There's been a Christmas truce, of sorts, at Newcastle United, where the club's ban on its local newspapers has been lifted.

We reported on the situation at Newcastle, including the granting of special media rights to The Sun, here.

Two weeks ago, the Mike Ashley-owned club decided to end lift the ban imposed  in October 2013 - after the Evening Chronicle, The Journal and The Sunday Sun had the audacity to do their job, and report on a fans' protest over the sportswear entrepreneur's handling of the club.

Anecdotally, the local papers have been enjoying a circulation boost since then  - so being readmitted to St James' Park might not be such a blessing after all. In time-honoured manner whenever a club has got the 'ump with a newspaper and tried to gag it with by barring it from the press box, the titles simply bought tickets to games and sent in reporters accordingly.

The Trinity Mirror regional titles negotiated the truce to include no "terms and conditions", but a ban on journalists from the Daily Telegraph remains.

That ban was imposed in September after Northeast football correspondent Luke Edwards reported that Ashley was willing to sell the club. Newcastle issued a statement to deny the story, describing it as "disgraceful journalism for which the club and its supporters should receive a full and unreserved apology". No such apology has been forthcoming.

The stand-off worsened when Edwards further reported that Ashley's ownership interest in Rangers could jeopardise the clubs' ability to qualify to play in Europe - UEFA competition rules look to prohibit owners with controlling interests in more than one club competing in the Champions League or UEFA League.

The club published a rebuttal, which is still live on its website, which Press Gazette had reported may be libellous.

They quoted lawyer Christopher Hutchings as saying: "While the club is within its rights to exclude journalists and papers that themselves print allegations about Newcastle, it may not be wise for it to make counter-accusations about the integrity of the journalists."

Now, journalists sueing a football club... That's something we'd pay to watch.

Lee Clayton, David Walker and Matt Gatward, respectively the head of sport at the Mail group, the Daily Mirror's new sports editor, and the sports editor of The Independent, have some big decisions to make.

Clayton, especially, looks to have his work cut out, following the news that Les Snowdon, his trusty No2 as the Daily Mail's sports editor, is to leave Derry Street to take up a new job as Scottish editor for The Times.


The Mail is one of the last bastions of an old-style sports desk, with plenty of reporters and production staff to manage, as well as to try to break the occasional story, all operating these days alongside the click-bait team working on Mail Online's sports coverage.

Snowdon has worked in Scotland before, having been editor of the Scottish sports coverage for the Sunday Times and as well being the editor of Scotland on Sunday before joining the Mail five years ago.

Clayton is also losing from his staff Mark Alford, who has undertaken various roles on sport, on the paper and online, since being signed up as a sub after completing the Mail's graduate trainee scheme a decade ago. Very much a Clayton protoge, Alford may not necessarily be replaced - his latest job title is "consultant sports editor" for Mail Online.

Both Snowdon and Alford are due to begin new jobs in January, Alford, according to a report on the website of the Sports Journalists' Association, moving to Sky Sports at Osterley as head of digital media.

Elsewhere in the same building off Kensington High Street, Gatward is attempting to re-build after the whirlwind interregnum under Mike Dunn (as we reported here).

With Neil Robinson, the former head of sport for The Independent, Independent on Sunday, i and the Evening Standard, having been sidelined to a night editor's role to make way when Dunn was appointed, it has been left to Gatward to pick up the pieces of the spendthrift three months when the Indy titles suddenly started pretending that they had the budget of The Sun sports desk.

The spending - on the likes of 600-quid-a-time football columnists such as Terry Venables, or the six-figure deal for Paul Scholes - is now being recouped through drastic cuts to the papers' already slender budgets for casual subs and reporters' travel.

Dunn arrived accompanied by his former buddy from The Sun and News of the World, Tim Allan; Allan was only ever on a short-term deal, and he is understood to be among the applicants for the role of "sports editorial executive" - effectively sports editor of the IoS and the i. Interviews were held last week, and an appointment expected to be made any time now.

Over at Canary Wharf, and Walker has been given an early opportunity to make his mark on the Daily Mirror's sports pages.

Walker won the game of musical chairs at Trinity Mirror's titles in the summer, as he was promoted from the Sunday Mirror, while People sports editor James Brown left the building (to re-surface at The Sun).

But two key members of staff leaving in quick succession might have come as a shock so early in Walker's reign.

To lose your football corr, in Martin "Laptop" Lipton, who's been recruited as the new deputy sports editor at The Sun , and then also have your chief sports writer in Ollie Holt defect to the Mail on Sunday, where he is to be the "new Patrick Collins", might be a double blow for Walker.

Apparently not so. According to one Trinity Mirror sports desker who was in a football press box at the weekend, "David sees it as his chance to bring in or promote those people he really rates. Nothing lasts forever, and Laptop and Ollie had both been fixtures at the Mirror for a while. David can now mix things up, without having to elbow anyone aside."

Early suggestions are that Andy Dunn, a Walker favourite when he edited the Sunday Mirror's sports pages, could figure prominently.

England's cricket captain, Alastair Cook, for all the assaults on his uncertain position in charge of the one-day side, has so far out-lasted another product of Essex county cricket, namely Derek Pringle.

For it is Daily Telegraph cricket correspondent Pringle who has become the biggest name casualty of the round of job cuts on the sports desk that we reported last month.

The 56-year-old Cambridge-educated former Test all-rounder has perhaps never enjoyed the acclaim for his cricket writing that has accompanied, say, Mike Atherton. And possibly with good reason.

But surely no one deserves the sort of treatment meted out to Pring when it came to breaking the news of his imminent departure from what, surely, is still one of the best jobs in sports writing?

As I alluded to here in Press Box, as a long-term consequence of the merger of the Daily and Sunday's sports staff and the pressures of the latest round of cut-backs, the Torygraph's head of sport Adam Sills was faced with a newspaper desk's version of Sophie's Choice: he had two staff members operating effectively as cricket corrs, Pringle and Scyld Berry, who had been the Sunday paper's specialist, and just the budget for one of them. 

The choice, in the end, was a foregone conclusion as far as the bean-counters at Victoria were concerned: one journo had a cheaper deal than the other. And one had not got on the wrong side of the Telegraph's sumptuously expensive cricket columnist, Kevin Pietersen, either...

But, as is the nature of these things, there are processes to go through, consultation meetings to attend, lip-service to fairness to be done.

According to the latest issue of Private Eye, "A couple of days before he was due to go to the office and put his case... Pringle had a phone call from Berry - who in all innocence apologised for the fact that he had been asked to stay on.

"Thus Pringle learned that the decision had been taken to give him out before he had even faced a ball."

• The departure of Pringle means that, at least until he finds another outlet that will pay his wages and expenses to travel the world and file a few hundred words each day, the cricket press boxes of the world will be denied the presence of someone who was once an extra in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire.