That article didn’t make the cut
The Telegraph article reported in the last blog post didn’t make it into my hard copy of the newspaper, unfortunately.
There was, however, the article BNP could be at heart of far-right EU group which did appear on page 20. I’m guessing that it must have bumped it, because the editor is instinctively not going to want to run two BNP articles on the same day.
Because of the speed with which they are put together, newspaper staff have to over-produce for the space (unless they use the wire-service articles to pad out their space).
This has the side-effect of giving the editor a huge power to filter the news. I can’t find the interview where I read this, but one newspaper reporter explained the consequences. He said that, “No editor doesn’t tell me what to write. But if I wrote stories that he didn’t like, they simply wouldn’t make the cut.”
Luckily, with the internet, there’s no shortage of space, and no excuse to throw perfectly good articles in the trash.
Which brings me to the project called Journalisted.com (hosted on the same server as The Straight Choice) which webscrapes all on-line articles in all the British newspapers and puts them on a database.
Unfortunately, there isn’t the people-power (concerned volunteers anyone) who can go through their favourite daily newspaper and mark up which ones of those on-line articles made it into the print edition, and which have not. This might reverse-engineer some interesting information about the editors picks, perhaps? No one knows.
We do at least get from that site, all other articles written by Matthew Moore.
As you can see, he’s very prolific and has specialities towards sort of internetty things and photography. In those big PR firms they know this sort of stuff and, if you take them a story that’s within such a domain, they can mail it to exactly the right busy reporter who they know will be interested in a package that will be efficient for them to assemble into a story in a small number of minutes.
We didn’t do that. In this case we got very very lucky.