Sky News give up on the hunt for Madeleine McCann
by Martin Belam, 6 December 2007
Well, after over 8 months, it seems that Sky News have given up on the hunt Madeleine McCann. Since May 2007, the single word Madeleine has been the third item on their main navigation - above Politics, World News, above Business and the Weather.
That has all changed with today's redesigned homepage.
Editor Steve Bennedik has even been moved to blog about it:
There's one other change you may already have noticed. We've removed the heading "Madeleine" from the navigation list on the left-hand side of the page.
It doesn't mean we won't report on any new developments - and if you've added our Madeleine page to your favourites or made it your home page, you can continue to use it.
Our move is simply a recognition that eight months after she went missing, Madeleine's story is no longer dominating the news in the way it was, and we can no longer justify its prominence.
I know this will be disappointing for many of you, while the search for Madeleine remains unresolved. But I hope you understand why we've made this decision.
An interesting choice of phrase there - "we can no longer justify its prominence". I'm not entirely sure they could ever actually justify placing the story of one missing child out of hundreds of missing children as being more important than 'World News'
Now that Sky have bitten the bullet, it will be interesting to see whether The Sun follows.
I suppose it just goes to show that Sky subscribers and sun 'readers' (always thought that was a strange description) are probably much the same segment.
Hooray.
I'm sure it won't stop them making it one of their Review of the Year programmes, though.