I got an email yesterday about what the Times will be offering once the paywall is up. Here's a screenshot of the main bit.

According to the Sun, a hung Parliament would be a disaster for Britain, while David Cameron "left his opponents reeling" in the second election debate.

The Sun's online polls tell a different story.

There was a story yesterday that the Express has been emailing SEOs selling links. I went over to the Express home page. And was fairly shocked to see it has a toolbar pagerank of just 4, which seems incredibly low for a newspaper site (er, it puts it on a par with my homepage toolbar pagerank!).

It definitely used to be higher than this.

Since the first TV election debate, Nick Clegg has started to be taken seriously by the newspapers (or else has been the victim of a series of hatchet jobs, depending on your point of view).

The charts how the number of stories about Nick Clegg has soared in The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Guardian - even allowing for the fact general election is on.

The News of the World has trumpeted a poll of mums claiming Cameron is "storming" into the lead. The figures show the opposite of this - read my dissection of the stats over at The Media Blog.

Johnston Press is dropping the paywall on its local papers, with the number of subscribers said to be in single figures. People have already started to draw conclusions from this.

However, my view is that the Johnston Press experiment tells us precisely nothing about anything. The reason? Johnston Press had implemented its paywall in the worst way possible. All you can learn from this is that a paywall that makes no attempt to sell the content won't sell any subscriptions.

Adam Sherk recently pointed out that Twitter drives less than 1% of traffic to US newspaper and magazine sites (but noted that this still makes it "a top 25 referrer for all the [10 sites he asked] and top 10 referrers for most").

Trying my luck somewhat, I asked people from the three largest UK newspaper sites (the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Guardian) what their figures were.
* For the Mail, under 0.5% of their referrer traffic is from Twitter.
* For the Telegraph, 0.5% of global traffic and 0.25% of uk traffic currently comes from twitter.
* For the Guardian, 0.4% of their page impressions in February came from Twitter.

I've blogged about Jan Moir and the PCC over at libdemvoice.org. Why not read it and leave a comment? Here's a taste:

Second, the PCC is excusing what she wrote on the grounds that someone else had said it already. On this basis, newspapers can justify any factual inaccuracy as long as someone else said it first. What was Cowley supposed to do, track down the first journalist to wrongly claim Gately died alone and complain about them only?

The Guardian reports that the PCC has rejected all the complaints (more than 25,000) about Jan Moir's article about Stephen Gately.

As it's late, I shall limit myself to comparing the reported ruling with the original article ...

The Press Complaints Commission is on Twitter. It tweets when it arranges for a correction or clarification to be made. Which lets us see how much prominence they are given when they're published.
Today, it tweeted:
The ...

John Terry's been "nobbing" Wayne Bridge's girlfriend as one of the edits on Wikipedia puts it. Terry got a superinjunction forbidding publication of this story - and of the fact that there was an injunction. ...

I pointed out this morning that the Express was talking utter rubbish claiming that the BBC was keeping up twitter accounts with 0 or 2 followers. The real numbers were in the 000s.

It appears the Express has confused following and follower numbers. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Dear the Express. Please look at the right twitter a/cs when discussing the BBC's followers. That is all.

NewsNow revealed this morning that it's heard that News International will soon be blocking NewsNow from crawling The Sun's site - just as it has done with the Times.

This has now happened, as the Sun's robots.txt file shows.

I wrote yesterday that I was sympathetic towards NewsNow and its ongoing row with newspapers, especially the Times. I've now decided that I'm not.

NewsNow crawls the Times site in order to gather information for its paid service to businesses.

I am sympathetic towards NewsNow over the newspapers attempts to block it linking to them. The site has been blocked from showing Times Online stories. But I think it's campaign is a little overblown:

Tanya Gold has written some anti-iPhone drivel in the Guardian. I'm not going to link to it or its 17 questions. (Nothing to say? Why not ask lots of questions? Is that a good idea?)

But wait. What's that in the advertising slots on the page? Oh, yes, an advert for the Guardian's iPhone app.

Ever wonder which of the Express's obsessions it's most obsessed by? Here's what the archive search tells us ...

If Murdoch wants to put the Sunday Times or the Sun behind a paywall but still wanted Google to index his content, he would have to join first-click free.

If he decides the Sun is really the Wapping News Journal and joins Google Scholar, then the rules would be different. He could have his content indexed without having to let anyone see it unless they paid a subscription. On top of which, Google would give his content priority if was the original source of a story.

UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow - but the rate is getting slower and slower, according to the latest figures for the 129 accounts I'm tracking. November to December growth was just 6.6%, down from 17% earlier in the year.