In small publications, covering a wide remit using scant resources makes it very hard to please everyone. And if your main demographic includes a lot of expats who’ll break out the flat caps at any given opportunity, you know that leaving them displeased is going to mean fielding a lot of angry phonecalls and meandering letters written in longhand. Or so you’d think.

One paper’s attempt to please the traditional audience resulted in an unusual level of online engagement from those same flat caps.

That paper is the Irish Echo, Australia’s Irish expat paper (where I was once deputy editor), which has had to strike a balance between pleasing the traditional audience of Irish ‘lifers’ in Australia and the new audience of transient 20- and 30-somethings in Australia for a good time, but not necessarily a long time.  And that’s a tough thing to do – to try and keep happy the community groups as well as the Facebook-and-cocktails brigade.

Particularly in recent times, small publications have to evolve rapidly to cover new media and new behaviour in various demographics. The great fear, from a perspective of retaining your audience, is that you alienate a chunk of the regular readers with any change you make in pursuit of a new and unpredictable chunk of audience.  If the chunk lost is greater than the chunk gained, you’re at a net loss, which is probably why small publishers often freeze.

A re-jigging of sections in the paper to mark out the backpacker territory seems to have held its ground, and some intelligently-chosen columns (one on visa issues and the other from a Sydney-based AFL star) provide guaranteed engagement in two key areas of interest. Two blogs provide teasers for the online audience (The Echo online has bravely remained behind a paywall), and has kicked off a Facebook page.

The mix is very evident, though, in the one-off publications that the Echo has made its own.

There’s the annual guide to Irish pubs in Australia, and the Irish Down Under mag for Australia-bound Irish. Both of these are for the pubbers and clubbers, but the latest addition to the stable is their magazine detailing Top 100 Irish Australians, which made national headlines last week.

And that’s the one that’s cause the furore. Trying to boil down Australia’s Irish roots to a strong broth of just 100 people was never going to be an easy task. And everyone, it seems, has an opinion on who should have been in there, which is just how editor Billy Cantwell wanted it (“I’m sure others could come up with another 100 names. If there wasn’t a fight about this, I’d be very disappointed.”)

It’s been a major coup for the Echo – plenty of debate and online engagement is definitely a good thing, and if they can get the auld and young audiences to engage with them online, they’re laughing. Celebrating its 2oth year in print this year; with some further online investment, the Echo could well be around for another 20.

Writers’ Rooms, which appeared in the Guardian on a Saturday, never had a byline or mentioned who edited or compiled it, so when it disappeared at the end of July, I emailed its dedicated photographer Eamonn McCabe to see where it had gone. There was no announcement, no ‘Writers Rooms will return in September’, nothing to explain its absence.

McCabe had taken the photos of the various writers’ rooms since the series began in January 2007. In that time, the series had poked its nose into the literary dens inhabited by the likes of Anne Enright, John Banville, Jane Austen and plenty of others, with living authors describing their habits, trinkets and favourite distraction in deliciously colourful pieces. If, at any stage in your life, you have written for love or money, the series was some of the best voyeurism on offer. My favourite is Will Self’s study (pictured), with its orderly lines of post-its that I first discovered in the book How I Write.

The series justified all my own foibles and little acts of procrastination, which made it an unhealthy indulgence, but also gave me confidence that there’s no magic to writing. Nearly all of them involve a table and chair, and either plenty of paper or a laptop. The rest is inside the head of the author.

But anyway, it’s gone. For good.

My email to Eamonn McCabe asked if it was indeed dead and buried, and this was the response:

“Dear Markham, thanks for your email and I too am sorry to see it go. I’m glad you enjoyed the series and rest assure I am doing everything I can to bring it back (maybe ) in the Autumn..”

The Guardian readers’ editor offered some hope to add to McCabe’s comments:

Markham – I’m pretty sure Writers’ Rooms is only on summer hols, as is the Review Letters page, but we’ve passed your query to the editor of theSaturday Review in case this is not the case.  If you don’t hear from us to the contrary I think it’s safe to say that all will be restored next month.
Best wishes,
Helen Hodgson

But when I explained my email conversation with McCabe, the following came through:

Markham – you are right, alas.  The desk tells me that the series came to a natural end and there are no plans to revive it.
So sorry not to have more positive news.

The series was the first thing I read in the Saturday Guardian every weekend, and it’s sad to see it go, although it will live on in mimicry in several different forms (among them Sinead’s excellent Musical Rooms).

Pencils Down.

Ever since Mum and Dad had his ‘n’ hers Honda Civics back in 1987, Hondas have failed to represent anything special or alluring for me. They were the cars my folks had, in which school runs were made and I had to sit next to the loud guy with the mushroom hairdo in my class whose mum was friends with mine but who I silently hated. Those daily ordeals were the Honda’s fault. Dad’s upgrade to a grey (ex-showroom) Accord EXi did nothing to dispel the domesticity of the Honda, nor was his subsequent (e-showroom) V-tec Accord.

Hondas were made-in-Japan mundanity. They were reliability without the German industrial ingenuity that made the Volkswagen attractive. They were safe without the cold Nordic hardness of a square-cornered Volvo. They were value-for-money without getting bang for your buck. They were average, lacking any identity or defining feature, other than that you didn’t really have to worry about them. Superintendent Chalmers drove one.

When a friend’s father squandered his mid-lifer on a Honda S2000 convertible, inwardly I snorted that he had blown his one shot at a Mustang on souped-up Japanese droid. In fact, the only Honda I’ve ever raised an eyebrow at was a 1985 Shadow 500, but by the time I got around to riding motorbikes, Honda had managed to make even the Shadow line look saggy and overweight.

All of which is why I think the above Honda ad is the best ad of the last ten years, because it makes me identify the brand with freedom and adventure and happiness. None of which makes any sense, given my personal history with Honda. But fuck it, what a glorious piece of advertising this is. It’s worth watching again and again.

Actually, some of us are noxious c*nts, but because we’re part of the all-conquering, locust-like mind-hive that is blogging, we’re all afraid to say it. That’s the vulgar paraphrasing of a blog post from Eoin Butler last week, in which he deftly twisted the words of fellow IT scribe Jim Carroll, who in turn borrowed a few ideas from a post by Johnnie Craig. In terms of blog-post-incest, it’s a lovely little choo-choo train. But in terms of content, it’s a doozy.

Both Jim and Johnnie lit the touchpaper of a debate on Irish bands getting treated with kid gloves by Irish reviewers, and the fireworks duly kicked off in the comments section.

Butler, whose singles reviews are often unrepentantly scathing and, as a result, hilarious, took the ball and ran with it, spiking a touchdown at the heart of the Irish blogosphere. He admitted giving an aul star to Irish acts from time to tome, and happily admitted that Irish reviewers are soft on musicians, just like all the bloggers said. But no more soft than bloggers and online writers are soft on bloggers themselves. In fact, we bloggers are blindly protective.  And what better way to illustrate this point by taking a running lunge at the beating heart of Ireland’s bloggerati – Twenty Major.

“Think about it. When was the last time you heard one blogger openly criticising another blogger?,” says Butler. “I don’t mean respectfully disagreeing on a given point – I mean criticising the overall quality of another’s work? It simply never happens.”

And then, as if by magic, it does.

“When have you ever heard another blogger point out the glaringly obvious truth that [Twenty Major's] blog is also nasty, vulgar, puerile and reactionary. It caters exclusively to the lowest common denominator and (most unforgivably of all) is almost always woefully unfunny. I don’t mean to single the guy out. But if Aslan had won 157 consecutive Best Irish Band Awards the IRMAs, it would at least have provoked comment.”

Ka-boom.

Obviously, being a timid shit, I wouldn’t dare to criticise a fellow blogger like Butler, particularly when he has accurately identified the blogosphere’s worst trait – rampant cheerleading for the undeserved. Among the great ideas, the child prodigies and the start-ups, Irish bloggers are up there with the rest of the world when it comes to churning out useless codswallop. But don’t try and tell us that, we’ll be busy with our fingers in our ears, being brilliant.