RE: Wells Journal

Posted by Alex on Feb 25, 2009 in Blog | Comments

This post is in response to the article printed by the Wells Journal on the 26th February 2009. Last Thursday i presented a proposal to the City Council of Wells. I spoke to them about my plans for the Pride of Wells which is to be an awards handout for people of the City. I originally had no plans to run this event but was left with little option when the Central Somerset Gazette kept printing that the Pride of Central Somerset was only for Glastonbury and Street and the surrounding villages. This was was not the case. When i first presented the Pride of Central Somerset to Philip Welch the Editor in October of last year i made it very clear that it was to include wells. Most articles that were wrote by the paper were sent to me to be checked over. When the early articles were wrote i questioned the fact of why Wells was not being mentioned and i was met with this reply from Laura Thorpe:

I have spoken to Phil about the Wells involvement and he tells me this is specifically for central Somerset, with no Wells involvement at this stage. 

The idea was for the paper to take public nominations in the Central Somerset Gazette first and then i assumed to move on to the Wells Journal. Later that week i met up with Phlip and he told me the reason they were not including Wells was because they were planning on running ‘The Pride of Wells’ that was presented to them by the council. I later found out that this statement was false. I was very annoyed that Wells was not been included so i sent Philip an email which said:

When I came to you I thought we agreed that we were going to cover mid Somerset, for some reason this has changed and it cant. I am running this award ceremony as I planned with or without the support or the local newspaper.

So i jumped into action, i contacted the council who confirmed that Philip had approached them about the ‘Pride of Wells’ and that it has been unofficially rejected. Keith Donoghue gave me the opportunity to put forward a Proposal at a council meeting as he felt it was my project to present and that’s what i did. I received mainly positive feedback from the council with one councilor saying he was not keen on the name even though as i am told he is a Lion member and they run a Pride of Lions award scheme. Little hipacritical don’t you think. The funniest thing is that Philip wanted to call his scheme ‘The Pride of Wells’ i wonder if he will now reconsider seeing it apparently sounds like a “rusty old boat”.

One reason the paper printed this article is because they plan to run something similar.  The negative vibe presented to the Pride of Wells has not dampened spirits between me and the people who work on these projects. Nor has it effected the Pride of Central Somerset. Due to the unforgivable attitude of the Local Press we are no longer involving the paper with the final steps of the Pride of Central Somerset.. not that they were ever involved or participated in the organisation and production anyway.  

This however does not stop the paper from covering the event and to be quite frank i think they owe the local people to continue there coverage. Its crazy to believe that my fiancee went to Crispin School this week to take photographs for the article in the Central Somerset Gazette and this is how they repay us. I will leave my opinion of them to myself and you can make up your own minds.