When I embarked upon this task as Crime Correspondent, I assumed it would be fairly easy. There’s always crime in the news. The emergency services are always busy. Surely, there would be plenty of things happening that I could write about. And it is true, there are always things going on, but it’s not easy to find stories that aren’t from official sources. There are loads of potential articles, but not so many that haven’t already been covered by local newspapers and local TV news.

A good of finding new and original stories is to look at blogs. I’ve managed to produce two interesting and original articles in this way.

The first, my story about Sandwell Labour Councillor, Bob Piper, was a bit of luck. I had written a story about him before, when he put an offensive picture of David Cameron on his website. The notorious blogger had done it again! This time a spoof photo of Tony Blair! It was lucky that I already knew of him, so I was able to identify this as an interesting story.

His reputation seems to be that of a controversial, rebel Councillor and while its good to have a representative who is passionate and open about his views, I think maybe it was a bit silly of him to do this again after facing criticism the first time!

Another story that I came across on a blog was about the possible risk from people posing as ambulance workers. The blog was that of John Robertson, an ambulance worker from the West Midlands. In his blog he writes about his experiences in the ambulance service and is a really good insight into the work that they do.

In this particular blog entry, he highlights the fact that he very rarely gets asked to show his ID and yet easily gains access to people’s homes. I picked up on this statement as a good original story about the possible safety risks.

A comment left in response to the post mentioned the fact that St John Ambulance uniforms posed a similar risk and were much easier to get hold of. I feel that this story is particularly important at the time, when the fear of terrorist attacks is high. It is quite shocking how easy it is to get these uniforms, you just order them from the website in the same way you would anything else. When you think about the sorts of places an impostor could gain access to with no questions asked, it could potentially be quite dangerous.