99 Spoilers and you WON'T believe what Coronation Street Blog does next

Regular readers may have noticed that we're not posting Coronation Street spoilers as often as we used to. In fact, we're not posting them at all.

The regular weekly previews which go live every Tuesday are the official previews from ITV. I label these as 'spoilers' but they are truly previews which are in all of the magazines and newspapers once the embargo date of Tuesday morning has been reached. So they only preview a week in advance.

There's a reason for the change here at Coronation Street Blog towers. To be honest, I'm fed up with what I read online. In their desire to fill space and feed their greedy advertisers, the news and soaps websites that I used to trust for my Corrie stories are pushing out absolute rubbish and have been for the last 12-18 months. It shows no signs of slowing down, indeed, it's getting worse.

They build 'stories' around tweets, sometimes just one tweet, they've read online. One single fan who tweets 'I didn't enjoy last night's Corrie' becomes a clickbait headline of 'Fans blast Coronation Street and here's why'.

I've had enough.

The Coronation Street Blog will never go down that route, and I'm now steering well clear of clicking on headlines that either don't give the full story, are stomach-churning sycophantic reads or are nothing more than a pathetic attempt to get clicks to feed ads.

Back in 2005 when I was taken on as editor of a different Coronation Street Blog, which no longer exists, I was the very first person online to blog about Coronation Street. I used to record programmes like Loose Women and ITV's This Morning when I knew they had a Coronation Street cast member on it. I'd dash home from work, watch it and write up any interesting snippets they said. Now the tabloids and soap sites do it - with less love and subtlety - but they do it and they wrap adverts around it and they sell it as product.

We were also the first online site to always, consistently, tell fans about schedule changes. Not because it made us popular, not to drive traffic to our site, but to - well - tell fans about schedule changes. Now it's something that almost every soaps and news website does because it feeds their advertisers. Or maybe they do care about Corrie fans, who knows?

.Yes, we have Google ads on this site, we always have. The revenue that comes in pays for things like travel expenses when our bloggers go to ITV press days and our blog get-togethers.

I've also stopped writing the more unique blog posts I used to write because of the tabloids stealing my work. No more will I feed them words. For instance, every Christmas, I write a list of all of the Corrie cast who are appearing in panto. I've done it every year since the blog began. Last year some lazy hack cut and paste the list, sold it to The Mirror who printed it as their own, then The Daily Star printed it as their exclusive. That list took me hours to put together. Anyway, that's just one example of something that happens far too often when lazy journalists look to our wonderful blog for work they can nick to pass off as their own.

Another for instance - when we interviewed crime writer and Corrie fan Martina Cole, we donated to Breast Cancer Care in return for her words as we always do with VIP blog post.  The next day, her interview was on the front page of The Daily Star with the screaming headline 'Corrie's Bloody Awful' (which she never said).

So there it is. No more clicking on the most horrendous, sexist, misogynistic clickbait headlines 'just in case' there's a snippet of information there that I can use for the blog. No more.

We'll continue to write original, sparkling content here on the Coronation Street Blog, as we always have. We'll work hard to promote fan events, as ever. We'll highlight and showcase fan books, fan artwork - basically, anything and everything by and for Corrie fans.

We blog because Coronation Street is part of our lives.

We do it for the love, not the clicks.

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