currybetdotnet The Sun archive
The Sun relying on 'copyright thieves' Google and Yahoo! for their Wrightys XI campaign
Despite Murdoch's stance that search engines steal his newspaper's content, The Sun are using search keywords as the main marketing thrust for their 2010 FIFA World Cup competition.
Page Three plugs 3D
The Sun was plugging Sky's experimental live football 3D service - even on Page Three!
African Cup of Nations online coverage review: Part 1 - UK
During the course of this year's African Cup of Nations tournament in Angola, I've been reviewing news coverage in the UK and in Africa itself. In the first part of this series, I look at how, before a ball was kicked, the terrorist attack on the Togo team made print front pages in the UK.
'Smug foul-mouthed juvenile overpaid twerp' Russell Brand graces The Sun's front page today
You remember Russell Brand? In editorials over the last 12 months or so, The Sun has said he was a 'foul-mouthed' 'smug' 'juvenile overpaid twerp', guilty of 'disgusting stupidity', a 'sick tirade' and peddling 'unforgivable smut'. And then it put him on the cover today picking his favourite Sun front pages. So not that unforgivable then. I honestly don't know which of the pair looks more opportunist....
"UFO hits wind turbine": World-class journalism from News International
I've got no qualms with the News International corporate site claiming that each of their newspapers is a leader in their field - the audience figures speak for themselves, especially in print.I just wonder, if I'd been putting the banner graphic together, whether I'd have picked The Sun's thoroughly debunked "UFO hits wind turbine" front page as the image to set against the claim of 'world-class journalism'......
Twitter - dangerous hunting ground for paedophiles. And The Sun's football correspondents
Given that today's front page article described Twitter as 'a free and easy hunting ground for paedophiles seeking to lure kids for sex', was it the best timing for The Sun's North East football correspondent Steve Brenner to be opening lots of new accounts on a service where his paper says 'pornographic pictures of young girls are also freely available'?...
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...
Google ads battleground between The Sun and Labour
Labour vs The Sun on GoogleGoogle Ads drag the Hillsborough disaster into the recent spat between the party and the newspaper
"Bang Bang" - What B.A. Robertson can teach the news industry about the price of scarcity
With varying announcements about potential future paid-for-content models from the FT and News International titles, there has been a resurgence in the debate about getting people to pay for visiting newspaper websites. Malcolm Coles yesterday wrote a great blog post looking at ways that News International could succeed in monetising their content. I think it addresses a lot of issues and niche content that does exist, that the naysayers of the 'information wants to be free' crowd tend to sweep...
The Sun's pharma front page
For a split-second, when I saw this front page on Saturday morning, I thought that somehow The Sun's print process had been hacked by a pharma spammer! I notice they didn't use that headline for the article online. I wonder if it was out of concern for their automated spam filter rankings at Google et al?...
"It's SunTalk Wot Won It"
During the recent election campaign, the BBC's community areas will have been operating under 'special election rules'. Moderation will have been much tighter than usual when people were talking about politics. Actually, this system has got more relaxed over the years. I remember that one of the most disrupting elements of h2g2 being assimilated by the BBC was during the 2001 election campaign. Then, the community were told that if they wanted to discuss politics, they'd have to leave the...
Newspapers on the go - Metro and The Sun
Yesterday I was casting a (very) quick eye over the mobile offerings of The Telegraph and The Times. Today I'm looking at the sites that The Sun and Metro offer to users on-the-go. The Sun Of the sites I looked at, The Sun's was by far the most nakedly commercial. Sometimes literally so. Their homepage had a strong focus not just on the news, but on calls to actions to download ringtones, wallpapers and games, which are provided by a...
Press silence on Alfie Patten DNA test result broken by Google News
Yesterday, The Mirror was reporting a further development in the story of the 13 year old boy named as a father. The initial coverage of this story was a significant factor in boosting The Sun from #5 to #1 in the UK newspaper online charts. Today, The Mirror has pulled the story from their site. It is an interesting test case of whether legal deletions should also cover SEO-orientated keyword stuffed URLs. They might have pulled the story, but I...
Wireframing the front page: Part 5 - The Sun
Over the last couple of days I've been comparing the different proportions of types of content on newspaper front pages and their online equivalent. So far I've looked at a 'quality paper' - The Times - and a 'mid-market' title - The Daily Mail. This has been part of a series called 'Wireframing the front page'. Today I wanted to compare the front page and online "viewport" of a 'red top' tabloid - The Sun. The Sun Again we see...
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...
Ban this sick Nazi paedo filth!
Please note - this post contains plot spoilers for the movie "The Reader" "MOVIE-MOGULS HORRIFIED cinema goers today with the launch of a film that shows a SICK NAZI PAEDOPHILE having sex with a 15 year old. In one scene the MONSTER lures their victim into the bath - and both are depicted TOTALLY NAKED. The TWISTED HUN is revealed to have BURNED TO DEATH 300 Jews during the War, and to have SEXUALLY ABUSED victims in a Concentration Camp....
The evil of searching for 'Gary Glitter'
Personally I remain unconvinced of the power of 70's music to reach out through time and corrupt the youth of today via the medium of guidance notes for exams, but that hasn't stopped the Gary Glitter GCSE 'scandal' being one of the main media storms of the day. For me perhaps the most unintentionally funny bit of it is the quote from the anonymous headmaster in The Sun about his fears when teenagers go online: "He's a convicted paedophile jailed...
Social media: Contextual help on UK newspaper websites
So far in my observations of the use of social bookmarking links on mainstream media sites I have concentrated on the end results - the number of URLs that became popular on a service. Today I wanted to start looking at one aspect of the user interface that media sites provide, namely whether they have any 'contextual help' for users around social bookmarking. Of course, it could be convincingly argued that actually the job of 'contextual help' here is...
Newspaper widget review: Facebook Applications
I recently gave a presentation at the Miami IA Summit about Information Architecture and user-centred design ideas for widgets, and I very often blog about newspaper websites on currybetdotnet, so it seemed like an obvious idea to put the two together, and blog about newspaper widgets. In the previous two posts I've looked at the Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadget platforms. Today I want to turn my attention to the Internet darling of 2007, Facebook. About Facebook Applications The decision...
Newspaper widget review: Google Gadgets
'Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 2
Lies, damned lies, and motoring statistics in The Sun
Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 1 - The Daily Mail vs The Sun
Google hijacks traffic from newspaper site search
Saucy Sun snaps in their Facebook apps
Biblical Christian names still out-number Mohammed for Britain's boys
The "feelthy" French get hold of The Sun's front page
More RSS errors - The Sun and The Express
Sky News give up on the hunt for Madeleine McCann
The Sun's broken RSS still affecting Chipwrapper one month on
Not qualifying for Euro2008 - as it happened in Greece
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 6 - The Sun
My assessment of My Sun and My Telegraph in the Press Gazette
The Sun's Dream Team debut nightmare
Newspapers 2.0: How Web 2.0 is The Sun?
The Sun's MY Sun registration systems and odd date range behaviour
The Sun using blogs to solicit amateur Page 3 Girl style photos
The Sun's sexiest barmaid vote goes a bit tits up
Guess Brit babes bra size, and you can help catch rapists in The Sun
Getting content onto Britain's sex beasts' mobile phones
Some six year olds are not very good at geography
Searching The Sun online - part two
Which job was it we were doing anyway?
England due to play this week? Must be time for another Sven story then
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"Journalism in the digital age"
I'll be appearing on a panel with Sarah Hartley and Iain Hepburn at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on Sunday April 11th. More details...
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Day of the Triffids
If everyone suddenly went blind, how long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?
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, if the 'professional' keeps publishing articles so wrong that they have to be deleted.
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