SMART METERS – LOOKS LIKE WE HAD BETTER GET A MOVE ON

FACEBOOK IS PAYING TO TRAIN JOURNALISTS

NEWS reaches us this week that Facebook is dipping into its pocket to the tune of £4.5m to help pay for the training of new UK journalists.

These new reporters, who will receive training from the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), will be known as “community” journalists, and will be placed in newsrooms around the country to help offset the dwindling numbers of reporters publishers themselves are able to afford.

Maybe Facebook feels a little bit guilty about its role in putting the news business under strain in the first place...

Anyway, the cash will be provided as a grant to the NCTJ, which will then invite applications for funding from the major UK regional publishers, like Reach, Newsquest, and Archant.

Publishers themselves have promised they won’t use the extra cash to pay for their own trainees, but will treat it as an extra resource.

The cash will fund training for two years, after which the reporters – who will by then be fully-trained – will either be taken on by the publisher they work for, or seek employment elsewhere. THE government has a plan in place to have everyone running a smart meter for their energy supply by the end of 2020 – a date which sounds like it should be way off in the distant future, in an age where we’re all jetting about in flying cars.

It is, however, just over a year away in reality... and flying cars remain a pipe dream.

As does the plan to move everybody over to smart meters, if a new report by Which? is to be believed.

It says the energy companies are way behind in their installation programme, having fitted just 11m to date, with another 46m to go.

That means they’d have to replace 30 meters a minute every day for the next two years to catch up (which seems unlikely given they’re managing 9.7 a minute at the moment).

So, it seems the government will have to reassess the situation and recalibrate the targets...

Perhaps we’ll see those flying cars before everyone is able to monitor their energy spending more closely after all.