iDosing is the made up internet craze where teenagers download digital drugs in the form of MP3 sound files and get high. Or something. I’m not making it up – the Sun and the Mail have reported it. The Mail got there first by an hour or so.
Now compare and contrast the reporting …
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The Sun decided last week to run a story about the rumours circulating about Steven Gerrard. I don’t know what Gerrard’s lawyers made of this story but they might want to have a word with Google. If you get as far as typing Steven Gerrard into Google News, the auto complete function throws up this list …
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I’m not quite sure why the Sun runs Sun Vote as it just ignores it (EG when its readers aren’t that fussed over a hung parliament). But its own on-site poll from last night about who won the debate (and unlike other sites, these aren’t easy polls to vote in – you have to go through a lengthy sign-up process) reveals that Clegg won.
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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.
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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.
Read the full post ...The Information Commissioner’s Office says recording phone calls is nothing to do with it.
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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.
Read the full post ...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.
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As well as the Sun misjudging its readers’ mood over Gordon Brown’s handwritten letter, Daily Mail readers also seem to be sympathetic to the Prime Minister.
The best rated comments on its story are those with sympathy for the PM. The worst rated are mostly criticising him.
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The Sun is running a pretty despicable campaign against Gordon Brown – and the majority of its readers don’t agree with the paper’s stance if its website comments are anything to go by.
Read the full post ...Newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I’m tracking. October to November growth was just 8.3%.
Read the full post ...June 2009 saw the Mail Online unexpectedly overtake both the Guardian and Telegraph in the ABCes, partly on the back of US traffic and Michael Jackson stories.
Fast forward to September and the story is the same as earlier in the year – Guardian first, Telegraph second and Mail third. So what’s changed? To find out, I’ve compared the ABCe figures for UK and foreign visitors in June and in September. The difference between the Guardian’s performance and that of the Telegraph and Mail is revealing.
Read the full post ...National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October – an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).
The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.
Read the full post ...I posted yesterday about the shameful reporting of the tragic death of a girl who died on the same day as getting the cervical cancer vaccine – and how, without any evidence of a link, the papers were giving the impression that the vaccine, which will save hundreds of lives a year, is unsafe.
So, how are the papers covering the news that, as the BBC news site puts it in its 3rd most important story “Cancer jab ‘unlikely’ death cause: A girl who died shortly after being given a cervical cancer vaccine had a ’serious underlying medical condition’, an NHS Trust says”?
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The UK media have learned nothing from the debacle over the MMR vaccine – where they relentlessly covered stories doubting the safety of MMR, putting the lives of children at risk.
They are continuing their habit of undermining public-health initiatives with their latest scare story about the safety of the cervical cancer jab, after the tragic [...]
National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).
You can see the September figures in the table.
Read the full post ...Instead of lambasting the BBC for the “chilling” effect of its online activities, and blaming the problems of online news sites on the BBC “dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market”, News Corp chief James Murdoch should thank the BBC for all the traffic it sends his way.
The BBC is responsible for about 870,000 visitors a month to Times Online and 1.1 million to thesun.co.uk (see methodology, below).
Read the full post ...The Guardian has more bookmarks on Delicious than any other UK newspaper according to Quarkbase. There are nearly 11,000 bookmarks for the Guardian, with the Times in 2nd (3,944) and the Independent 3rd (3,196).
Read the full post ...I’ve written a guest post for econsultancy, entitled: Murdoch CAN charge for content online, but can anyone else?
Read the full post ...There are more than 100,000 citations on Wikipedia that reference the Guardian – more than twice as much as any other UK national newspaper. The FT is way down the list – barely higher than the Sun.
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