Former TalkSport host Jon Gaunt will launch new online-only radio station on TheSun.co.uk.
The new audio service will make use of new multimedia studios at News International’s Wapping headquarters.
Web traffic to The Sun surged on February 13 following a report on 13-year-old new dad Alfie Patten.
According to a press release from the title, the story became The Sun’s most popular online article of all time recording 3.9 million unique users in one day, beating the previous high of 1.6 million.
UK unique users came in at 884,000, while in the three days up to and including February 15 a video of new parents Patten and girlfriend Chantelle Steadman attracted 1.2 million views, the release claims.
The website’s message boards saw 180,000 users reading and leaving comments on the story.
When reviewing Times Online and theSun.co.uk for our series on accessibility, we only really skimmed the surface of both sites’ blogging areas.
This was largely because issues of accessibility prevented our user from locating the blogs section on each website. Asking them for their thoughts once I, as a sighted user, had helped locate them would have been misleading.
The lack of a dedicated ‘blogs’ link or section heading on each site’s homepage illustrates the papers’ differing approach to blogging – Sun blogs come under the personalised My Sun area; whereas Times’ blogs are listed in the comment section.
While this means that any user purposefully looking for this section might struggle to find it without prior knowledge, this is an issue of content rather than accessibility. Each newspaper has chosen not to feature a blogs section on its homepage, because this is may not be the content it wants to flag up first.
This is a subjective choice by the publisher, which may not meet the subjective needs of all the audience. So does making a news website accessible mean making a compromise to try and please most of the people, most of the time?