'Indicative of fecal contamination'

Have a look at this (particularly unpleasant) headline and standfirst, and then have a look at the full story on WESH.com.



First, the headline: "Human waste found in soda fountains". Well, the body copy says the fountains "contained coliform bacteria, which is a group indicative of fecal contamination". But it doesn't say anything about actual human waste being found.

And then the standfirst: "Virginia researchers find 70 percent of drinks contaminated". The body copy says "nearly half of all beverages" contained the bacteria - so where does this figure of 70% fit in?

Incidentally, the story refers to "a study" carried out by "experts" and "researchers", and also indirectly quotes "microbiologists". Names and details, please!

You know it's a slow news day when...

Sarah has emailed in to draw my attention to a story on the Telegraph website entitled Ghostly image of Michael Jackson appears on car bonnet.

She writes:

What on earth were The Telegraph thinking when they decided to put this on the website? I can only imagine that it was a slow news day. My favourite bit is at the end where they quote Gary Sloggett on what he did when he saw the photo [of his car]: "I immediately turned to my wife and said: 'What is Michael Jackson doing on my car bonnet?'"

This is my favourite part of the article:

"It's quite extraordinary," said Gary, of Stafford. "The obvious explanation is that it seems to be some sort of cloud formation that just happened at the time."

Yes, it's the reflection of a cloud. How extraordinary!

Old story about tea is one of BBC's 'most popular'

Here's the BBC News website's 'most popular stories now' widget from the start of the week:


What's interesting is that story eight, "Tea 'healthier' drink than water", actually dates from August 2006:



For it to resurface as one of the Beeb's most popular stories three years after it was written shows the longevity that web content can have.

The story has been flying around on Twitter quite a lot recently, so I wonder if the micro-blogging site is responsible?

Our taxonomy, a stun gun and PPE

Where I work, the reporters now have an additional task: classifying their news stories according to our website taxonomy.

So, for example, if a story was about Mercedes launching a new vehicle, the reporter would select the taxonomy items 'product launch' and 'Mercedes-Benz' before filing the copy. You get the idea.

Anyway, one of our staffers wrote a story about a truck driver who was caught in possession of a stun gun. Unsurprisingly, we don't have a 'stun gun' taxonomy item, so the writer used her ingenuity and classified the story under 'PPE – personal protective equipment'.

PPE can be defined as "protective clothing and other devices designed to protect an individual while in potentially hazardous areas or performing potentially hazardous operations", so I suppose a stun gun might qualify...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Police_issue_X26_TASER.jpg

• Wikipedia: Personal protective equipment

Too many Washingtons

I had to change a live web story today because it described a certain UK-based company as being "US-based". The writer had seen on the company's website that its headquarters were in Washington and he assumed that meant Washington DC (or Washington state, I suppose).

In fact, the company is based in - you guessed it - Washington, Tyne and Wear, right here in England.

I can't really criticise the writer, though, because I was the sub who worked on the story before it went live and let the blunder past. Oops.