Just received the latest online news bulletin from ‘Insider’ magazine, and couldn’t resist commenting on one of their news items.

The story in question concerns well-known pornographer David Sullivan, who is also the co-owner of my favourite football team (not), Birmingham-based Small Heath Alliance FC.

‘Insider’ reports that Sport Media Group, of which Sullivan is honorary publisher, has today announced a cost cutting exercise at its Manchester headquarters, as it bids to reduce debts of £12m.

For those who don’t know, Sport Media Group is the publisher of the ‘Daily Sport’ and the ‘Sunday Sport’. What can one say about these two? Well, I suppose you could start off by being factual, saying that the latter commenced life in 1986, followed by its stablemate five years later on.

They are newspapers in the loosest sense of the word – there is really no news in them, they are mainly devoted to soft porno pictures and adverts for adult goods and services. Oh, and what ‘news’ there is seems to consist largely of made up nonsense such as ‘World War 2 bomber found on the moon!’ (complete with faked picture, if my memory serves me correctly).

Other ‘classic’ stories from the ‘Sport’ include: ‘5 stone mum gives birth to 8st baby’; ‘6st girl beds half ton man’; ‘16-stone toddler crushes gran to death’. 

During 1989 I was working on a publication in London, and we received word about a man living in a Skoda on a main road in Finchley, together with several hundred mice. We checked it out, and it was true – the occupant of the car was a former police sergeant, who had sadly gone a bit doolally. Because of the man’s mental issues, we decided against running anything – not long later, the story turned up in the ‘Sunday Sport’. 

Someone from my publication had clearly sold the story to the ‘Sport’ (we never found out who) – they ran it as I have described, although they did tack a fictitious quote onto the end of it, purportedly from the resident of the Skoda revealing that he had not had sex for ten years. 

Thankfully, that’s my only experience of the ‘Sport’, which the aforementioned Lord Porn of Small Heath ran until he flogged it in 2007. Well, now he’s back, it seems, according to ‘Insider’. And judging by his latest comments about Small Heath Alliance FC (as published here by www.tribalfootball.com), he’s got the fantasy world of the ‘Sport’ mixed up with reality.

He has declared that his aim for the current season is sixth or higher, and thus qualify for Europe. Well, I’m sure all Villa fans (and nearly everyone who knows anything about football) will have had a seriously good laugh about that.

And that’s not all – Sullivan adds: “We’d also like to win the FA Cup”. Well Mr Sullivan, all I can say is that the only newspaper likely to carry that story in the near future is…(need I say it?)

 

Filed under: Public Relations