Thetownend.com

Good piece from Sam in his new guise

http://swindonlinksport.com/swindon_sports_news/sam-morshead

Can a mod get the News Monkey onto him? He's a bit more literate than his successors at the Adver.

Still can't spell properly mind....sleight-of-hand....it's sleight-of-hand

Is this possible ? Advers lack on 'news' this week is boring, atleast Sa mcomes up with something remotely interesting to fill column spaces

You should write for them.

I'm going to start posting pieces on here manually soon. Come on Monkey, give us a chance.

I should add it's entirely our fault why it might not be possible, and that should be sorted soon.

Sam, how is this enterprise funding itself? There doesn't seem to be any advertising or sponsorship. Is it just something you're doing out of the kindness of your heart?

The site will have advertising introduced very shortly, we had to get an idea of the numbers we could "command" first. That said, the gent who owns it is a Swindon lad and very keen to give the town a diverse and digital-savvy media outlet out of the goodness of his incredibly big heart*
*contractually obligated comment

It'll be like the Swindon Echo...took on the Adver with a selling line of colour centrefolds of Maurice Owen.... :)

Sam - On a technical issue, I tried to visit your site on my phone (EE/TMobile) but encountered a 'content block' (due to 'adult content' FFS!)  In order to get the block removed (and prove I'm over 18), they want me to give them my credit card details.  They can f**k right off!  You might want to get your techies to look into that, if it's going to stop people accessing your site.

Sam, sort out an RSS feed for the site and the monkey will dance.

You can use this for the time being until their techies sort it out.

https://feedity.com/swindonlinksport-com/VVZWVFVQ.rss

Thanks Samdy, FLIC added.

Odd. Quite right for you to tell them to f**k right off with that. I'll get the people who know how to do something about it to do something about it.

Yep, appreciate that it's our fault on this one. It'll be done very soon.

You're a star. Thank you.

Thanks. Good luck with that. Actually, EE/TMobile also blocks access to thrownend.com for the same reason (but that's less surprising).

Can we split this discussion from the squad thread please? I've always thought this was a good thread to keep in the 25% football bit of the forum.

What?

Discussion about what Sam M is doing now, the new enterprise, etc.

Split from Squad thread and moved somewhere more relevant

It's not FLIC though is it?

Fixed.

They're all the fucking same anyway.

That FLIC guy just nicks Sam's stories anyway

Its a bit crowded,  Adver, FLIC and Link all covering the local sport on the net.

What, or where did FLIC come from? Nothing against them, but they just sort of appeared and I wondered if they were a full time affair, nationally owned, or a similar local but competitor of Link.

The Washbag had a decent article on that very point http://thewashbag.com/2014/09/08/swindon-media-too-many-places-to-read-all-about-it/

Good spot, forgot about the Washbag too!

I would be surprised if there was not a little 'consolidation' very soon.  Too many media outlets chasing a finite number of interested readers.

What happens to the Adver is going to be very interesting.  I would have imagined that their Sports coverage was central to holding up their readership figures.  In the space of a few months they seem to have taken themselves out of the game; and moved from top slot (ie the first place I would normally go to to get my STFC news/updates) to 3rd or 4th.

Either way, I hope the Washbag survives in something like its current form.  The quality there is superb.

Hopefully the Adver will just die. Awful for years and getting worse.

True.  But the passing (if it does carry on going downhill) of a Swindon institution like the Adver is nothing to celebrate really.

And print media with it.

I beleive FLIC is a young lad (andrew Steele Davis) that is trying to make a name for himself and is learning the ropes by covering stfc whom he supports, I believe it is run from his family home and is owned by his parents. I think he has his press passes etc. Last season with the fallout with Sam I think stfc were helping him out by giving him exclusives so getting his rit rate up.

Oh right, thanks.  Well good luck to him.

Not happy with the club's treatment of the Adver mind. Personally I thought Sam played it too much as the clubs mouthpiece anyway through fear of getting frozen out. Particullarily when BS Jed was around and their were a lot of unanswered questions. But he got frozen out anyway...

Did we every find out what the 1940's debt was all about or what happened to the fianancial audit (assuming this was not simply what led to the 'missing money' allogation).

FLIC is owned by Mark Neilson (local construction/boxing promotion etc) - he bought it off a guy called Daniel Webb a couple of years ago. They employ Andrew but not many others. He's press accredited etc for games. Works very hard in a pretty tough role.

That Daniel Webb is a fucking bellend.

Consider me corrected, my info was wrong - should have checked with my sauces  :)

Nice to be tracking all the news sources - thx mods - but as noted elsewhere, there are now so many of them that they'll begin to swamp the home page, pushing TEF discussion out of sight. Is there a way to resolve this? Just have a menu link to the news feeds, and keep the front page for TEF content? From a tech point of view, could a news item then come onto the forum home page only if someone comments on it?

He did have his own company, not sure what happened to it.. but FLIC isn't his, he just works for them. He's a lovely guy, massive Town fan as you rightly pointed out and he works very hard. Wish he'd stop using every cliché under the sun though!

My pleasure. Makes it much easier to just come here and have all the links available so it was driven by laziness on my part :)

I never use the homepage so was unaware of this. I'll see what I can do.

Yep, agree with this it looks as if our simian friend, is just talking to himself.  Further, why is he/she not Harbinger of Doom any longer....damn  :clap:

Been playing, doesn't look like there's an easy way to differentiate between 'normal' posts and News Monkey posts.

I can take the Linksport and Washbag posts out again if they're annoying everyone?

Is there no way of just linking in to Linksport and Washbag once....and then being able to look at the individual things from their menu?

Same, I use - http://thetownend.com/index.php?action=unread as default.

Not using the News Monkey. I'll create a poll and let the people decide.

 Yes to independence...

Ah, never used that view, but it still basically has the same problem: flooded with monkey. Am glad to have the new feeds covered somewhere, especially since Sam and the Washbag are often better than the Adver and beeb, but not by pushing out TEF threads.

Red Frog, you could go into the News section and 'mark as read' then use that link.

jayo, wouldn't something like this work?

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1338

From my fleeting use of SMF in the past, there's generally always some mod available to do whatever you want.

Sounds decent. Not sure I'm comfortable installing mods for the forum. I think I should leave that to a more senior mod.

I wouldn't have access to fix stuff if I end up breaking it.

Yeah, let Barry break it :)

Will look into that. We get very stuck with our own viewing preferences.

Froggy....just start loads of your own threads, then they will drown out Monkey's efforts.

I don't know a great deal about the new guys at the Adver, but there seems to be less of a Swindon connection there. Sam and Andrew Steele-Davis have the benefit of being fans and the historical knowledge of the club, to put each season into context. On the flip side, they have the hard task of remaining objective. I'm minded to look at Link and FLIC before the Adver, which is a shame as it's, as has been said, part of Swindon's history falling apart in front of our eyes as it fails to adapt.

The issue is that in the search of multiple daily news, quality plummets. That is even more the case as 3 news outlets try and differentiate. This is Swindon Town. There is maybe a story of note every few days at most.

That's a very good point. However, I'm of the belief that genuinely interesting writing/reporting of off-diary events/opinion pieces are almost as engaging for fans of one specific club as daily news content. This is why it can be very hard to keep a readership interested by words from manager/players from organised press conferences alone. Modern local print journalism doesn't have the capacity to expand into more interest/colour/opinion pieces because there simply isn't the time (from experience).

That's where the web gazumps it. Local papers don't have to keel over, they just have to be open to becoming web-savvy and web orientated, we'll get to a point where the last print-only generation is sadly no longer with us - that might have already happened/be in the process of happening.

I feel if there's good quality, at least slightly informed writing out there, that is still a valuable and interesting commodity. If that writing can be delivered with no specific timeframe it suits the audience. Maybe I'm wrong. Obviously I hope not.

Aren't Newaquest or whoever own the Adver selling off the Old Town site and hasn't the vast majority of function been moved to scumsville?

Yeah. Look at the Daily Mail as an example to follow. Their online offer has proven extremely popular and trounces the opposition.

Thanks all the same, but I'd rather not...

The Vic Road building is for sale. There is a subbing hub in Oxford, though none of the sports content is produced, subbed or designed there, and they print the paper there as well.

Don't worry Reg, I won't be doing a fashion comment piece on Harry Agombar's latest get-up.

From now on all RSS news feeds will be posted such that they will automatically be marked as read and won't appear in the recent topics list and unread post list. But it's fairly obvious where to go for the news hopefully.

You can read and reply as normal. This applies to everyone.

Edit: Topics will still appear in Recent Topics but will show as read.

Yeah but we could all benefit from the latest on Kim Kardashian and her arse...

I like the idea of the site....I'm not a huge fan of the layout though. Looks a little busy to me. It's a good starter though.

Completely agree with that. It's much like opening the Sunday sports pages - the editorial pieces are usually far more interesting than cliché-ridden, meaningless, media-trained soundbites from managers. If you've a Di Canio on hand for quotes, it's a slightly different story, but Cooper does things rather differently, to put it mildly. Hopefully there is a market for the more informed pieces amongst the broader fanbase. Good work and all the best with it.

P.S a nice long Fraser interview would be great. Clichéd anecdotes from the early 90s would be fine by me in that instance.

There is (or was) a multi part digby interview on the washbag a few years ago

Problem with LinkSport site at moment

Here is that Digby interview - in six long parts.
http://thewashbag.com/2012/08/03/thewashbag-meets-fraser-digby-part-1/