Wednesday 17 March 2010

Guardian: is Meg Hillier "a dreary knuckle-dragging authoritarian?"

Hackney's MPs have been bathed in an unfavourable light in the last 24 hours.

First Diane Abbott was targeted by the Daily Mail.

Then a Guardian blog about ID cards asked if Meg Hillier was a: "bright New Labour high-flyer... or a dreary knuckle-dragging authoritarian"...

Meanwhile an independent candidate for Hackney South and Shoreditch - 36-year-old Denny de la Haye, who lives in Hoxton/Shoreditch has a piece in Open Democracy: Why I'm standing to be an e democracy MP.

Yesterday you could have seen his story in more than a dozen versions of Daily Mail "localpeople" sites from Ely People to Exmouth People - including Dalston People and Stoke Newington People - (some background on these sites from Stokey Talk: http://stokeytalk.com/daily-mail-stoke-newington-website/836/)

Denny's story was also in a blog called Virtual Economics by Seamus McCauley. Seamus, in his own words, is the: "Head of Publishing for localpeople, part of FTSE-250 listed Daily Mail and General Trust. My work for localpeople involves managing the Community Publishers who do the actual work of researching and writing the news in each town."

His piece ends with this: "Disclosure: I know the candidate personally, a bit"

2 comments:

  1. Ooh, you already found me :)

    I can't remember if I've actually met Seamus in person, but we have a mutual friend and have probably interacted online in the past because of that. He emailed me about my campaign on the day it launched, and was very enthused about it. He did as you guess prod his team of journalists into looking at it. That produced a range of articles some of which were quite interesting and some of which were clearly fluff pieces which those local sites could have lived without.

    I didn't know those sites were Daily Mail affiliated though, I'm shocked and appalled ;) My link got retweeted on Twitter by the MD of the Mail group as well, if I recall correctly - which makes more sense now that I know who owns the *people sites. It's not the newspaper I'd have chosen to promote my campaign in personally, but any publicity is good publicity for an independent with a late-launching campaign :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dang, no terrifying conspiracy then.

    ReplyDelete