Discover Hertford Online Forum

Totally misleading report on the Mercury website about shoplifting.

http://www.hertfordshiremercury.co.uk/c ... story.html

The figures quoted take no account of the populations of each town. Cheshunt has the highest population so unsurprisingly has more shoplifters. And why a single figure for Hertford & Ware?

And I do wish they'd stop calling it Mercury Land. They stopped engaging with the community years ago (anyone remember the Mercury bus?). Most of their reporters are from outside the town and know little about the area. It's fast morphing from a local newspaper in to an advertising platform.

Not a lot to do with shoplifting and not really about Hertford but in view of your last paragraph this piece from a Leicester Mercury journalist will strike a chord with anyone like Steve and me who have been involved in the town for some years and look for some local reporting.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/spiked-co ... ournalism/

On shoplifting you can only report on the cases where the villain gets caught. There's not much of a radio link between the shops in town now so who knows what goes missing - more than when the radio/CCTV network was active ie 50+ members. The gangs left Hertford alone. I know because a) they've been heard complaining about the level of security (high) and (b)they were spotted migrating to other towns. And (c) a lot got caught!! It is not the managers and staff who are to blame but the area managers who will not foot the bill for a radio. I was also able to subsidise some radios for the small independents through various funding vehicles. But that was then and this is now.

Unfortunately some don't seem that bothered with catching the offenders - I told someone in Marks about a guy putting meat in a rucksack and walking out of the door and they just said okay and carried on packing shelves!

I suppose publishing what amounts to a list of towns and shops fills a bit of space.

Also, if Hitchin and Letchworth are in 'Mercury Land', where's Stevenage then? The best bit for me though was the line (with no apparent sense of irony) that Waltham Cross "boasts" a Lidl.

How are Hoddesdon & Waltham Cross lumped together but Cheshunt, which is in between them, is listed separately?

Steve wrote:It's fast morphing from a local newspaper in to an advertising platform.

Which is entirely what commercial media has always been. They need to provide enough content to attract enough readers/listeners/viewers to allow them to sell advertising.

Not forgetting that owners Trinity Mirror were the company that thought it a good idea to launch a new daily newspaper named NEW DAY, only to close it two months later. I think that tells us enough about their compentancy.