Interesting Facts

Police in the UK only solve 1 in 10 burglaries. (According to crime statistics, £2 billion worth of goods have been stolen over the past 6 years, but only £137 million worth recovered. Some newspapers are blaming the cuts in front-line-officers over the past 6 years, but there is no surprise for me here. We were broken into 4 times, and no one ever got back to us on any of the cases, including the one where the burglars left a knife covered in oily prints. (We also lived just down the road from a police station.) People being quoted in the press are saying things like "They just don't seem to care", well my friends, they didn't care in the past either.)

France, India and Italy all have laws banning the publication of opinion polls in the run-up to an election. (In France newspapers and media can't publish opinion polls up to 24 hours before an election. In India that is 48 hours, and in Italy, 15 days. Of course the opinion polls published in the UK were so wrong, it would be funny, if they didn't charge £8,000 to £12,000 for the privilege of using them.  The pollsters are blaming the public - for lying.)

Germany's Bild newspaper, the world's seventh-biggest newspaper, has stopped printing its page one girl. (The page one girl, usually a busty, semi-clad and sometimes completely naked woman has been a staple at breakfast time all over Germany for years. The German tabloid declared, "It is perhaps a small step from the viewpoint of women, but it is a big step for Bild and for every man in Germany."  Even more amusingly they reprinted a headline from May 1970 - ''Women have less in the head than men'' - and announced that ''this headline is of great embarrassment today''. The Sun, which started showing topless page 3 girls in 1970 and was an inspiration for the Bild, declined to comment on Bild's move,)

The UK press (apart from the obvious ones) have all jumped on the fact that Rupert Murdoch called the British Prime Minister's disabled son 'RETARDED' whilst giving testimony at the Levenson enquiry. (Retarded comes from the French word 'retarder', and when used in the context of childhood development it  has been around for centuries, it was used as an official medical adjective to describe a mentally disabled person, but for the last few decades retarded is now deemed offensive. Why is it offensive?  Well that happens to words the moment they start to be used as an insult.  I guess around 1970 kids started to say to other kids in the playground, 'you are such a retard' or 'you are so retarded'. In 2006 the medical term 'mental retardation' was dropped by the American Association on Mental Retardation and the organisation was renamed American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. And in 2008, a poll by the BBC conclu...

Purely MHO:- Politics was a big theme in 2012. The Sunday Telegraph claimed that the Tories were launching a hunt to replace recently-departed "blue skies" thinker Steve Hilton using the format of a new reality TV show. The Observer said David Cameron had asked the Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder to come to Downing Street to advise him on issues of class. (Hubby and I fell for this one.) The Independent on Sunday reported on police stations holding "hosepipe amnesties" for the public to hand in garden hoses ahead of a hosepipe ban in south-east England (the hosepipe ban was real, just the amnesty was a joke). The Sunday Times' Style magazine hoped to catch out readers with its double-page spread on "Lemac", a new Middle-Eastern beauty treatment where customers are injected with cells from the humps of camels. Readers of The Sun on Sunday reported that Arsenal football club was releasing its own fragrance, which took its aromas from the E...

A survey by the media regulator Ofcom has found that only 7% of people in the UK trust the tabloid press to report the news truthfully. (The same report found that radio is the most trusted source of news in the UK, beating both TV and the internet. 66% of people polled said they trusted radio news most, 58% chose internet news, 54% said television. 34% said newspapers in general, but only 7% tabloid newspapers. The only problem I have with this is the Sun is still the most widely sold newspaper in the UK. I wonder why?) !Note - The tabloid newspaper format is particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where its page dimensions are roughly 430 × 280 mm (16.9 in × 11.0 in. They are often called "red tops" because they have a red masthead, and the usual ingredients are an emphasis on entertainment news, celebrities, gossip, sports and political scandals. The red tops include The Sun, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Star, along with various local and regional newspapers....

According to a survey by Ofcom (The Office of Communications) in 2009, radio is the most trusted source of news in the UK. (66% of people considered news reports on the radio to be reliable compared with 58% for news websites, 54% for TV and just 34% for newspapers. If you've ever read a British newspaper, you'll understand why they rate so badly.)

The British Library is going to make 40 million pages of newspaper archives available online. (300 years of journalism will be put on the web by the publisher BrightSolid. Users at the main library at St Pancras will be able to use the material freely. That sound ominously that the rest of us will have to pay. They really don't get the point of the net, do they.)

According to the Press Complaints Commission 4,340 complaints were received in 2007. (This is a 31% increase on 2006, which either means the quality of reporting in the UK is deteriorating, or Brits are moaning more.)

powered by ODEO Over the past decade, the average length of an article for a magazine or newspaper has gradually fallen from 5,000 words to 3,000, and in the last few years to just 1,500. (In the 1890s reports of 5,000 words were common in the Times, but of course that was before the tabloid journalist arrived. Personally I think it's easier to write 5,000 words than it is to write 1,500 words with a catchy headline.)

In the UK a giveaway DVD in a newspaper costs as little as 16p to produce, including rights, materials and manufacture. (These things are often given away in the Sunday newspaper. Recent titles have included East is East, Cabaret and even episodes of Fireman Sam.)

Only 36% of the world's newspapers are tabloid. (The rest are what is called broad sheet. A tabloid newspaper has pages that are half the size of a standard newspaper. Tabloid newspapers are typically dominated by headlines, photographs, and sensational stories. Broadsheet newspapers are are newspapers with a large page format and they are regarded as more serious and less sensationalist than tabloids. But let's face it, pretty soon all newspapers will be online anyway.)