The best of the Live Network this week, April 5

We’re coming towards the end of the Easter break period (or the middle of it for those areas where schools are still off next week) and, as always, it’s been a reminder of the fact that our audience patterns generally change during holiday times, and so our content plans need to change with them.

Typically, we’ll find that browsing patterns alter, making it even more important to think about how we’re reaching our readers, and how we’re tailoring our output for what they’re doing and thinking about it. When the schools are off, for a lot of our readers that will mean hunting for things to do, places to go and general ways to entertain their children, and the audience data from the last couple of weeks shows there’s a real reward available for doing that in a way that’s authoritative and well-targeted.

On MyLondon, Luke Donnelly helped populate the to-do lists of thousands of families in the capital by focusing on the spectacular woodland on the edge of London that's one of the best places to see carpets of bluebells, while Anna Willis introduced readers to the excellent Horniman Museum in Forest Hill after it was named one of the capital’s best family days out. On a similar theme, BirminghamLive’s parenting editor Zoe Chamberlain tipped off her readers about a little-known mini-zoo that costs just ￡3.80 for children - perfect for families keeping an eye on their household finances during a potentially expensive period.

Our local insights are such an important part of our offering when it comes to great what’s on content, and the final two things I wanted to flag before we move on demonstrate this perfectly. On the Liverpool Echo, the team routinely leverage the knowledge of the whole team to help ensure their evergreen content is as well-researched as it possibly can be, and they put that to good effect once again with this guide to Merseyside’s best chippys, timed perfectly for Good Friday. Taking the concept of personal recommendation a step further was this review from ChronicleLive’s Cathy Addison-Swan, headlined “Why this hidden gem Whitley Bay café has become my favourite in the North East”. We should never underestimate the significance of a personal seal of approval where we have experts in a given field, and placing this front and centre in a headline can really make the difference in terms of capturing readers’ attention. As head of what’s on Emily Heward says: “If you regularly write about food and drink (or other What's On subjects), what's your ultimate favourite restaurant, cafe, pub, beach, etc? It could make for a nice first person series -? 'I'm a food writer and this is my absolute favourite place to eat’? or ‘the place I always recommend when people ask me for the best restaurant’.”

Of course, the value of local knowledge, insight and authority isn’t just limited to what’s on, and those were traits on display in spades for PlymouthLive this week after news broke at around 10pm on Monday night that Plymouth Argyle head coach Ian Foster was facing the sack. The title’s highly-respected football writer Chris Errington had already spent the afternoon covering the match against Bristol City, but sprung back into action to cover the impending departure up to and beyond the moment the sacking was announced shortly before midnight. In all, a live blog, analysis on why the club had to act, background on the reasons things had gone wrong for Foster, the inside track on potential successors and a host of reaction made the site the only place for fans to get the comprehensive picture of what had happened.

Great football journalism can equally be about the things that happen far away from first team squads, and that was exemplified by MEN Man City writer Joe Bray ’s excellent feature on former Manchester City academy player Reece Wabara,? who dropped out of football totally at 26 to set up fashion brand Maniere de Voir, and now has a staggering net worth of ￡83m.

Staying in Manchester, and well done to the MEN team on their coverage last night and this morning on a fatal stabbing in Moss Side. Night reporter James Holt worked contacts to find out the boy had died and get the name, morning breaking news reporter Ashlie Blakey made contact with family the following day, while live news editor Todd Fitzgerald tapped into a senior police contact to discover this was a targeted attack, as well as other key details.

Yesterday, we welcomed the candidates for the newly-created role of elected mayor for the North East to our recently redesigned ChronicleLive newsroom for a hustings event. It’s great for our brands to be able to be the conduit for events like this - well done to LDR Dan Holland for organising the event, multimedia editor Andrew Musgrove and audience editor Gemma Hudson for crowdsourcing reader questions and recording the event, and Northern Agenda editor Rob Parsons , who chaired the event. The recording will be used for a special edition of the Northern Agenda podcast on Sunday, so look out for that.

Finally this week, congratulations to a couple of our colleagues for their achievements over the past couple of weeks:

• MyLondon LDR Rory Bennett won the trainee feature of the year prize at the NCTJ Awards. Rory, who covers Ealing, Hounslow and Hillingdon, broke an exclusive on the conditions in two hellish shipping container estates in Ealing. He exposed how mums and their children were being forced to live alongside dangerous drug dealers and addicts in shipping containers that look like prison cells, and those who complained were being beaten up. His first feature, on Marston Court, told the stories of several named residents living there, with exceptional bits of colour from having visited himself several times, and brilliant images from photographer Facundo Arrizabalaga . The second feature, on nearby Meath Court, contained equally harrowing tales of cockroaches and dangerous rusting walkways, and combined the two articles led to the council decommissioning the shocking estates, intended to help ease the borough's housing crisis.
• Reporting from WalesOnline’s Conor Gogarty into direct sales firms in Cardiff this week prompted the Fundraising Regulator to issue a report this week calling for changes in the way charities fundraise. During his investigation last summer, Conor went undercover at a direct sales office in Cardiff and his hidden camera footage revealed door-to-door reps were both tricked into believing they would get a salary, when in fact they worked purely on commission, and were trained to trick people into making charity payments on their doorsteps. In January, Conor broke the story of a second Cardiff office which used manipulative tactics to get donations and put reps through humiliating forfeits if they missed targets. Both offices lied to reps that they would be paid a salary and heavily controlled their lives. Not only did Conor literally close both these offices down but the Fundraising Regulator launched a major inquiry as a direct result of his investigation. This week it released that report, saying charities must make changes. Among its key demands are that sales reps working on behalf of charities are paid a living wage and that there must be better oversight. The watchdog's Jim Tebbett said the bad practice currently widespread across the sector was "exposed by WalesOnline".