Recent posts in my Daily Express Category
January 4, 2012
How a press release trumped the Lawrence murder verdict - a new low for the Express
At some point yesterday, actual human beings who actually call themselves journalists decided that the verdict in the Stephen Lawrence trial wasn’t the most important news story in the UK. Instead they decided to lead the Express with a PR puff piece.
May 31, 2011
No foreigners please, we’re the Daily Express!
The Daily Express registration system is as xenophobic as the paper's editorial line - you can't tell it you are outside the UK.
July 13, 2010
Why I care about the racism of the Daily Express
A furious man jabbing at his newspaper in anger in Walthamstow market today reminded me why I care about the accuracy of our press - and despise the racism of today's Daily Express front page.
June 2, 2010
Whitehaven shootings illustrate the Facebook 'Like' problem for news
Online coverage of the Whitehaven shootings illustrate why the Facebook 'like' button is unsuitable for generic use on all news stories.
April 23, 2010
News apps on the iPad - my first impressions
I had my first real grapple with an iPad this week, checking out applications from the New York Times, BBC and USA Today. Whilst I found some things about the device impressive, I also had some concerns about the rush to 'replicate the print experience'.
February 18, 2010
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......
January 19, 2010
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.
October 8, 2009
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...
October 6, 2009
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...
March 8, 2009
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...
February 15, 2009
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...
February 9, 2009
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...
February 3, 2009
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...
September 13, 2008
$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...
September 8, 2008
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...
May 5, 2008
'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...
May 3, 2008
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...
April 30, 2008
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...
April 11, 2008
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...
March 25, 2008
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...
March 19, 2008
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...
February 12, 2008
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,...
January 15, 2008
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...
January 9, 2008
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...
December 21, 2007
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...
December 16, 2007
More RSS errors - The Sun and The Express
In theory Chipwrapper should be so easy to product manage. I spent a little while registering the domain name, making some HTML pages and finding a logo image. I set up a Google Custom Search Engine. I mashed up some Yahoo! Pipes and pumped them through some of my own Perl and then Feedburner, and it should all just run just tickety-boo. Unless, of course, newspaper publishers kept doing really dumb things with their RSS feeds. The Sun's feeds remain...
November 6, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 1 - Daily Express
The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act put the force of law behind the principle that businesses should not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their goods and services. Although yet to be tested by major case law in the UK, it is generally accepted that 'services' includes a business web site, and that therefore businesses should take care to make sure that their sites are as accessible as possible. In theory, this is trivial to accomplish. All that...
October 10, 2007
The Daily Express Inheritance Tax 'Crusade' re-writes British politics. And massages the numbers in the process.
When I touched down in the UK in the early hours of this morning, I didn't realise that I had walked into a land in the grips of a political revolution. I mean, I know there is a new PM here, and there has been some to-and-fro over the merits of a November election, but I had missed the seismic change in British politics that happened with Alistair Darling's pre-Budget announcements earlier in the week. Fortunately, the humble Daily Express...
June 11, 2007
Guess who is the the favourite search term on the Daily Express site?
Whilst doing the research for my lengthy series about the "Web 2.0" features on British newspaper websites, I came across quite a few quirks on them that didn't fit into the main set of articles, but that I wanted to point out anyway. One of these was on the Daily Express site. Aside from their sadly telling keywords tag content, of course. When you perform a search on the site, at the top of the results page there is a...
May 7, 2007
Today's burning question: "What will the weather be like on the UK's Bank Holiday?"
I've set off today for a 10-day road trip around Crete, to explore the eastern half of the island which I have been calling home for a year, but haven't really explored yet. Thanks to the joy of scheduled publishing and the ./tools/run-periodic-tasks cron job, you shouldn't see any interuption to my blogging on currybetdotnet - although it does mean that the spelling mistakes I only ever seem to pick up after publication will be sitting there live for a...
May 3, 2007
Daily Express RSS feed 404s
Often when people first start out blogging they are advised that making their content available as RSS feeds is a great way of potentially growing their audience. It took British newspapers quite a while to learn this lesson, and it is only in the last year or so that all the major newspapers have started offering RSS feeds. Some of them are still a bit clumsy about letting people know where they are. Last year I noted that The Guardian...
April 23, 2007
Newspapers 2.0: How Web 2.0 is the Daily Express?
The Web 2.0 new media buzz-word has penetrated the mainstream media as a short-hand for all sorts of new internet-enabled technologies. I was curious to see how many of the British Press have actually themselves adopted any of the kinds of functionailty and services bracketed under the Web 2.0 "concept". I have therefore done a survey of the main British newspaper websites, looking at the extent to which they include or promote things like RSS feeds, blogging, user-generated content...
April 3, 2007
The ten things most likely to be on The Daily Express front page
Download a print version of this article What is the Daily Express actually for? It is a question that has plagued me for some time. I mean, there are some papers whose purpose is clear. The Guardian is there as a recruiting tool for the BBC. The Daily Mail is there to channel the seething disapproval of the English middle classes. And The Sunday Sport is there so short people and poor people can get their grubby paws on lots...
February 21, 2007
"Has Britain gone to the dogs?" - The Daily Express certainly hopes their readers think so
"Has Britain gone to the dogs?" I ask the question because there are a variety of ways that the British press and news services online try and entice their users into debate. The Mirror's redesign has added links to 'Digg this' and 'del.icio.us' on some of their stories, but their blog content is where they seem to restrict their user comments to. The Sun, meanwhile, has buttons underneath headlines asking readers to "Add comment" or "Join Discussion". The new Times...
February 12, 2007
Failing to petition Number Ten on Darwin Day
Having been nudged to sign a petition to make Charles Darwin day a national holiday in the UK, I rushed off over to the Number 10 Downing Street petitions site to do just that. Sadly, it wasn't playing fair today. First of all it wouldn't let me sign up because the site was too busy. Then, when I did get a confirmation email, following the link led me to a 503 Service Unavailable error page. The site is a beta...
July 11, 2006
Searching The Daily Express
Over the last couple of weeks I have been evaluating the search services offered by the online editions of British newspapers. Today I want to look at the British paper most likely to feature Diana, Princess of Wales or house prices on the front page - The Daily Express. From the homepage of the Daily Express search is offered over the web, or over the Thomson Local directory, using a radio button selection mechanism. The search results feature a title,...
January 19, 2005
The Daily Express on Firefox. Ish.
The Guardian recently turned over their media section to a series of essays by non-journalists about how they perceived journalism as a trade. More than one person made the point that one of the real problems with the media is that the majority of articles you read about something you know about contain a significant amount of inaccuracy and misunderstanding, which then undermines your confidence in the accuracy of everything else you read. There was a classic example of that...