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

• The story, illustrated with a picture of someone being vaccinated, says the death comes after “months of concern over the vaccine”.
• It quotes a “campaign group for safe vaccinations” calling for immediate withdrawal of the vaccine.
• Terrible, irresponsible journalism. I hope the two journalists, Natalie Fahy and Sara Dixon, are ashamed of themselves.

The Mirror: 60% irresponsible

Headline: 14 year old girl dies after cervical cancer jab

• The Mirror’s story is fairly short. The headline suggests a causal link, but the story is fairly balanced although the number of lives saved isn’t given.
• However, the story is described as ‘jab death’ on the Mirror home page. Given we are talking about a young girl’s death, this is tabloidese at its most nauseating.

Independent: 50% irresponsible

Headline: Teenage girl dies after cervical cancer jab

• The headline suggests a causal link, although the story makes clear there isn’t one. It doesn’t say how many lives the vaccine will save, however.
• One of the two user comments (from someone who is clearly deluded about the media’s position) says: “In my opinion vaccinations are NOT benign & injecting our children with 35 different vaccinations before the age of 5 is very foolish. The media are complicit in the ‘vaccinations are perfectly safe’ mantra.”

The Sun: 40% irresponsible

Headline: Girl, 14, dies after cervical cancer jab

• Again, a causal link is suggested by the headline, although the story is fairly balanced, even though it doesn’t mention the number of lives saved.
• The user comments are restrained and even, can I say, thoughtful.

Times: 30% irresponsible

Headline: Schoolgirl dies after being given cervical cancer jab

• The headline suggests a causal link, even though the story makes it clear there isn’t one established. The piece is, however, fairly factual about the benefits and risks.
• However, the story is linked to another case where a girl suffered a mystery illness after the jab, with the mother claiming there is ‘a serious problem with these injections’.
• There is one comment that says: “What is in this vaccine as they never say?? The h1n1 vaccine has squalene and mercury in it FACT !! This causes cancer and brain damage and the government have made the makers immune to prosecution WHY??”. Another comment from a father whose daughter has developed pre-cancerous cells age 14 says “The press are attributing the tragic death of this young girl to the HPV vaccine. Scare mongering and speculation. It is for the coroner to determine the cause of death not Fleet Street. I wouldn’t wish our last year on my worst enemy, so please parents, don’t let this tragic incident cloud your judgement, sign the consent forms.”
• I’ve edited this to make the Times only 30% irresponsible (rather than the original 50%) as it also ran a piece called “Benefits of cervical cancer vaccinations will far outweigh the risks“.

The Guardian: 30% irresponsible

Headline: Schoolgirl dies after cervical cancer vaccination

• Despite this headline, the Guardian story makes it clear that there is no link yet between the vaccine and her death, and points out its benefit.
• However, it has run a separate comment piece claiming ‘confidence will plunge if no answer is found’. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy if the media report the story like this.

Telegraph: 20% irresponsible

Headline: Tributes to 14-year-old schoolgirl who died after being given cervical cancer jab

• The headline suggests a causal link, but otherwise the story is fair and mostly concentrates on reaction to the young girl’s death.

If you’re all appalled by this as me, why not vote in the Daily Mail’s poll to keep the vaccine program going? Or you can follow me on Twitter.

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The Guardian has more URLs bookmarked on Delicious than any other UK newspaper, as I first revealed here (with the original video here)

There are 10,914 Guardian URLs bookmarked, with the Times coming 2nd (3,944) and the Independent in 3rd place (3,196).

Quarkbase must be using the Delicious API but it doesn’t say where it gets the number. Click the papers’ name to see the Quarkbase figures (and more).

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Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa. But 62.8% of users look at just one page (figures originally posted here).

In terms of daily page views per user, the Sun (4 pages), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) are above average. Visitors to the Mail site look at just 2.4 pages a day – so while the Mail may have come top in the July ABCe figures, maybe its large number of overseas visitors aren’t staying to look round the site.

Stickiness of UK newspaper sites

• Better than average figures are in bold.
• The bounce rate is the percentage of visits that consisted of just one page (so a low number is good).
• These figures are 3-month averages. These change on a daily basis at Alexa – so they may have altered slightly by the time you check. Click the papers’ names to see the current data.
• The overall average at the bottom is a simple average – it has not been weighted by traffic.

Page views vs bounce rate

The table is ranked by daily page views per user. The bounce rate is another measure of stickiness. It doesn’t exactly correlate with page views, as papers may have differing proportions of loyal, engaged users who visit lots of pages. The more pages that these users visit, the better the page view figure – but they won’t affect the bounce rate.

The Telegraph has a worse bounce rate than the sites near it in the table, perhaps because the great success with its Digg tool doesn’t always lead to multi-page visits?

Using Alexa data

There are issues with using Alexa data like this as it underrepresents UK users, who may have differing usage patterns to other visitors. However, as it seems to underrepresent them more or less equally, the rankings should be OK even if the absolute figures are all out by the same margin.

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Update, 2 days later: Paul lets me guest post here (ie I wrote this, not him). It was going fairly well until I wrote this post … You can read my climbdown here…

The latest subscriber figures (see table below, and first published in my blog’s newspapers category) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds – and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.

(You can read some of the defences of RSS here and here)

The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.

And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.

Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).

Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.

The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK …

Top 3 RSS feeds at each newspaper

They didn’t all have three that showed up (full table here) …

Switch to Twitter instead

I suggest newspapers switch to Twitter instead. Twitter’s advantages over RSS include:

• Wheat vs chaff As a reader, you can see which stories other people are retweeting and so are likely to be of interest.
• Context There’s space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline (well, there is for those that have got it and don’t just stick the first few words of the standfirst after the headline).
• Promotion Followers can RT newspaper stories, promoting the paper – they can’t do this with elements of an RSS feed.
• Tracking Stories’ development can be tracked on Twitter – you can’t usually tell what’s changed in an RSS feed.
• Conversation You can take part in a conversation on Twitter. People only talk to their RSS feed when they swear at it. The journalists behind the story can tweet, too.

Newspapers agree with me …

As I say, despite poor subscriptions for many feeds, papers pump out RSS feeds as if there’s no tomorrow – the second column in the table shows how many feeds (rounded) that each paper has.

But despite this, it’s clear some papers agree with me – and have already given up on RSS feeds and no longer actively promote them.

No visibility

The Mail, despite its 160-odd feeds, only mentions them in its footer.

The same is true of the Sun.

On the page but hardly visible

The FT’s RSS link does at least have a logo – but its buried at the bottom of the right hand column on each page.

The Telegraph shows relevant RSS feeds on pages – but they’re buried in a different way: above a banner ad that no one will ever look at.

Even the Guardian, which lets you mash up your own RSS feeds (hence the 000,000s in the table), hides details of its feeds under an unusual term ‘webfeed’ in the far right of its header.

The Times still has an RSS link in its main header menu on its news page. On other pages its’s at the bottom. And it mentions Twitter on its pages much more than RSS.

Visible – but not doing them any good

The Independent is alone in listing RSS feeds on its main category pages – although that doesn’t seem to get it many subscribers.

The Mirror has an RSS link next to its search box, although it took me ages to find it. Does this count as visible – it’s not exactly intuitive …

And the Express has a link and a logo prominently in its header. But as the express doesn’t update its website often (or at all on sunday), I guess that’s why no one subscribes. And some of its RSS feeds appear to be garbage – check out this theatre one …

Caveats about the data

After you’ve started writing something about newspapers, you’ll eventually discover that Martin Belam has already written about it. Having just noticed his Top 75 British newspaper RSS feeds (written before the recent explosion in Twitter use) as I was researching Google Reader’s market share, I figured I’d just repeat his caveats about his own data as they apply to mine too:

• Subscribers don’t necessarily ever read anything.
• Numbers quoted by Google vary wildly.
• Google Reader has a large market share but there are other readers.
• Newspapers have problem with the same feed on different URLs. To quote Martin: “If the papers themselves can’t work out how to set one canonical URL for their content, why should I?”
• Google Reader search is not great. There may be mising feeds.

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Express.co.uk is about to undergo a redesign (and there’s a good review of the new look, still currently in beta, at econsultancy).

To me, the new site isn’t that impressive (screenshot below, or you can compare the old front page or new front page) – it looks like a poor mashup of the BBC and Yahoo in the existing colour scheme.

Even worse, it’s not very accessible as there is literally no content on the new home page with javascript turned off.

The agency behind it is Netro42 who say here about the old version that “Netro42 working in partnership with Northern and Shell quickly established that the key to success was in wholly utilising the digital space.”

Personally, I like to partially use the analogue space when working on websites, but I may be old fashioned.

I wonder if the new design means they’ll update their site on a sunday? Or get some better suggested search terms?

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2 weeks ago the Scottish Sunday Express led with this cover story (PDF) on how the survivors of the Dunblane massacre were turning 18 and – shock, horror – drinking and making rude gestures. Reporter Paula Murray, it seemed, had “managed to inveigle her way into a Facebook friendship with teenagers from the town and write a salacious piece about their “antics”, based on information culled from their profiles.” You can read it in full here (text) and also here (PDF). The original was quickly taken down.

So far, so middle market. But what happened next was an abject lesson for the Express – and Paula – in how things have changed for journalists who will do anything for a ‘story’.

Of course, “the blogosphere erupted” as some newspapers reported (as if this was some fringe). That included comedy writer Graham Linehan, who wrote a wonderful post urging readers to take action:

“Clearly aware of the legal guidelines in place to protect those under eighteen against invasion of privacy (and the specific instructions that the Press Complaints Commission issued regarding the Dunblane children), she waited until they hit eighteen. Then she wrote this.”

His suggested actions included writing to the editorial director and publisher, joining a Facebook protest group and signing an online petition.

At the time of writing his post has had 173 comments, the Facebook protest group has over 6,800 members and the petition has had over 10,000 signatories.

Meanwhile there was extensive discussion on forums, Twitter, and more blogs.

Bloggerheads – who you may remember from their campaign against Daily Mail journalist Julie Moult – highlighted at length Paula Murray’s double standards in her own use of social media, including many images culled from her Facebook profile and Twitter account:

“In her attack on Dunblane survivors, Paula Murray castigated and demonised survivors of that tragedy who “boasted about alcoholic binges”, which is EXACTLY what she’s doing here.”

It also managed to find that the quote from an MP apparently condemning the teenagers’ behaviour were taken out of context.

And it supplied a list of Express advertisers to target.

Meanwhile, The Press Complaints Commission received over 30 complaints (60 according to Press Gazette) including 2 from those mentioned in the article.

The Express’ apology, for its size, is described by The Guardian as “strongly-worded”.

Bullshit.

It’s largely self-congratulatory: “It is 81 years since the first edition of this great newspaper rolled off the presses in Glasgow,” is the first line. The last is: “The Scottish Sunday Express is a big newspaper, with a long and illustrious history. We are also big enough to say we are truly sorry.”

Big enough to say sorry, but not big enough to allow people to comment on the apology. The door is closed. Talk to the hand.

Big enough to say sorry, but not big enough to realise that the balance of power has shifted. Your readers are your distributors. Piss them off, and you have a distribution problem. 

Big enough to say sorry, but not big enough to learn from Liverpool’s boycott of The Sun, or the mistakes made in reporting the Virginia Tech tragedy.

If I was a senior staffer on the Scottish Sunday Express I’d see this as a distribution opportunity. I would open comments on the apology and respond to them myself. I might even give Paula Murray some quick training in online communication and point out that she would do well to engage herself.

I would use the apology to link to the Facebook group and online petition to show that we were aware of them. I would also visit that Facebook group and apologise there.

I would visit as many forums and blogs as I can and apologise again.

And I would follow up and address responses to my apology that raise reasonable points I can respond to.

I would not entrust this to a PR company or marketing department, or to a junior member of staff. Because this is about distribution – and you wouldn’t entrust a negotiation with TNT to a PR person would you?

Start learning. Start talking.

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Which comes first? A newspaper’s agenda or its readers’ interest in those subjects? The search suggestions at Express.co.uk give a revealing insight into either what its readers are searching for or what the Express wants them to be interested in.

The screenshot below, first published on this blog, is a photomontage of the search box on the Express site. Every time you reload the Express search page, a different ‘example search’ is shown. The list seems to suggest a certain editorial agenda …

The 15 examples shown here are: anorexia, abortion, muslims, big ben, recipe, bnp, friends provident, apprentice, floods, care homes, immigration, binge drinking, lottery, Madeleine McCann, Liverpool FC. But there are many more to be found by reloading the search page (none of them terribly cheerful).

For more on search at the Express, check out this analysis of its top-10 searches box, revealing an ongoing obsession with the McCanns.

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I’m currently in the middle of a 3-week break from computers – in the meantime, here’s an article I wrote for Press Gazette the week before last, about the past year’s raft of newspaper website relaunches:

The last Luddite has left the building. With almost every national newspaper having revamped its website in the past twelve months, Richard Desmond has finally joined the club and relaunched Express.co.uk – and the Daily Star site is set to follow later in the year.

In an industry of technophobes, Desmond was the Piltdown Man of news. Before last week Express Newspapers’ only attempt to tackle the threat of the internet was to offer an ‘e-Edition’ of the Express and Star which amounted to little more than a PDF with animated pages.

But as his competitors launched MySpace-inspired sections and video-heavy offerings – and even resorted to lime green in their attempts to appear up-to-date – something had to give.

Still, it’s something of a watershed moment that sees Express journalists moving to a 24-hour reporting cycle, plans being made for online video and podcasts, and even web 2.0 elements such as blogging and social networking.

In reality, the new site looks like it was created by someone who has had a website described to him, but never actually seen one. The ‘blogs’ are actually opinion columns with nary a link to be seen, video is being outsourced, and online journalists will work separately from print hacks.

But it’s the move into social networking with ‘MYExpress’ that represents a quantum leap for this most reluctant of online newspapers. The service, which allows readers to create a personalised homepage, blog, and communicate with other users, has the potential to create a community of Disgusteds from Tunbridge Wells that may well represent the group’s cash cow.

So how did Richard Desmond – the man who sold the Express websites for £1 in November 2000 – come to join the rush online? And why the recent rush by national newspapers generally to give their sites a makeover?

Desmond can blame his rival Rupert Murdoch. It was he who, in 2005, warned the American Society of Newspaper Editors that unless his industry woke up to the changes brought about by new media they would be “relegated to the status of also-rans.”

Murdoch had sneezed, and the whole news industry began to catch a web fever.

The Times and Telegraph websites, which weren’t even in the top ten online news destinations, have since been overhauled and are making significant ground on leader The Guardian. Tabloids began to see that there was more to the web than monetising page 3 girls. And the middle market just worried about internet chatrooms.

Murdoch wasted no time in buying up promising web properties including, most spectacularly, MySpace, a property which was then cloned on The Sun’s ‘MYSun’ feature.

The Sun’s transformation has been most surprising of all – the reactionary paper has proved technologically progressive as the paper embraced video and virals, slideshows and podcasts, created blogs that actually understood the medium, and built a ‘Lite’ version of the paper for time-starved visitors. Perhaps most tellingly, the paper realised the web presented a window into the regional classifieds market. Oh, and we mustn’t forget the legendary video version of Dear Deirdre.

The Mirror, once again, has been left playing catch up. Its February redesign was ripped apart by many observers for a range of misjudged decisions ranging from buying in video content from the US (coverage of American Idol, anyone?) to the use of capital letters on the home page. The site has five sections – news, sport, showbiz, blogs, and… ‘more’ – a vagueness which perhaps gives some indication of a lack of direction behind the scenes.

Video has been a recurring theme throughout all newspaper website relaunches as ad sales departments realised they could tap into the television advertising market. The Mail has been no exception with its ‘showbiz video’ section, while a number of newspapers have bought in content from the likes of ITN and Reuters. And the ability to encroach on broadcasters’ territory without that pesky Ofcom to worry about has proved particularly useful for tabloid exclusives such as The Sun’s ‘friendly fire’ video and a range of NOTW stings.

The three major broadsheet websites have led the way in the use of blogs and podcasts, video and galleries. The Telegraph’s relaunch focused on the systems behind the site, building a multimedia ‘hub’ and training journalists to work across print and online, video and audio. But The Times’ makeover resulted in an all-singing site that belied its staid reputation and currently looks the most modern of national newspaper sites. The Independent plans a low-key revamp this year but for the most part has sat and watched from the sidelines like a kid waiting to be asked to join in the football game.

So where do the sites go from here? Last year The Guardian’s commentisfree raised the bar for newspaper blogs, while its Flash interactives remain a unique demonstration of the possibilities of new media. But a wholesale revamp is likely to be part of editor Alan Rusbridger’s planned £15m investment, while the move into television production with Guardian Films demonstrates that the group have ambitions beyond getting reporters to read out the day’s headlines: it has already brought dividends with a series of slots on prime time ITV News.

The Sun continues to innovate in the tabloid market, and the launch of a mobile edition suggests they understand the next big challenge for newspapers: if Desmond thought his work was done with new media, he’d better think again: the battleground is moving on.

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