Express confuses followers and following. Ha ha ha!
January 17, 2010
11 Comments
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 tens of 000s.
Express thinks following means follower.
It appears the Express has confused following and follower numbers.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Here's what they said:
The BBC Radio 2 site, which gathers messages, or “tweets”, from presenters such as Chris Evans, Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr, has no followers.
The BBC Radio 5 Live site, run by presenter Victoria Derbyshire, has just two.
Did they mean these accounts:
- http://twitter.com/onradio2now: 536 followers, but following 1 person
- http://twitter.com/vicderbyshire (Victoria Derbyshire): 3,639 followers, following 2 people.
Yes, they surely did. I wrote this morning that:
it makes it look like you don't know what you're talking about.
The original story. Clowns.
And they certainly don't.
Malcolm
Thanks. Minor point. I think the Radio 2 account they are referring to is actually this one. http://twitter.com/bbc_radio_2 which has around 13K followers. The onradio2now account isn't actually a BBC account but does uses data that we make freely available.
Jem Stone (I work for BBC Radio)
Jem: Thanks. I did see that one but wasn't sure of the difference. Thanks for explaining. I plumped for the one above to give them the benefit of the doubt - as it was following 1 person which seemed closest to the 0 they quoted (the official one you mention is following 160). If they did mean the official one, they were even more completely stupid as 160 does not equal zero either.
All in all, who knows what they meant as the whole piece was complete rubbish!
Oops meant to include this...There is a fuller list of Radio 2 related accounts here: http://twitter.com/BBC/radio2 and 5 Live related accounts http://twitter.com/BBC/radio5live
Super-embarrassing for them. That's what often happens when mainstream journalists write about online stuff.
OUCH.
Do journalists not do research anymore?
Is there no one checking facts?
As Toni says it is embarrassing but also reinforces the argument that you need to find information from creditable sources.
"Do journalists not do research anymore?"
The key here is "journalists": they actually had TWO journalists bylined on this story. You'd think one would be awake enough to realise they were talking rubbish ...
[...] who were making claims about the lack of interest in BBC presenters’ Twitter feeds had confused followers and following. And after highlighting this example of sloppy journalism, he added for good measure that there [...]
In this day and age there are journalists who still don't know what the difference is between following and follower?! And it's "citizen journalists" who end up getting called amateurs... Go figure.
[...] In summary, the Express published a story (since removed from their site), which claimed the BBC was publishing Twitter accounts with 0 or 2 followers. Malcolm Coles was quick point out that the two Express writers had managed to use the figures for the number accounts were Following instead of being Followed by. [...]
[...] the Express claimed it had ‘no’ followers, it seems it has well over 500. Were they confused between ‘followers’ and ‘following’ as Malcolm Coles asks? The second claim was that a Radio 5 Twitter feed run by Vic Derbyshire has just two followers. [...]