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Say what you like about the Daily Mail but they do a great line in cute animal stories (when they're not supporting calls for the hunting of said cute animals).
Here's a news story, right, from today. It must be 'news', because it says 'news' in the menu bar at the top. So if we can all just ignore the fact the video (below) was actually posted on YouTube back in September 2008 that would probably be for the best (hat tip @JonathanHaynes):
If you saw The Express's 'Diana at 50' front page effort last week you'd be forgiven for thinking June had more than used up its creepy Photoshop budget. But you'd have figured without Newsweek in the US, whose own jaw-dropping 'Diana at 50' cover story begins:
"Chilling with the Middletons. Tweeting from Davos. And still the people's princess. If not for that tragic night, what her life might look like now..."
Want to know what Diana's Tweets might look like? Newsweek's got that covered. Look, here's what she might look like when retweeting the Dalai Lama:
Want to know what she'd look like on the red carpet clutching her iPhone 4? Course you do. Luckily, Newsweek's got that covered too:
Want to go be sick now? Go on, you've earned it.
(Hat tip Ben Cotterill)
Independent journalist Johann Hari has admitted copying quotes from other sources to improve the quality of his written interviews. He said he's done this because better quotes were available elsewhere - often written by the subject, in their own words - than the quotes he got during his interview.
"When I've interviewed a writer, it's quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they've said it more clearly in writing than in speech."
Cue accusations of 'plagiarism' and 'churnalism', but I don't think either of those allegations are accurate.
It seems more accurate, to me at least, to liken Hari's confessed practice to lip-synching. He's been presenting performances 'as live' - giving the impression the words on the page happened in the moment and were captured by his pen and his line of questioning - when really they have been finessed and prepared by expert third party producers beforehand.
It may be more polished, but for me this practice undermines the credibility of the interview and the notion that it captures a one off moment in time. But according to Hari he is not alone in this practice:
"I called round a few other interviewers for British newspapers and they said what I did was normal practice..."
You can read more about how this issue came to light over at Fleet Street Blues.
Here are the two top-rated reader comments* on the Daily Mail's story about senior Conservative Christopher Shale who died this weekend in the backstage area at the Glastonbury Festival:
Yeah, Glastonbury is just so elitist and uncool these days. I mean, newsreaders in "gum boots" - how awful!
Hang on, wasn't the story about a man dying?
This rather ugly headline from London's Evening Standard (right) might be marginally more palatable if many in the British media - the Standard included - hadn't previously pointed us all in the direction of Germany's official ticketing website, instructing us we could go online and buy up that country's allocation of Olympics tickets.
They cited the same EU competition law which these "foreigners" have entirely legitimately benefitted from.
(PS. Aren't "foreigners" what we used to call "tourists"? And aren't they thought to be a good thing for the economy?)
Related posts:
Who's the daddy?
British tennis star Laura Robson has obviously been catching up on her reading today after a battling defeat to tournament favourite Maria Sharapova at Wimbledon yesterday. Among the coverage of Robson's week at Wimbledon was an Evening Standard article about her father travelling to SW19 to watch her play (continues):
There was just one problem, as Laura herself explained today on Twitter:
The Evening Standard's isn't the only picture desk to get a little confused about goings on at Wimbledon this week. See also: Telegraph picture editor has Sixth Sense.
Scanning the pages of the Telegraph's Wimbledon coverage today you'd be forgiven for thinking something doesn't look quite right about its selection of photo stories for Day 4 (continues):
Because, sadly, Sir Bobby Robson could not have been among the stars attending Wimbledon, no matter what the Telegraph claims, because he died in 2009:
The picture they've used, credited to Getty Images, was actually taken in 2007.
The unveiling of a 'digital first' strategy for The Guardian last week certainly left some of the paper's staff feeling uneasy, despite job cuts not being spelled out in the original announcement. But with this new strategy ringing in their ears, it perhaps should not have come as a surprise that the first many Guardian staff did hear about confirmed job cuts came via the Media Guardian's Twitter feed:
It's been well documented that Ryan Giggs made his 14th consecutive appearance as the front page lead on the Daily Star yesterday. It lead us to wonder if this was some kind of World Record for the UK press.
Some smart commentators were quick to suggest Diana's near residency on the front of The Express, must surely have stretched to more than 14 consecutive editions... but did it?
No.
Our research took us back to September 1997 and the height of the nation's mourning. At that time The Express ran 11 consecutive front pages where Diana's death was ostensibly the lead. Those 11 pages though covered a broad range of events. It could be argued The Star managed to spin 14 Ryan Giggs leads out of a story which - unfounded speculation aside - wasn't moved on at all in that time.
The search continues...
The Daily Mail has taken the BBC to task for an item on Radio 4's You And Yours which featured an interview with the boss of Krispy Kremes.
The Mail story is based around "complaints from listeners" lodged with the Beeb about the apparently friendly nature of the interview:
"...listeners have accused Radio 4's You and Yours of broadcasting a 'six-minute advert' for Krispy Kreme doughnuts... Listeners claimed there was a lack of penetrating questions, saying that it was only in the final two minutes of the interview that issues such as health and obesity were raised."
Should you be interested, The Media Blog has been told by the BBC's press office that it was "flooded with 13 complaints" following the programme. That's 13 complaints - or 0.0008 per cent of the 1.6 million who listened. (The BBC addressed these complaints itself on Feedback... which may have been what tipped off the Mail.)
I've listened to the interview. It wasn't Frost/Nixon that's for sure (but then it was about doughnuts) and the negative aspects of the doughnut trade were covered and surely a six-minute interview, spent in its entirety blaming the world's ever-expanding waistband on Krispy Kreme alone would have been no more even-handed. But anyway, the Mail's stance on this issue is all the more interesting in light of two recent articles from its own pages, which no doubt went down very well with the marketing team at Krispy Kreme:
So, that's a new Krisy Kreme store open now at Cardiff's St David's Centre. Get along there now. Hurry, don't delay. And then there was this catchy headline:
Mmmmm doughnuts.
(Hat tip @Jemstone)
This is starting to look like an unhealthy obsession for The Daily Star. Here are the last 12 editions of the paper, with Ryan Giggs on the front every day, giving them enough to field a whole football team - with Giggs as manager too. I've rather arbitrarily laid them out in a 4-4-2 formation (I'd be tempted to use an attacking midfielder playing in the hole away from home... but that is allegedly where all this trouble started of course):
Manager:
Never mind the Giggs family, it's starting to look like The Daily Star may never get over this.
An unfortunate use of graphics here from BBC News South East:
It was, of course, a report about a "jobs blow" for the region - no laughing matter on a normal day. But somebody decided to have the words enter the screen from opposing sides (below) which made all the difference (spotter's badge @WillardFoxton):
They knew what they were doing at Property Week when they wrote this headline, don't tell me they didn't...
(Hat tip: Jon Slattery and Willard Foxton)
Ever wondered what happens every minute on the internet? This infographic from Go-Globe.com may shed some light*: from 320 people signing up to Twitter to 25 hours of video being posted on YouTube (that's a lot of cats doing funny things!),via nearly 700,000 searches on Google and 13,000 iPhone apps being downloaded.
(*There are some conflicting versions of these statistics available online - and some will have dated in the time it's taken you to read this far, so please don't base your PhD on this infographic... I just thought it was kind of interesting.)
Guardian journalist Rowenna Davis today 'live tweeted' from Great Ormond Street Hospital where surgeons were carrying out open heart surgery on a two-week old baby girl. Davis observed the whole thing and reported it live via Twitter, drawing in hundreds of new followers in the process and captivating her audience. It was a compelling, emotional, suspenseful and hugely effective use of Twitter and a brilliant demonstration of how powerful a platform Twitter can be for the media, given the right story to tell.
