Journalisted Weekly: Bin Laden, wedding hangover, & Scottish election

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Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about.

It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations.

Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

For the week ending Sunday 8 May

  • Bin Laden’s death pushed royal wedding out of the headlines
  • AV, Scottish and Welsh elections dominated political news
  • A mass grave in Ivory Coast and rising African affluence, covered little

Covered lots

  • Osama bin Laden, found and shot dead in Pakistan by the Americans almost 10 years after 9/11, 1,329 articles
  • The Royal Wedding, including comment on wedding highlights and honeymoon destinations, 590 articles
  • The AV referendum goes to the polls and loses the vote, while the Lib Dems suffer most in the local elections, 465 articles
  • The Scottish parliament election, with the SNP winning a second term on an overall majority, 258 articles

Covered little

  • The neighbour of Joanna Yeates, Vincent Tabak, pleads guilty to her manslaughter but faces trial for murder, 21 articles
  • The last known WW1 veteran, Claude Stanley Choules, dies aged 110, 15 articles
  • Ahmadinejad’s allies accused of sorcery, amid a power struggle between him and Ayatollah Khamenei, 6 articles
  • A mass grave is uncovered in Ivory Coast, one of several found since political unrest gripped the country after last year’s disputed election, 3 articles
  • A study by the African Development Bank reports 1/3 of Africans are now middle class, 2 articles

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

David Cameron: 737 articles (+135% on previous week)

Celebrity vs serious

Arab spring

Who wrote a lot about…’Osama Bin Laden’

Toby Harnden – 14 articles (Telegraph), Farhan Bokhari – 12 articles (Financial Times), James Lamont – 12 articles (Financial Times), Declan Walsh – 12 articles (The Guardian), Ewen MacAskill – 10 articles (The Guardian), Jason Burke – 10 articles (The Guardian), Padraic Flanagan – 9 articles (Daily Express), Rob Crilly – 9 articles (Telegraph, The Scotsman), Catherine Philp – 8 articles (The Times)

Long form journalism

4,084 words: Tunisia: after the revolution – Roula Khalaf, Financial Times, 6 May 2011
3,994 words: Osama bin Laden obituary – Lawrence Joffe and Jason Burke, The Guardian, 2 May 2011
2,941 words: Morgellons: A hidden epidemic or mass hysteria? – Will Storr, The Guardian, 7 May 2011

More from the Media Standards Trust

Visit the Media Standards Trust’s new site Churnalism.com – a public service for distinguishing journalism from churnalism

Churnalism.com ‘explore’ page is available for browsing press release sources alongside news outlets

The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

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