Online Journalism Blog

The superinjunction obtained by England Captain John Terry was overturned on Friday – and the case raises some interesting issues (cross posted from John Terry: another nail in the superinjunction coffin):

• Ecen when the superinjunction was in force, you could find out about the story on Twitter and Google – both even promoted the fact of Terry’s affair – via the Twitter trends list and the real-time Google search box.
• No one got the difference between an injunction and a superinjunction - the former banned reporting of Terry’s alleged affair, the latter banned revealing there was an injunction. They weren’t necessarily both overturned, but there was a widespread assumption you could say what you liked about Terry once the superinjunction was overturned. This wasn’t necessarily the case …
• The Mail and Telegraph seemed to flout the superinjunction – as did the Press Gazette which decided if wasn’t bound as it hadn’t seen a copy. This seemed risky behaviour legally – which makes me wonder if the papers were looking for a weak case to try to discredit superinjunctions.
• This superinjunction should never have been granted. What was the original judge thinking?

Google and Twitter ignored the superinjunction

Tweets from while the superinjunction was in force

The superinjunction was overturned at about 1pm or 2pm on Friday. Needless to say, the papers had a field day over the weekend. [Read more]

Has anyone pointed out the workings of Google Scholar to Rupert Murdoch? He’s going to have a fit when he finds out (first published here) …

Imagine if Google offered a deal like this to news publishers (as you’ll have guessed, this is exactly how Google Scholar works):

• Where content is behind a paywall, Google will index it all and include it in its web results even if searchers who click through to the page are then told they can’t read the story without subscribing.
• Google will work out which is the authoritative source of a story and show that – so newspapers breaking exclusives get priority over bloggers etc.
• Google won’t differentiate these results in any way – searchers will think they’re going to see the content they can see in the Google results, but actually they’ll hit a paywall.

As I say, that’s exactly how Google Scholar works – but it’s not a deal that Google’s offering to newspapers [Read more]

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:

• July to August growth: 17%
• August to September growth: 17%
• September to October growth: 13.1%.
• October to November growth: 8.3%
• November to December growth: 6.6%

The detail

These accounts had 1,801,044 followers on November 2nd (ignoring one FT account that has been shut). On December 2nd they had 1,919,770 followers in total.

Of the 118,726 increase, 76,812 or 65% was for the @guardiantech account (which benefits from being on Twitter’s suggested user list).

As ever, you can see the figures for each account here. (And yes, sorry about no Scottish ones. I’ll redo the list soon, honest).

The Sun is running a despicable campaign against Gordon Brown. But I’ve analysed the comments on its website – and readers disagree with its stance by a ratio of more than 3 to 2 (on top of which, there are now accusations that the Sun is censoring pro-Brown comments).

The paper has exploited the grief of Jacqui Janes over her son Jamie’s death in Afghanistan to attack the PM – because his handwritten letter of condolence was supposedly disrespectful due to sloppy writing and (disputed) spelling errors.

It’s loathsome journalism that ignores the effect of his disability (the PM is blind in one eye).

And it seems Sun readers are mostly on the Prime Minister’s side.

Of the 100+ comments on the story (don’t worry, I’ve nofollowed those links) when I checked, 111 expressed a view for or against Jacqui Janes or Gordon Brown (the rest commented on other issues or corrected people’s spelling errors). Of these:

• 42 were anti Gordon or pro the Sun’s stance.
• 69 were pro Gordon or anti the Sun’s stance.

So that’s more than 60% who don’t agree with the Sun, and less than 40% who do.

Sample comments from those who agree with the Sun’s stance

Some comments from those opposing it

Conclusion

The Sun is channeling this woman’s grief into a personal attack on the Prime Minister.

It’s refusing to make allowances for his disability (maybe we could next attack the war wounded for being workshy benefit scroungers?).

And it’s facilitating her breaking data protection laws by releasing a recording of a private phone call.

The whole thing is sickening – let’s hope that observing its readers’ reactions will lead to an end to this (not that this happened in the Jan Moir case) – and preferably prosecution of the Sun over the data protection offence. What’s more, Daily Mail readers are pro Brown, too. The Sun has got this badly wrong.

The Guardian has changed its user-generated comment system – moving from a client-side system to a server-side one. (This story was first published here, where you can read a bit more of the background.)

With the old system, once you loaded a story, some javascript would go off and look up readers’ comments and display them. This wasn’t terribly accessible – if you couldn’t or didn’t run javascript, you couldn’t see the comments.

It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn’t run the javascript (so couldn’t see the comments). And if your mobile didn’t run javascript (like mine), you couldn’t read the comments either.

With the new system, the comments are just part of the web page, like all the rest of the text.

This is a great change by the Guardian, and not before time. Google has already started to index the text of comments, as this search for some text I left as a comment once shows.

If you notice any problems, they’ve asked you to point them out.

English national newspaper Twitter accounts continue to grow – but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I’m tracking:

• July to August growth: 17%
• August to September growth: 17%
• September to October growth: 13.1%.
• October to November growth: 8.3%

The detail

These 130 accounts had 1,801,811 followers on November 2nd, up by 137,568 from 1,664,243 on October 1. Of that increase, 95,007 (or 69%) was for the @guardiantech account (which benefits from being on Twitter’s suggested user list).

(NB the Telegraph has renamed its @TelegraphScienc account, so this month I’ve restated October’s figures to be for 130 accounts – I thought it had deleted it when I downloaded the latest figures.).

The biggest mover was @MirrorFootball, up 11 places to 81st (from 455 to 809 followers), suggesting the Mirror is finally making some use of Twitter (most of its other accounts are near the bottom – and only appear to have moved up a place due to the demise of the Telegraph’s Science account).

The full spreadsheet is here or you can see the iframe below.

Super injunctions – those that don’t just order a newspaper not to report something, but forbid it from reporting the existence of the reporting restrictions – are on the rise.

The Guardian has been served with at least 12 notices of injunctions that could not be reported so far this year, compared with six in the whole of 2006 and five the year before.

And Carter Ruck continue their kafkaesque moves to stop reporting about Trafigura and the Minton report (their latest attempt is to write to Parliament saying it can’t discuss the matter, at the same time as saying they’re not trying to forbid anyone reporting what Parliament discusses. That’s because there wouldn’t be anything to discuss).

So what does a super injunction look like? I’ve got hold of one – I obviously can’t say which and I’ve had to leave out the juicy bits. But here’s what it says. [Read more]

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.

What’s more, 151,555 of the increase (or 78% of the total) is down to just one account – that of @guardiantech (which owes its popularity to its place on the Twitter Suggested User List). Indeed, of the 131 accounts I’m tracking, 51 have fewer followers than me (@malcolmcoles)!

You can see the full table here, or below (although the iframe isn’t behaving properly, so you’re better off clicking here).
[Read more]

I’ve pointed out that parents using Google to research the cervical cancer jab (in the tragic wake of a schoolgirl’s death) see a mass of negative and inaccurate information linking her death to the vaccine.

She died of an unrelated tumour. But Google’s results will give parents second thoughts about letting their daughters be vaccinated, even though the injection will save hundreds of lives a year. You can help however.

YOU can help do something about this.

If you publish web pages …

Google’s results are influenced by two things -  links to a page, and the text that’s used to link.

So, please, if you can publish a web page (a blog, say), then link to these URLs:

• http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hpv-vaccination/Pages/Introduction.aspx
• http://www.immunisation.nhs.uk/Vaccines/HPV
• http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/09September/Pages/Cervical-cancer-vaccine-QA.aspx

Ideally, use text like cervical cancer jab or cervical cancer vaccine to link to those pages, like this: cervical cancer jab and cervical cancer vaccine and cervical cancer vaccine Q&A.

The more of us who link, the better in Google’s results these pages will do, counteracting the ill-informed scaremongering.

If you can tweet, or you have a friend with a blog

Why not publicize this plan? Tweet it or ask friends with blogs to add a link to the relevant NHS pages.

If you’ve already blogged about this

Already published something about this online? Why not go back to that post and add links to the NHS pages. If you’ve linked to a misleading news story in your outrage, add rel = “nofollow” to your link. That stops Google counting your link as a ‘vote’ for the page.

Look in the HTML view and change something like this:

<a href=”http://tabloid.com/misleadingstory”>cervical cancer jab</a>

to this:

<a href=”http://tabloid.com/misleadingstory” rel=”nofollow”>cervical cancer jab</a>.

At the moment, many angry bloggers link to the scaremongering tabloid stories, giving them a boost in google’s results. Adding nofollow like this will avoid this problem.

If you need any help

Leave a comment if you want some advice on the best way to help deal with this. You can see all my posts charting the history of this media scaremongering here.

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 (this is cross-posted from my blog).

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 death of a schoolgirl who had the vaccine the same day.

I’ve given each of the mainstream media an irresponsibility rating below – the Mail and Express are the worst scaremongers, followed by the Mirror and Times.

It’s calculated as follows:

• A headline suggesting a causal link between the vaccine and the girl’s death – there is no evidence of this so far, the two events just occurred on the same day: 20 points
• The use of a photo or words in the headline casting doubt on the safety of the vaccine itself (as opposed to, say, this being a one-off allergic reaction): 20 points
• Calls for the vaccine to be banned: 20 points
• No mention of how many lives the vaccine will save: 20 points.
• Separate comment piece doubting the safety of the vaccine, or emphasis of other stories about vaccine problems: 10 points
• Ill-informed user comments adding to the suggestion of unsafety. 10 points

Daily Mail: 90% irresponsible

Headline: First picture of girl, 14, who died after being injected with cervical cancer jab from ‘rogue batch’

• The headline suggests a causal link. It makes claims of a ‘rogue batch’ in quotes where the only use of those words in the story are the journalist’s own.
• It’s running a poll: “Should the cervical cancer vaccination be suspended”.
• There are a lot of figures about side effects – no mention of actual lives saved.
• The best rated comment is currently “Chemical experiments on our children.” The worst rated is “Many more deaths may occur without the vaccine to guard against HPV.” The comments section is appalling, frankly – full of ill-informed anti-vaccine scaremongering.

Express: 80% irresponsible

Headline: Girl, 14, dies after taking cervical cancer vaccine [Read more]