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Fight story involving penis and vagina costumes goes viral

A paper’s quirky online story about a street fight involving people dressed up as a penis and a vagina went viral to gain more than 120,000 unique visitors on its newly relaunched website.

The Central Somerset Gazette published the story on its website last Thursday about a fight which broke out in Glastonbury, headlined “Woman dressed as vagina stops street fight between penis and man in Glastonbury”.

The story by reporter Laura Linham wrote about a scuffle between an actor dressed as a penis and another man who was angry at the graphic costumes worn by a street threatre group, while a woman dressed as a vagina tried to calm the situation down.

After the story was published online, the hits grew rapidly as the editorial team spread it on social media with it gaining around 300 Facebook shares and 1,000 visitors in the first couple of hours.

It then had a further spike after being published on the Fark.com website, which features bizarre stories from around the world.

By Saturday the number of unique visitors to the story had passed the 120,000 mark, 68pc of whom had been referred from social media sites.

It got a number of high-profile retweets including from Jeremy Vine and David Schneider and authors William Gibson and India Knight.

The costumes were worn by members of the Nomadic Academy of Fools as they performed some street theatre to help promote two of their plays which were being performed at the Assembly Rooms in Glastonbury.

Editor Bede Macgowan said the story had provided a boost to its newly relaunched newspaper branded website, which replaces Local World’s former ‘thisis’ site for somerset.

He said: “Though we recognised its obvious merits, before putting the story online, we had earlier decided not to put it on page one of the paper, but inside on page three, and didn’t use the pics of actors in costume in the paper.

“However, as the figures have shown, this was a story made for the web so we dedicated ourselves to spreading it far and wide on social media.

“It’s broken records locally for unique visitor numbers and is still by far the most popular story on our site.

“Laura deserves the plaudits for not only getting the story but also her work on social media, though she was ably backed up by the rest of the team, not least departing digital publisher Chris Rogers, who has gone out on a high!”

Bede added the aim was now to use the success to grow the audiences for four Mid Somerset News and Media titles on a more consistent basis.

The paper has also published a video interview on its website with the couple who were dressed as genitalia.

5 comments

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  • June 26, 2013 at 2:51 pm
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    “Vulgar rubbish?!” Otherwise known as news.

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  • June 26, 2013 at 3:32 pm
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    It reminds me of the old story about the man who went to a fancy dress party clad only in his Y-fronts.
    When asked to explain himself by the host he said:”I’m here as a premature ejaculation.”
    Asked to explain further he said:”I’ve just come in my underpants.”

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