The Wardman Wire

I’ve written before about the absurdity of the US electoral system that leaves more than two months between the election of the President and them actually taking office, and this is an example of it

Disgraced media tycoon Conrad Black is seeking clemency from outgoing US President George W. Bush.

Black, 64, is serving a six-and-a-half-year jail term for fraud and obstruction of justice in Coleman, Florida, and has asked the President to free him as one of his last acts before he leaves office in January…

President Bush has the power to grant pardons to criminals under the US Constitution and has already been inundated with 2,000 requests. He is also able to shorten sentences. (The Telegraph)

How bloody stupid is an political system that elects a new President but then leaves executive power with the previous incumbent for several months, allowing them to continue to pass legislation and edicts such as releasing criminals from jail?!

The democratic mandate of George W Bush ended the moment Barack Obama achieved the necessary number of electoral college votes. So why does he continue to wield the power of the ‘leader of the free world’?

Five people in a balloon, you can only save 3, they are:

- A journalist who can’t dance

- A member of the BNP

- A talent show judge

- A person with a diagnosed mental illness

- A disgraced former chat show presenter.

There’s been an awful lot of judging this past week, not all of it to the same standard, some of it to double standards. For example:

1. Talent shows. John Sergeants departure from Strictly Come Dancing may have hogged the headlines, but the X Factor judges were just as keen to see the back of one of their contestants. Okay there are others who are probably better, but the last time an older man won the competition he didn’t sell many records, which could be why ITV’s foursome were just as harsh on Daniel Evans as the SCD judges have been on Sergeant. Were they judging talent, or potential sales - well, who am I to judge….

2. Angus Deayton taking Jonathan Ross’s place as the host of the Comedy Awards. The BBC enquiry found the R&B calls ‘deplorable’, and no doubt Ross will do his time and be back, just as Deayton has done. Second chances are good, and it remains to be seen whether we see a contrite and changed JR in the new year, or whether Manuelgate becomes just another source of comic material.

3. BNP members. From the little I know of The List, I’m not sure I’ll ever look at railway enthusiasts the same way again… Some sackings, threats and public denials, have followed the membership leak, yet membership of the BNP is not a crime. Certain occupations are barred to membership, and rightly so, but we don’t as yet have thought crime in this country, and we never should. Yet the label makes it easy to judge people, which ironically is a language the BNP are quite familiar with.

4. On labels, well done to Horizon for an excellent two-parter on mental illness. ‘How Mad Are You?’ followed 10 volunteers, 5 of whom had mental disorders, and showed just how ‘normal’ they looked. A team of psychiatrists, despite the aid of video footage and some specially designed tests, only guessed 2 of them right. The programmes showed both that there’s a spectrum of mental health, and that recovery from mental illness is possible.

The BBC’s Headroom has made a real effort to educate and de-stigmatise mental illness. Whilst depression and ’stress’ are increasingly ok (and almost vital if you’re a celebrity), there are other conditions which are less well known, with which many people suffer in silence for fear of what others will think. I was struck by the courage of Dan, who spoke openly about his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (nearly 2m sufferers in the UK), in the hope that it would encourage others and help to break the taboo around it. It’s a horrible illness to have, and one which many are afraid to admit to, David Beckham being a notable exception.

With so many TV shows based around judges - either in the studio or the massed ranks texting in their votes - we seem to be training ourselves daily to pass judgement on people we’ve never met. Someone I know has suffered a torrent of online abuse this week for a public statement of his Christian faith. And because we know judging is so common, we also become experts at concealing stuff that might get judged by others.

Wouldn’t we be a better society if we could be open about our deepest beliefs, fears and weaknesses without being jumped on? Fear and criticism can create a ghetto mentality, where no critics are admitted, which in turn makes entrenched beliefs less and less open to reason. Witch hunts don’t find witches, they just create devils out of those who pursue them.

Jesus, who himself was voted off by both the judges and the public, once said ‘judge not, so that you yourself are not judged’. Of course he’s right, societies and individuals are both healthier for getting out of the judgement seat and sitting in the mercy seat instead. Now, who’s going to tell Simon Cowell?

For some time there has been conversation about the need to look at the Quality and Engagement of audiences for media websites.

This article looks at one of the data items available via the Quantcast.com service, which segments your audience by loyalty. The free service can also identify which organisations and businesses are sending visitors to a website.

I look at the data for national newspapers, and also for this site and journalism.co.uk.

The Quantcast Service

At present comparative data can be hard to come by, however one service that does publish data is Quantcast.com.

A note about the quality of the data first. Quantcast run different levels of service. They publish estimated data about many websites, including the data about the US audiences of British Media websites mentioned here. When a site is bigger, the estimates are more reliable.

They also have a service where a snippet of Javascript is added to each page on a website, which gives better data. The data for journalism.co.uk uses this service.

The graph I’m presenting divides the audience into addicts (30+ visits per month), regulars (1+ visits per month) and “passers-by” (i.e., once only in a month) visitors, and looks at how much traffic (% of visits) derives from each segment.

Here’s the graph for the Journalism.co.uk, which is a profile of all traffic to the site (link to Journalism.co.uk data):

Sites using Estimated Data

These figures sites are on US traffic - i.e., one segment of the overseas audience for the site. There is much more detailed data available by following the link.

Daily Mail

Data link for Daily Mail.

Independent

Data Link for Independent.

Telegraph

Data Link for Telegraph

Guardian

Data Link for Guardian

Times Online

Times Data Link

BBC (for comparison)

BBC Data Link

Comment

The raw data does not tell you which site is “best”, but needs interpretation in the circumstances. As ever, context and knowing what is happening in the background with your site is important. For example, a large “addicts” figure might indicate a loyal core readership, but it could also indicate a site which is not reaching out to new audiences. Equally a high “passers-by” figure could indicate success in breaking particular stories and thereby obtaining a new influx of visitors. If a site runs full content in the RSS feed, many regular readers may never visit the site itself, as there is no need to.

Read more »