“What’s happened to the ‘Staffordshire’ news?”, I thought. On searching Google News, there’s almost nothing worth having for the last week. But I realised that the problem was not Google News, but the lack of coverage from its sources, as evidenced for a search such as…

Staffordshire -terrier -cancer -police -ambulance -tennis -magistrates -motorway -racecourse

… and with this I had basically knocked out nearly all the news that was being reported, with my ‘knockout’ keywords. There was almost nothing left that wasn’t crime, sport, car-crashes or Staffordshire Bull terriers!

The dregs that did appear showed thrilling headlines such as… “Gavin Williamson opens refurbished gazebo in Wombourne” and… “Suffolk ewe wins at Staffordshire County show”. Nearly all that was left in the results came from the sturdy expressandstar.com in Wolverhampton, a long-standing newspaper that still has the very worthy remit of trying to cover everything on its patch, even if only very briefly. Other results were mostly press releases and farming trade journal articles.

I should add that I was searching the proper searchable Google News, not the nasty ersatz version found at news.google.com.

There’s an opening here for an aggregator page that collects and curates links to Stoke and Staffordshire news, while filtering out all the sports, crime, fluff and robo-reporting, for those who have no interest in the news that Deirdre of Burslem got into some argy-bargy in Cobridge, or that Bogthorne Rovers won a match against Piddlemire by two goals. I won’t be the one to do that, so feel free to give it a go.