Right. Let’s get right to that elephant in the room, that Reform ‘wrap’ last week.

Wraps are what we in the newspaper business refer to as an advertising buy that takes the front and back covers and the second and second-last pages – essentially the four pages that ‘wrap’ the rest of the newspaper.

We on the editorial side of things hate them. Not only do they take away what we believe to be our best real estate in any given ‘book’ – what we call the actual newspaper pages – but they bring production challenges in that everything inside is more compressed. Pages aren’t made of rubber and can’t stretch. There’s a finite amount you get in. The web is limitless.

Right. Now when I tell you that us lot on the editorial side, responsible for filling papers – and the web – with news, and that lot on the commercial side, have nothing to do with each other.

Our ‘books’ are built two weeks in advance. By that, I mean we get our blank pages – it always must be a multiple of eight, based on the presses used to print newspapers – with the ad spaces blocked off.

We on the editorial side do not whom who the ad buyers are until the finished ads are finished by a separate ad production department – and begin to populate or ‘flow in’, mostly on the day before we go to press.

For the record, your Cambrian News is printed at a Newsquest press site on Oxford – as a lot of dailies that also circulate here – and are all shipped to local newsagents and sales outlets using the same distribution company, Smiths, and on the same lorry.

That’s why if the lorry is involved in an accident or breaks down, there are no newspapers of any sort in shops that day.

I’m not deflecting here; I’m just trying to explain to you how our processes work.

I’ve been in newspapers and the news business for more than four decades on three continents and the process, whether a trans-Canada daily, in the Middle East, ‘Fleet Street’ or here on weeklies in Wales, is intrinsically the same but with varying scales of complexity.

By scales of complexity, I spent eight years between 2000 and 2008 as the Front Page/Inside Editor at the Globe in Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. Back then it sold 360,000 copies daily across Canada six days a week, produced from the newsroom in Toronto, with completed pages satellited to six different press plants in five separate time zones from coast to coast. There were 14 editions with deadlines that began at 21:30 - content changed in a news ballet most editions – and ended at 01:50. In that type of environment, deadlines are deadlines: You cross the line, you’re dead.

If, for some reason, you missed one deadline, there was heck to pay. Missing the ‘first British Columbia’ deadline, for example, by 10 minutes meant the truck taking the papers to provincial capital Victoria on Vancouver Island would miss the last ferry. Then you would have to weigh one paper, multiply that by 10,000 and use an air freight express plane to fly the papers out. And back in Toronto there’d be a lot of stuff flying too! (It only happened to me once, a sudden power blackout that shut down most of Ontario).

If there was bad blizzard in Toronto, one poor ‘send room’ bugger would have to get out on the roof of the building and sweep the satellite dish with a brush to get rid of snow and ice so the pages could be transmitted.

Incidentally, at Gulf News in Dubai, the first lot of newspapers off the presses were sent to Dubai Airport where they would be flown to India, Saudi, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and then as far as Lebanon and Jordan with some going into Cairo. Because Dubai is so warm and newspapers retain their heat when they come ‘hot off the press’, they had to be passed through a chiller before they could be put on planes.

So, back to that wrap…

It was sold independently by our commercial department and we on the editorial side had no say in it. Dim. Nada. None.

Personally, I expressed my rather frank opinion to those on the commercial side and to those with higher paygrades than I.

I cannot say this forcefully enough: The buyers have ABSOLUTLY no influence on me, my staff and our award-winning news coverage. Those of you read the Cambrian News on a regular basis – thank you – know that I nor Cambrian News has demurred from authority in the slightest. Fact is, pretty much every journalist I’ve worked with on those three continents are part-anarchists – reacting the exact opposite if told to do something. And long may that continue.

If Reform and its ad buyers had read, for example, Patrick O’Brien’s excellent column in the same paper that ripped the party apart for its anti-Welsh policies and running political neophytes, they probably would have thought twice.

It’s a pity they didn’t.