Sometimes, quotes really do lend themselves to being the headline….

FOI Friday: Unidentified bodies, chugging, bedroom tax costs and ambulance delays

How many unidentified bodies have been discovered by police? < Liverpool Echo THE ECHO today explores the riddle of 11 mystery bodies that lay open on Merseyside Police’s files. The unidentified bodies and body parts – dating back to 1972 – include a decomposed foot found in a trainer which washed up on Hightown beach

FOI Friday: Babies missing from care homes, absent pupil fines, stalking laws and sexting complaints

Schools starting to make use of fines for absent pupils < Harrogate Advertiser An investigation by the Advertiser series has found that nearly eight times more fines were issued in North Yorkshire, year on year, in the first quarter of the new rules. Countywide, there were 95 fines issued from September to December, compared to

Dear Nick Clegg, if you think you’ve got it bad, then please read on

Poor old Nick Clegg. Damned for apparently abandoning his principles when the hooked the Lib Dems into the coalition and now damned for sticking to his guns in the European elections by (whisper it) saying being in Europe might not be a bad thing. He’s got Vince Cable saying one thing in support but apparently

Is the Pope a Claret? (or perhaps the most unusual ‘football club gets promoted’ story you’ll see)

We’ve all been there. Football club gets promoted, and the football club – temporarily at least – stops being the exclusive enclave of the sports desk, and everyone is thrown at it. The list of stories normally goes like this:

FOI Friday: Suspects released by mistake, crimes in hospitals, careless coppers and big pay outs for teachers

Wrongly-released offenders < Manchester Evening News A sex offender, violent thugs and burglars are among a long list of charged suspects released without trial because of blunders by Greater Manchester Police. Dozens of charged suspects walked free over the last six years before they reached trial – with more this year than any of the

FOI FRIDAY: Ambulance delays, lack of dentists, data-snooping coppers and dodging conviction for assault

How to dodge a conviction if you assault someone < Brighton Argus Thousands of criminals including sex offenders, arsonists and violent offenders have avoided conviction. Sussex Police introduced community resolution in 2011 to deal with low-level crimes. But The Argus can reveal that the policy has been used more than 11,000 times in the past

The Stamford Mercury, Jack Straw and a real way to make people care about politics again

On Question Time last week, politicians tied themselves up in knots over the question of how they can better put themselves across to the public. It was prompted by the following question: Q: Does “yobbery” of MPs during Prime Minister’s Questions give best impression of the political elite? #bbcqt — BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) February

Probably the only time you’ll see this T word in a regional newspaper…

Last Friday afternoon, my Facebook feed started popping up with images like this: and this…. The story, broken by the Lancashire Telegraph (with apologies to the Lancashire Telegraph for writing two blog posts about them in a week!)  shortly after these images were posted is fascinating. Thwaites is a Lancashire brewery which has dominated the

Why the right image is more important than ever to regional journalism … thanks to Facebook

Last week, Facebook announced a new change to the way it will treat posts to Facebook pages. Based on its research of millions of users, it’s discovered that people are more likely to respond to text updates from their friends, but are less likely to respond to text-only updates from pages they’ve chosen to follow.