I WENT on a cultural tour of Hull last Friday.
I know what you’re thinking.
That must have been a nice 15 minutes, but what did you do for the rest of the day?
Don’t worry I’ve heard it all before.
To be honest, I’ve probably said it all before.
But after three years of visiting Hull on such trips I’m now not so much a missionary as a preacher about the attractions of this Far East city.
Organised by Hull entrepreneur Shaun Watts, the annual Cultural Tour was first kicked off to Hull being City of Culture in 2017.
It involves several business people inviting a guest from outside the area to join them for a day to get a taste of what Hull can offer.
Having visited Beverley Minster, Hull Minster, Trinity House and quite a few of the historic pubs in between over the last three years, this year’s visit took in a tour of Hull Guildhall.
The historic building records much of the city’s proud maritime and trading history and includes the Coroner’s Court.
This was once a criminal court and has a tunnel leading from the dock under the building to cells next door.
The ageing business cards of hopeful solicitors are still stuck to the wall of the reception area where prisoners were brought in.
Guided by experienced local historian Mike Rymer, we toured the Guildhall looking at the collections of silver – including something I’ve put on my Christmas list, a pair of ’grape scissors’ – a life size statue of anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce and the council chamber.
The member of staff accompanying us helpfully explained that there were 57 councillors that meet in the chamber.
“They are mainly Labour and Liberal Democrat, but I think there are a couple of Tories,” he added.
From the Guildhall, which has stood in for London during the filming of some TV dramas, we headed down the exotically named street the Land of Green Ginger towards some local hostelries including The George Hotel, which boasts England’s smallest window.
The pub dates back to 1683 and the tiny sliver of glass between two blocks of stone at its front is said to be from its time as a coaching inn when a porter was seated at the window to watch for approaching coaches.
The landlord told me that the history of the pub helps attract visitors but he’s looking forward to getting Sky Sports and a pool table in the upstairs bar to encourage more.
Imbued with a thirst for more history and culture I approached a blue plaque on a wall next to a pelican crossing on Castle Street, the main dual carriageway which leads to the docks.
Put there by an organisation called Alternative Heritage, it said: “On This Spot 2017. Clare nearly died whilst waiting for the green man to finally appear.”
One of the guests on last week’s tour was former Asda chief executive Andy Clarke.
Given I’ve been critical of his former employer and also his involvement as chairman of Leeds & Partners in the recruitment of useless former chief executive Lurene Joseph, I thought I better leave it until later in the day until I chatted to Andy.
I was also grateful that I’ve held back from being too critical of Leeds Bradford Airport where he is now chairman.
Although I’m told the recent fly-on-the-wall TV documentary about the airport is more damning than anything a critic could say.
In one of the many pubs we visited last Friday, I slurped heavily from my pint of bitter and approached Andy.
My guess was that he’d never heard of me never mind my weekly witterings in this blog.
“You wrote that stuff about me when Lurene Joseph left Leeds & Partners,” he said.
It turns out one of the other people on the trip to Hull had helpfully told him I was on the trip and pointed out some of my choicer comments.
I gulped.
“I suppose she wasn’t one of my best appointments,” he said with a smile.
Before he had a chance to mention my comments about Asda I moved the conversation on to Hull’s rich maritime heritage.
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DEPENDING on who you support there is a good chance that if you are a football fan you either spent the summer studying who your team were going to spend millions signing in the transfer window…or wondering whether your club would survive by the time the season kicked off.
The have and have not world of English football has never been as starkly underlined as they were this summer when Premier League teams spent a total of £1.4bn on transfers and historic clubs like Bolton and Bury fought for their survival.
Bolton got a last gasp reprieve last week and are now under new ownership.
Bury were not so fortunate, being booted out of the English Football League, where the club had resided since 1894.
There is a chance that if the club is acquired by new owners then it could be reinstated to League Two but even if that happens then given the state of the Shakers, it will not so much a phoenix from the flames as a drowned rat dragging itself to safety.
Amid all this drama of high finance in the Premier League and the struggles of lower league teams my attention was captured by another football transfer saga.
American sports website The Athletic launched in the UK to coincide with the start of the football season.
Founded in 2016, The Athletic is a subscription-based sports website that provides ad-free national and local coverage in 47 North American cities.
In three years it has raised $67m dollars from funders and hired over 300 sports journalists to cover teams playing in all the major US sports leagues.
It was launched by two former colleagues at subscription-based fitness company Strava with a mission of producing “smarter coverage for die-hard fans”.
You don’t have to be a student of journalism to know that traditional media have been struggling for years.
Newspapers, both national and local, have been unable to adapt their models to a changing world.
On the one hand they sell their content in printed form – and on the other they give it away for free on the internet.
Unless you are the Financial Times, it seems paywalls don’t work for UK newspapers.
The Times professes to be successful with the model but I’ve not seen any figures to show that.
Certainly regional and local newspapers can’t make it work.
So they load their already poorly-functioning websites with pop-up adverts, click bait and countless surveys.
For many of us, despite the fact we can access the content for free, it is a frustrating process which you often can’t be bothered with.
Headlines to sports stories are written to entice fans to click on them, but most fail to deliver what they promise.
I’m told some online dating sites are similar.
The Athletic promises to be different.
It relies on subscription revenue, not advertising revenue, to support its business.
Founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann believed sports fans would be willing to pay for good reporting and writing, a clean app and no ads.
In the US The Athletic has 600,000 paying subscribers and claims a retention rate of 80% year-on-year.
Subscription costs around $8 a month but those who sign up get the first month free and often a significant discount for the first year.
When it launched in the UK last month it offered new subscribers their first month free and half price for the first year.
It will need to attract plenty of subscribers over here as it has hired more than 50 journalists from national and local papers and national broadcasters to cover all the major UK football teams.
Apparently all the new staff have been offered significant pay hikes to join as well as equity in the business.
It certainly contrasts with local newspapers in the UK, where staff are poorly paid and never given a stake in what they are helping to create.
Whether the new model The Athletic brings will prove successful remains to be seen.
It has been dismissed by those running local newspapers.
But why should they be correct?
They have shown no success in second guessing the industry up to this point.
The Athletic has steamed in and poached their experienced football writers from London to Glasgow and every major provincial city in between.
What the newspapers perhaps didn’t appreciate was that these writers have significant social media followings who have gone with them.
The Yorkshire Evening Post’s longstanding Leeds United correspondent Phil Hay has upped sticks to The Athletic and he has 167,000 followers on Twitter.
His former colleague Richard Sutcliffe has recently joined to cover Sheffield United while the established and experienced reporters who cover the major clubs in Manchester, Liverpool and London have gone too.
They have been joined by journalists from national newspapers and the BBC which suggests that The Athletic will be adding more video content to the podcasts it already serves up to its subscribers.
For a sports fan the content is thoughtful and highly readable. The Athletic treats you like a grown-up.
Even the comments from readers are considered and spelt correctly.
If you look at the comments left on the bottom of most newspaper website football stories you’d think it was typed by someone wearing mittens.
I suppose the only downside is that my team, Derby County, doesn’t appear to be covered by such an experienced journalist.
On the evening when Derby played their biggest rivals, Nottingham Forest, in the EFL Cup, he wasn’t there because he went on a “date night” to see a rapper and tweeted: “A couple just got engaged on stage at he Machine Gun Kelly gig I’m at. That was some wholesome sh*t.”
Nice.
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BACK to my visit to Hull.
The trip might have embraced culture but things got more boisterous as the day went on.
At one stage my silk pocket square was used by someone to mop up some spilt beer.
I was annoyed but kept as calm as I could.
But if a member of the party had spilt beer on my spats, well that would have meant fisticuffs.
Have a great weekend.