Apologies for delay in replying to this - drafted response on Friday night on the rank, but because it's about fine detail thought I'd have a quick look over it next day before posting, but never got round to it. Still can't be bothered with it, to be honesty, but I never like deleting more than a few words, so here it is
Any errors are all mine
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Thanks for your analysis Stuart. They’d be wrong saying just ‘Transport Minister’ in more ‘conventional reports’ as you’d have to class Grant Shapps and George Freeman both with the same title too.
Grant Shapps would be transport *secretary* rather than transport *minister*.
You're right about Freeman as regards a hierarchy of ministers beneath the Secretary of State, but maybe Ghani could be termed a 'junior minister' if you think the hierarchy is relevant (which I don't really think it is in this case, personally).
But personally I'd go for 'transport minister' maybe adding 'with responsibility for taxis and private hire', or suchlike, the latter maybe framed towards your particular audience. Who, I suspect, aren't too concerned with the precise job titles.
I've been reading the likes of the Times, Telegraph, Independent and Guardian for almost forty years, and I just can't imagine them using such arcane job titles, even in the specialist politics pages, unless it's a formal list, or just for curiosity value, or whatever.
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If TaxiPoint are criticised for being too detailed with facts I’ll live with that feedback!
So for the likes of ye and me and readers, I'd say "Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport) and Government Whip" is just a bit cumbersome and a tad too much detail, and more likely to mislead than clarify.
It's a bit like a press report referring to Boris Johnson as "Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, and Minister for the Civil Service", which is something like his full job title. Or Sajid David as "Chancellor and Under-Treasurer of Her Majesty's Exchequer" - usually abbreviated to Chancellor of the Exchequer, or simply 'chancellor'.
Likewise, starting your piece with 'leading Government MP' to describe Ghani threw me a bit, and although I was vaguely aware that she was a transport minister, I wondered if your description meant that she'd been demoted, or whatever, and was just speaking as a backbencher, or similar. A bit like starting an article about Dominic Raab or Priti Patel with the term 'leading Government MP'.
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TaxiPoint is the only industry publication in the world to appear alongside ‘conventional’ MSN having had our journalism approved by Google, Apple and Microsoft News aggregators. With over half million different readers last year, I’d say we were as conventional as other local news media outlets you post up?
On the contrary, I didn't class TaxiPoint as not conventional, I simply said that the description 'transport minister' was more conventional usage than the longer job title you used.
(And if you really want to get into the nitty gritty, I don't think it's conventional to capitalise 'Transport Minister' either, because it's not a formal job title. Of course, different sources take different approaches to that kind of thing - 'Chancellor of the Exchequer' or 'chancellor of the exchequer', for example, because that's more of a formal title - but I suspect most publications would go for 'transport minister' rather than 'Transport Minister', because that's definitely not a formal job title.)
But, since you raise the point, I wouldn't class TaxiPoint alongside the local news outlets that make up the bulk of the stuff on here, because TaxiPoint is a specialist publication aimed at a particular audience, while the local news outlets are aimed at the general public, so the content will be tailored accordingly.
And while I don't underestimate your achievement regarding the news aggregators and search engines etc, as someone who did a bit of search engine optimisation stuff back in the 1990s (when it was a lot more straightforward), what I'd certainly bet the house on is that it has absolutely zero to do with whether you use "Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport) and Government Whip" or simply 'transport minister'