same with the sections for columnists and opinion.  Go to them and the only content is last week’s column by Francis Maude.  Why not all his previous columns?  Why not the countless columns by Henry Smith, Philip Circus and Morwen Millson?

As it happens they are in there somewhere.  Search for “equitable life” and you will get Maude’s column from August 2008 about that topic.  So you can search for older columns, but not find them by browsing.

If looks were everything, I would give the site a qualified thumbs up, but the content and navigation let it down.  Where it matters the site is just as bad as it was before.  I wold be happier if they had left the website alone and modernised the paper edititon, by moving to a more practical format.

With all the decorating I am doing I will admit that it is useful to have some sheets of paper as big as 58cm x 74cm but for all other purposes it is unwieldyand impossible to read easily.  I can think of no good reason to persist with the old broadsheet format that all the daily papers, bar the Telegraph, have ditched.

In other news: the design and content of skuds.org remains as crappy as ever so I am well aware of the glass house from which I am lobbing my bricks, thank you very much.