The Media Blog

It's The Sun wot had to do it... eventually

The Sun today ran a front page picture of Prince Harry in the nude which has been circulating online since Wednesday. Even The Sun's own front page admitted the picture was one its readers, or at least any who care, will have "already seen on the internet":

Commenting online, many observers were quick to question why the paper would flag the degree to which print is lagging behind online on this story:

But the paper has justified its 'yesterday's news tomorrow' approach by saying the issue wasn't about really, really wanting to run a nudey pic of Prince Harry, but it had become about fighting for the very freedom of the press and public interest. It's making a stand, you see:

"We are publishing the photos because we think Sun readers have a right to see them..."

What they mean of course is "we think Sun readers have a right to see them... in The Sun" because by their own admission these pictures were not tricky to find elsewhere. 

"The images were first published on the web three days ago. But the Palace's lawyers, via the Press Complaints Commission, warned the UK's newspapers against printing them, claiming they would breach Harry's privacy and the PCC Code. 

"Since then the entire UK media has reported on them and told readers and viewers how to find them... By yesterday, the photographs were indisputably in the public domain... That generated a legitimate public debate about the behaviour of the man who is third in line to the throne and increasingly taking on official duties. Yet as that debate went on in homes, factories, offices and pubs, the Press were still effectively banned from using the pictures.

And who's looking out for all those people on the wrong side of Britain's digital divide who are being denied the basic human right of looking at nudey photos online? The Sun, that's who.

"It is absurd that in the internet age newspapers like The Sun could be stopped from publishing stories and pictures already seen by millions on the free-for-all that is the web.

"It was vital for us to run them."

Well I'm convinced. 

The Mirror meanwhile has used the story as an opportunity to make a bid for the moral high ground, claiming it stands by its decision not to publish the pictures:

"The Daily Mirror took the decision not to publish the pictures of Prince Harry because we would be in clear breach of the Press Complaints Commission's Editors' Code of Practice, regarding intrusion of privacy, which we signed up to and we stand by that decision."

Perhaps in a further dig at its rival, The Mirror also ran a story claiming that 12 million Brits had already seen the three-day-old pictures anyway. So who would waste a front page on a three-day old news story?

Obviously, The Mirror has still lead with a Prince Harry story today. It just didn't use the nudey pictures.

Racing Post joins the iPad app revolution

All national newspaper editors know their print circulations will rise and fall, driven by events in the outside world. Major events and 'slow news days' go with the territory. But no daily national newspaper plans for this more than the Racing Post, who this past week joined other major publishers in launching an iPad app.

Some may think it an unlikely innovator, their thinking clouded by images of old men in betting shops but the Racing Post is keen to ignore such narrow stereotypes and its publishing model can definitely benefit from embracing the flexibility of digital.

During the Cheltenham Festival in March or meetings such as Royal Ascot, the Derby or the Grand National the Racing Post will sell upwards of 120,000 copies. On weekdays, when racing is limited to more low-key meetings, it plans for around 40 to 50 per cent of that amount.

But with the cost of print increasing, catering for such fluctuations is an expensive and inexact science, especially when the weather can also affect sales by impacting the quality of racing. Launching an iPad app is a natural and sensible move.

This isn't the Racing Post's first foray into apps. Its free iPhone app has been downloaded more than 600,000 times since it launched in February 2010. The team behind the launch are confident in market research which suggests they have a digitally-engaged readership and hope a 30-day free trial of the app will encourage iPad owners to give it a go. Those who do sign up will get the first edition of the newspaper delivered every day by 8pm the previous evening, followed by the full edition by midnight.

It features the full newspaper content, including the race cards which are so central to the paper's popularity. The race cards are fully interactive, allowing readers to delve into the form of horses, jockeys and trainers at the tap of a finger:

      

The cards can also be customised so punters can sort the runners and riders by almost any criteria they choose, or they can double-tap to remove a horse altogether from their card and their thinking. All that information is easily mined and accessible also through a standalone database, where race fans and stattos can read full form and career records:

All in all the app is good. It works well and for readers of the paper it does everything you'd expect. But where this becomes most interesting to the wider media industry is with pricing.

The challenge with any app is getting the pricing right and getting people using it to a degree that really does mitigate the long term threats posed to print publications.

All newspapers have every day readers and occasional dippers, weekenders and once in a blue moon types. But the Racing Post is catering for a wide range of customers and unprecedented seasonal and sporadic buying habits. It hopes it has struck upon two options which will appeal to customers. After the 30-day free trial period is over there is a £24.99 per month or a £1.99 per edition option.

The £24.99 may appeal to some of the people who read the Racing Post every day of the year, such as owners; trainers; breeders; jockeys; agents; racecourse staff; racing broadcasters; bookmakers and professional gamblers.

But for the rest of its customers, who might buy the Racing Post rarely or at weekends or only during the major festivals, the £1.99 is the only option. The price represents a healthy reduction on the £2.50 weekend cover price. It also offers total flexibility with none of the risk of signing up long-term and not getting full value from the app.

The fact there is no middle ground however is interesting. That might have been a 40, 50 or 75 issues per year option for example, paid for upfront at a further per-edition discount. These could be tailored to cover the major flat or jumps racing festivals or Saturday editions. The appeal of such a half way house to publishers is that it could lock readers in for longer and give the app a better chance of becoming an established part of their readers' media consumption habits.

The team behind the launch admit there is more to come. The free Racing Post iPhone app has an integrated betting platform which at this stage has not been included in the iPad app in order to speed it past Apple's app store gatekeepers. That functionality will surely come in time, as should some social media integration which is currently missing.

Sadly the one thing which can never be integrated is a foolproof way of telling you which horses are going to win.

Spot the ball...

A bit of a cock up has been spotted on the Premier League website - it features a photo of former Spurs player Vinny Samways evading the tackle of Wimbledon's Warren Barton...in more ways than one. (Spotters badge Andy Halls):

Top 10 Media Blog posts: July 2009 – July 2012

The Media Blog today turns three years old (hence all the childish humour and occasional tantrums). Over that time a lot of ground has been covered in more than 1,200 blog posts but it's some of the quirkier posts that have typically taken off with readers. That is certainly reflected in the 10 best-read posts from the past three years...

1. No!…no!…no!…no! That'll be the Liverpool Echo, with arguably one of the worst page layouts ever witnessed in the rich history of massively inappropriate headline, picture, caption and story clashes. 

2. The BBC wrestles with social media: You know that moment when you accidentally set your development website live, complete with insults about your readers? Yeah, that…

3. Daybreak viewers get easily confused: The fact Daybreak viewers get confused by ITV +1, to the point they contact the programme via Twitter to tell them their clock is wrong – every single day – has provided hours of amusement. It all started with this post.

4. The wrong Steve Jobs: There are so many spoof Twitter accounts, including a fake Steve Jobs who famously fooled the Daily Mail...

5. A Twitter riot: If the internet has always been good for one thing then it is surely 'blaming stuff on'. Last summer that meant the Daily Mail blaming the London riots on Twitter.

6. "A**e!": Some over-officious censorship at Virgin Media saw all sorts of words getting the asterisk treatment.

7. Newspapers clash off-the-ball: While England and Sweden battled it out on the pitch to decide who was marginally more qualified to get knocked out at the Quarter Final stage of Euro 2012, the two countries’ newspapers fought it out in a series of spoof front pages.

8. Well somebody had to say something: This open letter to the BBC was an attempt to restore some much needed perspective to the debate about the Corporation’s coverage of the Jubilee. Only one person on Twitter didn’t get the joke.

9. Penguins will make kids gay: Over the past three years the Daily Mail has provided more fodder for The Media Blog than any other newspaper, including some odd views on penguins.

10.  When captions attack: The BBC graphics team have given us a few laughs over the years, but this one will take some beating. 

A tale of two Colins...

Here's some movie trivia for you: Colin Firth, star of The King's Speech and Colin Farrell, star of In Bruges and Phone Booth aren't actually the same person, whatever the Daily Mail would have you believe: 

(Hat tip Karen Krizanovich)

Confused yet...?

The beauty of a great headline is that it needs no explanation, it leaps out at you and grabs your attention. But Daily Mail readers could be forgiven for needing a pencil and paper and a copy of Who's Who to fathom this triple decker effort:

(Hat tip David Walsh)

Mail admits to "gratuitous" eye-candy

I wonder if somebody at the Daily Mail got told off for the high number of 'Write caption here' style captions which litter its website. I only ask because it seems the Mail has decided upon a new house style for their holding text:

(Hat tip Helen.)

Giles Coren: Not good with criticism

Is the irascible Giles Coren getting a bit less verbose with age? Back in 2008 Coren used over 1,000 words to castigate The Times' sub-editors by email. But now, with Twitter the default medium for all it seems Coren gets to the punch a little more directly.

It's also safe to say he doesn't take criticism well: 

What a charmer.

While the criticism aimed at Coren was obviously unwelcome and a little rude, by the knockabout standards of Twitter and the frank barbs Coren can certainly dish out to others it was closer to constructive feedback than wanton trolling. Coren's response meanwhile is vile by anybody's standards.

Discussing his comments with another tweeter, Coren explained:

"some people think twitter is a device to be rude to people they don't know. i won't stand for that."

Clearly. Unless it's done in the name of brattish retaliation.

Mail Online editor forgot to flush

Martin Clarke the editor of the Mail Online today told the Leveson Inquiry that a combination of "Human error and over-zealousness" was responsible for an infamous article which wrongly stated that Amanda Knox had failed in her appeal against a murder conviction.

Clarke said: 

"There were three mistakes... the first one other people made as well which was they misunderstood a verdict being given in Italian."

He's right, there were a number of outlets which made the same mistake and jumped the gun. But the Mail's mistake was arguably made more memorable because it wasn't just the verdict they got wrong. The Mail Online ran an account of how Knox looked "stunned" when the verdict was read out and went on to claim:

"As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears...Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that 'justice has been done' although they said on a 'human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail'... Following the verdict Knox and Sollecito were taken out of court escorted by prison guards and into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail near Perugia and him to Terni jail, 60 miles away."

None of which happened of course, though Clarke explained this as a failure of process, telling the Leveson Inquiry:

"The second error was we had prepared what in newspaper parlance is called a 'set and hold' ...where you'd have copy ready to roll. That should never have gone out until it had been checked against what actually happened."

The third leg of this unfortunate shambles was a failure to hide the evidence. Clarke said:

"The third error was once we had killed the story we should have done something technical called flushing the cache which would have cleared the story from the internet."

Don't you hate it when people don't flush properly.

Do not publish do not publish do not publish...

ITV News are getting plenty of plaudits and have set Twitter alight with revelations this evening about how much certain newspapers paid for sensitive personal information on individuals. It's well worth a read. But does the URL of the article suggest somebody jumped the gun on publishing this particular exclusive?

(Hat tip: @Labecker36)

The Mirror crack'd

Congratulations to the team at The Mirror who have clearly worked hard to launch a new-look website this morning. And hats off to them for some refreshing honesty when the new-look site promptly fell over quicker than a reality TV star stepping out of a nightclub. Not for them the bogus claims of "essential maintenance" or "planned downtime". The Mirror reports:

"A brilliant new-look Mirror website was launched early this morning ... and then, as is traditional in digital publishing, promptly crashed."

Daily Mail hacked, accused of "hateful slurs"

Visitors to the Daily Mail's recipe pages today have been confronted with a message left by hackers who defaced and disabled the site. Hackers calling themselves TeaMp0isoN left a message criticising the Mail for "borderline racist propaganda...hateful slurs... and lying to the British public":

Last year The Sun's website was hacked and a fake story posted about the death of proprietor Rupert Murdoch.

(Hat tip @Glinner and @DrMikeReddy)

Such modesty from the Daily Mail...

This week saw the Daily Mail's website claim top spot among the world's newspapers. Critics may call it a victory for quantity over quality, but top spot is top spot. And what does the Mail attribute this success to?

Drawing upon the strengths of the Daily Mail newspaper...MailOnline has re-invented popular journalism for the digital era.

Now this is where the Mail is being far too modest. The runaway success of the website owes very little to piggy-backing on "the strengths of the newspaper".

The newspaper's success is based on targeting a very specific audience. It writes for the predominantly white, middle-aged, middle class of middle England, pushing a news agenda intended to create, then exploit fears about health scares, hoodies, liberals and the impact of multiculturalism. The paper's parochialism is the reason it is successful. It is also the reason it is so loathed.

At the last count, the Daily Mail's parish was around 1.9 million strong.That's a lot of readers but it goes no way towards explaining the current success of the Mail's website. Not least because the MailOnline has taken a completely different approach to finding readers.

It set about attracting readers by following the agenda of others, rather than trying to set its own. It is dedicated to serving content people were already searching for online. As such, much of the success of the Daily Mail website is the result of a focus on US reality TV, celebrity, pop music and naked flesh. Lots and lots of naked flesh: 

Of course the newspaper content does make it onto the website but clearly the focus for growth is not on the paper's traditional constituency or content. After all, how many readers of the Daily Mail newspaper know or care who Kim Kardashian is? Yet alongside Lady Gaga and Rihanna, Kardashian is an ever-present on the Daily Mail website.

And who is Snooki? I doubt she is the talk of the town among the Chipping Norton Rotarians yet she is a subject of some fascination for the Daily Mail's website team. 

Bikini photos

The real engine room of the Mail's online success is the picture desk. If somebody famous is spotted in public wearing a revealing dress or a bikini the pictures will be on the Daily Mail's website the next day.

If a model takes part in a shoot for a new line of lingerie or poses for a glossy magazine, the Mail will run the pics. If a celebrity falls out of a dress or reveals a little too much when stepping out of a car, a full upskirt or down cleavage record of the event will be available in the right hand column of the Mail's website:

How did we cope before the Daily Mail website began aggregating
every bikini photo ever taken of Kim Kardashian?

The Daily Mail's modesty no doubt prevents it from saying it has become the go-to online destination for pictures of famous ladies in tight dresses, bikinis and underwear, but it has aggressively and successfully cornered that market by flooding its website with content promising Google users that is exactly what they'll find. 

There is no denying the Mail's orchestrated success in courting pure online numbers and although it is a model which advertisers are less excited about now than they were in the dot-com boom of the late nineties, the Mail is clearly confident this remains a recipe for success.

Much of the web-only content is base commodity, aimed at drawing in any traffic it can, though the focus is clearly on the US. The majority of the photos are bought from picture agencies and the lion's share of the web-only copy is cut and pasted from US wire services. In fact, the prolific 'Daily Mail Reporter' is now cutting and pasting so much US wire copy - irrespective of how trite the news appears -they no longer bother trying to keep pace with changing US words such as 'sidewalk' or 'cell phone' to the English equivalents.

This may seem a small point, but for a newspaper to disregard its style guide - as crucial a part of its identity as the masthead - in pursuit of traffic is clear evidence its website and paper are being run as very different properties:

"This news story is about this interesting..."

None of these observations are intended as a criticism of the Daily Mail. It has set out to sell cheap commodity content based on titillation and US celebrities in various states of undress and it does it to great success. But the Mail really is being unnecessarily modest - or deliberately disingenuous - when it claims the runaway success of its website is an extension of its success in print. The two could hardly be more different and whatever it says, the Mail clearly wouldn't have it any other way.

See also:
Rihanna or the Queen: Who does the Daily Mail prefer?
Daily Mail criticises BBC nudity
Daily Mail exposes own readers to C-word tirade...

Media Blog Awards of 2011

Here are The Media Blog's very unofficial end of year awards...

'Scoop Of The Year' 2011:
The New Statesman wins one of the few honourable awards in this rundown of 2011's highs and lows for Hugh Grant's sting on former News Of The World journalist Paul McMullan (The Bugger Bugged, April 2011). Nick Davies' leg work over at The Guardian won him Media Hero Of The Year for 2011, but Grant's one article did much to take the phone hacking story to a whole new level. It was the second time Grant had met McMullan and the actor took advantage of an open invitation to visit McMullan's pub in Kent, when asked by New Statesman guest editor Jemima Khan to come up with some content for her issue. From the pictures below, it's clear which one was taken when Hugh Grant knew payback for the deeds of McMullan and his tabloid peers and employers was imminent:

 

The 'Non-Story Of The Year' 2011:
2011 was the year when the Daily Mail's pursuit of the BBC stretched as far as making up a story about a BBC-wide ban on the use of AD and BC dates. The Mail desperately flogged this particular dead horse over the course of multiple articles, to the embarrassment of all onlookers. 

 

The 'Media Blunder of the Year' 2011:
It's been a year of blunders but none was bigger or more widely relished than the Daily Mail publishing an entirely fictitious article about Amanda Knox losing her appeal against murder - the problem, Knox actually won her appeal and cleared her name. This minor detail didn't stop the Mail reporting:

Amanda Knox looked stunned this evening after she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction...As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.

None of which happened of course. 
Highly Commended: Exposure (ITV), BBC graphics department spices up the local news. 

 

The 'Phone It In' Award for Uninspired Editorship:
This year the Daily Star lead with Ryan Giggs on its front page on 14 consecutive days, with a story many people were tired of even before the papers were allowed to report it. Highly Commended: The Daily Express for its heavy rotation of "miracle cures", health scares and weather related 'news'.

The 'Johann Hari Award' for Misleading Readers 2011:
This year Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips truly excelled herself with an article about how penguins could turn children gay. She topped-up this level of apparent stupidity with her continued insistence that Muslims have made us all celebrate "Winterval" and perpetuating the nonsense about the BBC banning AD and BC. Highly Commended: Johann Hari. 

 

Hypocrite of The Year 2011:
Not content with being the editor of The Sun who presided over that paper's most hateful and hurtful dalliance with fiction, MacKenzie actually picked this year to start lecturing others about ethics. To add insult to injury he even claimed Rupert Murdoch was the real victim of the phone hacking scndal. Fortunately most people stopped listening to MacKenzie many years ago.

 

The 'Utter Nonsense' Award 2011:
Despite writing for a mature and well educated audience it seems The Telegraph still lives in fear of printing swear words that might offend its delicate readers. That's all well and good, of course until a story comes along about which swear words people can or can't say to the police. At that point the Telegraph published a story which claimed:

"Courts do not accept that police officers are caused harassment, alarm or distress by words such as ----, ----, -------, or ------." 

If you say so.

 

The 'My Eyes! My Eyes!' Award for Horror 2011:
If you ever wanted to be haunted by the image of Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones stealing sperm from a discarded condom and trying to inseminate herself on the bathroom floor, then November held a real treat in store. If however you're a well adjusted human being then it was probably one of the most awful things you've ever read. Highly Commended: The infamous dancing end credits from BBC's This Week. 

 

'TV Low Point of the Year' 2011:
Put Matthew Wright and Channel 5 together for any length of time and the end product is bound to be crass and awful, but at least relatively few people are watching. However, when Amanda Knox was cleared of murder and Wright decided to ask viewers if they'd still have sex with Knox - during a section called 'Foxy Knoxy: Would ya?" they managed to plumb an all new low: 

Highly Commended: Red Or Black, Channel 4 Athletics, Celebrity Big Brother.  

 

TV Presenter Of The Year 2011:
Matt Baker did a lot to raise money for Sport Relief this year but he will be best remembered as the presenter who asked David Cameron how he can sleep at night. Anybody who thinks this was scripted would do well to listen to Alex Jones, his co-presenter, and her sudden intake of breath when he asks the question:

 

The 'David Mitchell Award For Over-Saturation on TV:
Anybody channel hopping on a Friday or Saturday night could be forgiven for thinking some horrific accident had robbed Britain of all comic talent except for affable Geordie Sarah Milican. The only other explanation is that there is more than one Sarah Milican. Special Commendation: David Mitchell.

 

TV Ad of the Year 2011:
Nando's inspired, though slightly controversial advert featuring an array of dead dictators certainly got noticed around the world despite originally being made for the South African market:

Media Hero & Villain of 2011... revealed

It's time to reveal who Media Blog readers have voted as their Media Hero and Villain of 2011 - a year dominated by the issue of phone hacking.

 

Media Hero Of The Year:

1st: Nick Davies - The Guardian journalist was shortlisted for this award in 2009 when he first lifted the lid on phone hacking at the News Of The World. Since then he has worked tirelessly to uncover the full extent of a scandal which has been the dominant media story of 2011. It should be noted that during the voting period for this award Davies was criticised by News International employees past and present, after doubts emerged as to whether the News Of The World was indeed responsible for deleting certain voicemails from Milly Dowler's phone, as Davies had initially alleged. However, this criticism appears not to have affected the voting, not least because the point stood that Dowler's phone, along with many hundreds of others had been hacked by people acting for the News Of The World, as exposed by Davies.

2nd: Tom Watson MP - Watson has lead the charge in Westminster to make Rupert and James Murdoch answerable for the phone hacking scandal which took place on their watch.

3rd: Hugh Grant - Grant's extraordinary New Statesman article helped push the phone hacking scandal into the mainstream. The actor exposed the methods of News Of The World reporter Paul McMullan using a hidden dictaphone.

 

Media Villain Of The Year:

1st: Rupert Murdoch - As far as voters were concerned 'The buck stops here' for phone hacking, at the very top of the News International tree. Given the chance to give his side of the story in Westminster, Murdoch said "people I trusted let me down, and I think they betrayed the company", but the public clearly sees things differently and feels Murdoch must shoulder the blame for what happened at his company, carried out by people in his employ.

2nd: Rebekah Brooks - Brooks' initial refusal to resign and her attitude - described as "arrogant" during an angry exchange with staff - while the News Of The World died of shame did little to rescue a reputation inextricably linked with a period of scandal at News International.

3rd: James Murdoch - Murdoch Junior's defence appears to rely on his ignorance about much that took place at News International, including claims that he did not read in detail a key email which undermined the 'one rogue reporter' defence.

Telegraph in 'must blame the BBC' shocker

It's well known The Telegraph will bend over backwards to shoehorn criticism of the BBC into even the most tenuous of stories, but blaming the Beeb for editing Jonathan Ross's ITV chat show seems a stretch too far:

It's not like The Telegraph can claim it missed Ross's high profile departure from the BBC. They certainly wrote enough stories about it. (Hat tip David Walsh.)

See also:
Tim Minchin cries foul over ITV censorship

 

HMV blunder sparks X Factor 'fix' frenzy

When I started reading reports that Simon Cowell has 'fixed X Factor' I thought for a minute he might finally have sacked all the judges... But no, this latest conspiracy theory relates to HMV putting one contestant's 'Winner's Single' online for sale a full five days ahead of the live final:

HMV has said it was a technical error and that seems more plausible than the inevitable 'fix' allegations which arise each year. All three contestants will record a 'winning single' before the final and retailers will be preparing to sell hundreds of thousands of copies from the minute the result is known.

It seems highly likely that HMV just got a bit carried away entering all three into its website and managed to set one live.

I'm Benton Partridge...

Unless you've spent today hiding under a rock, you can't have failed to notice the fuss and furore around Benton the black labrador whose owner lost control of his dog in Richmond Park. Off his lead Benton went on to terrorise a herd of deer, while the commentary from Benton's panicked owner has become an online sensation that's been picked up latterly by the nationals - sparking a number of spin-offs (such as this from The Poke).

Another big story of the day has been Steve Coogan giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry... and mashing-up the two was just too, too tempting:  

BBC clears up Gok Wan 'plug' confusion

An article on the BBC website this morning about the curious fashion of earlobe stretching with wooden and plastic plugs included a sentence about Gok Wan which has stopped some readers in their tracks.

That line was quickly changed, perhaps to head-off suggestions being made on Twitter that it was anything other than a poorly written sentence:

(Hat tip: Penny Thomas)

Irony alert: Mail names and shames web troll

This blog has pointed out before the Daily Mail's inconsistent stance on 'internet trolls' - not least those who keep its own reader comments section ticking over and those it counts among its own staff, such as Jan Moir.

Today the Mail has named and shamed an alleged internet troll who they have clearly been doorstepping in recent days. The paper claims Geraldine Curtis has waged a campaign of abuse aimed at Welsh singer Katherine Jenkins, adding that this was all done from a "run-down home in South London" where Jenkins' detractor "lives alone".

The story has been top of the Mail's website all day, complete with pictures harvested from the Facebook page of Curtis.

While it's unclear exactly how much abuse was slung at Jenkins (the offending Twitter account is now deleted), a sample of comments suggest much of it was critical of Jenkins' appearance and singing ability, while some crueller comments referenced the death of Jenkins' father.

Of course it is disgusting that anybody should be targeted in such a way but is the Mail's coverage really proportionate to the importance of this story? And is the Mail really able to take the high ground on this issue?

Some of the Mail's own readers have pointed out the paper's double standards in reporting the issue of internet trolling. "Miss Curtis has said nothing online that I haven't read about Katherine Jenkins in the comments of [the Daily Mail] over the years," wrote one commenter.

"I'm sorry but I've seen worse said on these comments boards," added another.

Many other comments posted on the Mail's story include spiteful and offensive remarks about both Jenkins and her alleged "cyber bully" - ensuring the Mail meets its irony quotient for the day.

One commenter suggests: "Surely some of these comments on here are just cyber bullying as well."