currybetdotnet Daily Express archive
Now scientists say "Stop reading the Daily Express to enjoy a longer life"!
From the "D,ho! The irony" files. In recent weeks the Daily Express has bought us front pages like this. Yet today, on page 3, they tell us that 'being happier' is the secret to a longer life. And so it seems like stopping reading all the miserable doom-mongering in the Daily Express might make you live longer......
With professionals of this quality, who needs 'citizen journalist' enemies?
It is hard to argue that ethics and quality set the 'professional journalist' apart from the amateur blogger or 'citizen journalist', when newspapers persist in publishing professionally produced articles, like the Sunday Express 'exposure' of the BBC use of Twitter, which are so wrong that they have to be swiftly deleted.
So was it the Express or The Sun that 'saved' the England game?
I suggested earlier in the week that as part of the marketing operation, the UK's national newspapers might be giving digital sports rights agency Perform an easy ride over their decision to make England's World Cup game with Ukraine available only via pay-per-view Internet streaming. I didn't realise that some of them would be promoting their non-exclusive involvement in an affiliate selling scheme as if it was God's own gift to the England football fan. I'm sure Geoff Marsh...
Revenue share deal spikes newspaper guns about England's pay-per-view Internet World Cup qualifier
The confirmation that England's World Cup match against Ukraine will only be available pay-per-view on the Internet reminds me of 2000, when an away game against Finland was only available on short-lived and obscure pay TV service u>direct. Perform, the rights holders this time around, have made a shrewd move in allowing newspaper websites to sell the game on a revenue share basis. Whilst I'm not suggesting filthy lucre has unduly influenced editorial decisions, it is certainly a lot...
In-line adverts on the Daily Express site
On Saturday morning for the first time I spotted in-line advertising on the Daily Express site. I don't know whether this means it is a new thing, or whether I've just been spectacularly slow to notice that they have implemented it. I only spotted the adverts on two articles, triggered by the words 'lifestyle' and 'fitness'. Both adverts were provided by Vibrant Media and were for a Nicorette product. I could see how the positive contextual association of the product...
At least Daily Express readers are still searching for Madeleine McCann
I have a little Perl script that runs each morning, and checks what the popular searches are on the Daily Express website. I know it is a little childish, but it just amuses me so much that they are obviously editorially chosen rather than a real reflection of what users are doing, and, more importantly, that they seldom ever change. I got a little bit excited in April last year when they suddenly dropped 'Princess Diana' from the list. The...
Wireframing the front page: Part 1 - The "homepage"
I've been giving a lot of thought to the way that people navigate through newspaper websites, and it has made me consider the different functions that the homepage and the front page serve. Navigation, for example, is mostly redundant on the printed front page. Occasionally a paper might have something like "Turn to Page 7" to link to the continuation of a story, or a promo for the sports section, but generally the front page functions to sell one major...
Navigating newspapers: Part 4 - The 'red tops' and the 'middle market'
Last week I started publishing a series of posts about the primary and secondary navigation on 9 of the UK's national newspaper websites. Today I want to look more closely in depth at the red tops and the 'middle market' papers. Daily Express Alongside The Sun, the Daily Express is the only paper I looked at to still utilise a left-hand navigation. There are a lot of links, and I didn't include in the study a second similar panel of...
$num XL passengers stranded somewhere
It is a commonly held belief that arithmatic in the UK has declined following years of dumbing down, A-level grade inflation, and Play School being replaced by Tikkabilla. There was a great example of how random numbers have become in the Chipwrapper news feed yesterday. BBC News: Thousands stranded by XL collapse Guardian: 10,000 XL passengers must pay to fly home Daily Express: 85,000 holidaymakers stranded as XL holiday firm collapses Daily Mail: 300,000 British tourists hit by XL collapse...
No news is usually good news - unless it is the Chipwrapper feed
Those of you who rely on a live RSS bookmark of the headlines from Chipwrapper might have found the last couple of weeks to be slow news weeks. In fact, for some of the time, it even appeared to be a no news week, as the main RSS feed failed. I've vaguely ascribed the blame to a combination of Yahoo! Pipes, the Daily Mail and the Express. In fact, anything pretty much except my own shoddy Perl ;-) What appears...
'Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 1
A comment when I started my recent 'Newspaper Site Search Smackdown' series of posts prompted me to go and have a look at which British newspapers use sitemap.xml files. As it turned out, it was only the Daily Mail and The Scotsman which did (well, and The Telegraph and The Mirror and Metro), which meant that I got to have a close look at the 404 error pages generated by the others. I thought it might be worth running through...
At last, some varied 'popular' search terms on the Express site
It seems I got a bit over-excited earlier this week when I wrote about the Daily Express changing two of the most popular search they list on their search results page. That appears in fact to have just been the first step towards providing a broader spread of search terms on the page. For nearly three months, the site had displayed the same set of ten search terms - including one blank one - as the most popular on the...
OMG! They are not searching for 'Princess Diana' anymore at the Daily Express!
I've mentioned before that I have a little Perl script that keeps an eye on the 'Most popular searches' at the Daily Express site. Each day it faithfully goes and checks what they are, and then alerts me with a 'VROOT! VROOT!' email if anything changes. This morning the alarm went off for the first time in 74 days. The Express has finally changed the list of what users are most looking for, by altering two of the terms. You...
Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 4 - The Daily Express vs The Times
I'm running a series of smackdowns between British newspaper site search engines, to test how fresh their indexing is. The Daily Mail triumphed over The Sun in Round 1, and in Round 2, The Independent emerged victorious over The Telegraph, getting a perfect 10 out of 10 in the process. Yesterday was a low scoring Round 3, with The Guardian just edging out The Mirror, by 7 points to 6. Today I'll be finishing off the inter-newspaper contests with...
The Daily Express is back on the McCann case
When you are young and you fall off your bike, you are often told that the best thing to do is to get straight back on it again. And it must have been that kind of week for the Daily Express, as they took their first baby-steps backs into reporting the Madeleine McCann case in the post-front page apology era. Their first story online since the apology concerned Robert Murat, someone else whose life has been changed irrevocably by British...
The online fall-out of the Daily Express apology to Madeleine McCann's family
There is only one story about the media in today's media, and that is the story of the Daily Express making a front page apology to the family of missing Madeleine McCann. There is plenty of fall-out from the apology on the web as well, where the story was the lead item this morning, with the additional admission: "Please note that, for legal reasons, we have disabled reader comments on this article". The effects are felt strongest if you try...
Those Daily Express migrant arrest statistics in full
The Daily Express was leading yesterday with another story about the "extent of the damage unlimited immigration is causing to the fabric of society". Statistics are fun, of course. The Express claim that "A Migrant arrested every 4 minutes in UK" is based on an extrapolated figure of 360 foreigners being arrested a day, which makes up 7% of the total. If I remember my O-Level maths correctly, that suggests that the total number of arrests per day is 5,142,...
Now the Daily Express RSS feeds are in Latin
There is something very wrong with the RSS feeds from the Daily Express - and I don't just mean that the constant focus on Diana makes it look like they are ten years out-of-date. I've already written about how I had to pull the Express content from the Chipwrapper sports feed, as the stories in it still have Sam Allardyce at Newcastle, and Fabio Capello denying links with Liverpool - December 5th was the last time the feed updated. I've...
The wit and wisdom of the Daily Express reader
I noticed late last night via the wonder of Firefox's Live Bookmarks and the Chipwrapper Headlines RSS feed that the Daily Express was leading online with the story 'MAGISTRATE PUNISHED IN VEIL ROW'. It told the story of a public servant who walked out of his job without explanation, causing a trial to be re-scheduled, which wasted taxpayers money. You'd normally think the Express would be complaining about that, but since he did it in the face of the UK's...
Biblical Christian names still out-number Mohammed for Britain's boys
The tabloids have been spluttering their outrage at the news that Mohammed is now the second most popular boys name in the UK. Well, provided you massage the figures of course, I mean, why let facts get in the way of your editorial line that 'the fuzzy-wuzzies are taking over our country'. To get that result, you have to add up all the variations on Muhammed, whilst steadfastly refusing to aggregate any other names - I noticed both Jake and...
More RSS errors - The Sun and The Express
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 1 - Daily Express
Guess who is the the favourite search term on the Daily Express site?
Today's burning question: "What will the weather be like on the UK's Bank Holiday?"
Newspapers 2.0: How Web 2.0 is the Daily Express?
The ten things most likely to be on The Daily Express front page
"Has Britain gone to the dogs?" - The Daily Express certainly hopes their readers think so
Failing to petition Number Ten on Darwin Day
The Daily Express on Firefox. Ish.
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