The Crucial Blog

IT may have slipped by largely unnoticed but last week MPs found time to debate a long-term trend that has been gathering momentum and deserves all of our attention - the death by a thousand cuts of the regional press.

My name's Juliette and I am a journalist. There - in these current climes it sounds like an admission of something shameful. Well, the evidence coming out of the Levenson Inquiry into press ethics has indeed been shocking, disturbing and downright shameful. Only today Alistair Campbell is being reported as saying in his written evidence that the press is "frankly putrid in many of its elements" and that a very small number of people have "besmirched...