What happened to the more affectionate, realistic portrayals of northern life in Cold Feet and Our Friends in the North? We're not all John Middletons or Jim Royles

Mischa Wilmers joins our debate on getting started in journalism, from Chile

Ann Czernik reports and photographs regularly for the Guardian Northerner on the social challenges facing our three regions as austerity takes its toll. In the last year, she has looked at York's housing crisis, action to defend jobs and teenage binge drinking as well as public reaction to 2012's byelections and police commissioner and local council polls. Here's her calendar with a precis of prospects for the year ahead.

We shall be changed - albeit not in the twinkling of an eye and certainly not at the last trumpet. Welcome to a new Northern Editor and see you later from the old one

Praise be for a national institution whose greatest names - Canterbury and York - are outside the M25

Success of Tramlines and Sheftival leads to another three days of this, that and everything else in the capable hands of the station from Salford

Salford's Green party candidate for directly elected mayor, Joe O'Neill, publishes his priorities in the latest of the Guardian Northerner's series on the election

A conference at the great new base in Salford shows that the BBC has all the facts, but not yet the gumption to use them