A story about a man defecating on a nightclub floor provided an unlikely web hit for a regional publishing group yesterday.
Kent Online revealed yesterday how horrified clubbers in Maidstone had looked on as a man relieved himself on the dance floor after failing to get the toilets on time.
It transpired that he had drunk too many laxative drinks, prompting a warning from club bosses.
Editorial director Ian Carter revealed on Twitter that the story was the most-viewed on the site yesterday, although he added that he had “mixed feelings” about it.
It eventually garnered around 70,000 page views, ahead of what Ian described as “some slightly more deserving stories.”
The full story can be seen here.
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If the story is shocking so is the quality of the subbing and reporting.
That’s not a headline and I wonder which ‘meters’ the club has near the loos. And why put, commas, where they’re not, needed? Oh dear.
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What are you banging on about Observer? Other than the second ‘Maidstone’ being pointless the headline is fine for the web.
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Fantastic, what fun!
So it is a story given sizeable prominence in the media about a drunk bloke sh****ng himself on a nightclub dance floor.
But that doesn’t matter, just think of all those lovely web hits (not that it can be converted into any financial gain)
It should have the site’s potential advertisers queuing up to have their double-glazing company, furniture store or supermarket featured next to quality journalism like this.
Perhaps in another age it would have been reported simply as an incident in a nightclub where someone was unable to make it to the…
Or perhaps, it simply would not have been reported at all.
Have we really sunk to this?
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Confused – nobody ever went bust giving people what they want. Print and online are different beasts, I doubt this will be gracing the pages of the KM and they themselves admit it’s not the kind of story they want to boast about.
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Par 2 “1am on Sunday morning”.
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RT – I take your general point. My concern is, not that we should be sniffy (ha ha) about this being, or not being, what our readers SHOULD read.
But have we, or in this case an editorial director, accepted that just because a story in the loosest (sorry I can’t help it) sense will generate hits and comment it has to be broadcast or printed?
An editor once told us, waving in the general direction of our sleepy market town, that he wanted to know ‘if a sparrow farts out there’.
Perhaps he foresaw the pretty pass we have come to.
You are right that no one went bust giving people what they want – though I still maintain that this item will produce not one penny of extra revenue for the KM.
And it tends to be that, as the great philosopher Paul Weller once said, ‘the public wants what the public gets’.
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Confused – you are spot on. I hope to be out of this industry very soon after 37 years. It’s being dumbed down so far that it is no longer journalism.
Sure – it will get hits, which is a sad reflection on society, but will it attract advertisers?
As for RT’s view, perhaps you are about to witness companies going bust. Because the people who are getting what they want are not those who will finance the future
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Northern Hack’s reet…….the trade is going down the pan. (geddit?) I’m glad I worked in it in happier, better staffed years.
I grdugingly accept that this piece was worth publishing though. It’s the sort of tale which passes the old “Hey Doris, have you seen this?” test.
People would talk about it down the pub or over the garden fence.
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I don’t see a problem with the story itself. Granted, it’s hardly the best piece of public interest journalism, but a bloke getting chucked out of a nightclub for s****ing on the dance floor is attention-grabbing enough to warrant a mention. Newspapers have always run quirky stories alongside the more serious pieces and I don’t see why it should be any different on the web.
However, my reservations, for what little they’re worth:
1) That headline is utterly, utterly awful. Yes yes, I know, search engine optimisation and blah blah blah, but it still needs to read naturally. Why not “Man thrown out of Maidstone club for defecating on dance floor” (or “pooing”, if you REALLY must) and then chuck some of the other keywords high up in the story?
2) Stories like this aren’t enough to sustain a newspaper in print or online. They grab views for that specific story but they do little to encourage repeat views or build a loyal online following. That comes from consistently offering meaty, relevant local news over a longer period of time.
3) He should have relieved himself a couple of “metres” from the toilet, not “meters”.
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The ‘SEO’ headline is utter garbage. It smacks of journalists not understanding the concept of writing a headline that includes keywords but still maintains an element of creativity. Do all their headlines have the full adress in?
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Confused – on the financial gain point, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed those little boxes at the sides of stories on the internet. They are called adverts.
After the Jurassic era ended advertisers began paying per page impression or even on click through rates. 70,000 views is a quite a lot and would have increased both of the two elements above for the KM on that day.
So with increased hits they will either use up adverisers’ allotted page impressions more quickly or they’ll be able to charge them more for the increased number of hits. Hey presto! In this way, the organisation which attracts more readers by writing stories that get their attention sells more advertising and makes more money and employs more journalists so that there will be another generation of wonderful people to insist that their era was the last to have the permissible standards. It’s actually a rather classic model, wouldn’t you say?
With regard to the taste of the article, we’ve seen tabloids out sell papers with more worthy journalism by flogging absurd, outrageous, ridiculous and puerile stories for quite some time. It’s hardly that remarkable.
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Reminds me of that old Sophie Ellis Bextor hit: “Turder on the Dancefloor”.
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Forget web headlines and all that – surely the only one for this should be ‘Turder on the dance floor’
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