Have Such Crimes Now Become Less Newsworthy?

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2793840/woman-guilty-people-trafficking-forcing-two-nigerian-women-prostitution-making-eat-snakes-african-black-magic-ceremony.html

Why has such a horrific case only got reported by the Mail, the BBC's Wales news and the local news.

[2sp_]

To be fair, I did see this reported on the BBC teletex a day or so ago.

I think our media is becoming more obsessed with "celebrity" and what's happening in the US to focus on what is happening here.

It's more a reflection on our warped media than public feeling.

[hc4361]

It was also reported in the Mirror at the beginning of the trial.

[sp1814]

We get the news sites we deserve.

Perhaps if one or both of the defendants had the surname Knowles or Kardashian, the story would have gained some more traction.

Online news aggregators closely monitor the popularity of stories via the number of UPIs (unique page impressions) a story gets. The more a story gets, the more a site can charge for adverts on the page.

Other news sites may pick up on this story (note - ITV news has now reported on this) depending on how much buzz is generated online. They do this by monitoring which stories are gaining traction across social media platforms.

Another point - a lot of what we see online is supplied by news agencies (eg. Reuters), who actually create pre-written content for online news sites. It's possible that only a small number of sites have purchased this story because it's viewed as a 'local' rather than 'national' story.

I'd wager that if this trial were happening in London it would have been covered more widely (journalists sometimes give the impression that the UK ends in Watford).

[jno]

local story, I think. Welsh sites cover it because it happened in Wales; the Mail covers it for its own reasons.

[sp1814]

AOG

You may have hit on something here. The startling lack of uptake on this post would indeed suggest that the story is, at the very least, of little interetr to AB members.

This isn't to say that AB represented a mathematically accurate representative cross section of the British public, but it's telling to note that the Judy Finnegan story, as at the time I'm writing this (23:40 on Wednesday night) has attracted 100 times as many posts as this particular thread.

I wouldn't suggest that familiarity breeds contempt here, but perhaps it's true that repetition leads to ennui?

[naomi24]

Perhaps because, although disgusted by it, few are surprised by stories like this any more.