I was reading the Daily Mail, as you do. (Procrastinating.)

Britney Spears has told friends she “would die” for her two sons and would even give up her pop career for them.

Even her pop career? I can understand why she would die, but giving up her pop career is just a step too far.

Last week The Jeremy Kyle Show was branded as a human form of bear-baiting by District Judge Alan Berg. He is probably quite right. I say “probably”, because I have not actually sat down and watched a full episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show. The man’s demeanour is enough to put you off after just a few seconds.

I was going to say that it is not a surprise that The Jeremy Kyle Show should be compared to bear-baiting. Modern-day freakshow is how I usually describe these programmes. The predecessors to Jeremy Kyle (Trisha and Vanessa) were mostly the same. Some — interestingly enough, mostly the American ones — can be sympathetic to the programme’s participants. But Tampon Teabag’s summary suggests that Jeremy Kyle is by far the most despicable example of the genre.

Most of the time these programmes pluck out the most grotesque failures of humanity and plonk them under the spotlight for the rest of the nation to point and laugh at. I suspect the main reason for these programmes’ success is that it allows the utter failures that watch daytime television feel slightly better about themselves.

For me, though, the interesting aspect of this story is the fact that the programme’s sponsors only felt the need to pull out of the deal after District Judge Berg made his comments. Some are revelling in the fact that it was a publicly-funded organisation — Ufi’s Learndirect.

But let us be fair here. Most of Learndirect’s target audience probably watches Jeremy Kyle, because it is a programme for thick economically inactive people. So this was probably the most cost-effective way to get their message out.

But it’s the hypocrisy that gets me about it. Ufi’s response has basically been: “What? You mean to say that The Jeremy Kyle Show is a modern-day equivalent of cock fighting, but with chavs instead of cocks? I am shocked, just shocked!” Nobody who has seen these programmes before should be so surprised.

The real reason Ufi have pulled out is, of course, because the spotlight turned to them. The same happened when Carphone Warehouse pulled out of sponsoring Celebrity Big Brother in the wake of the Shilpa Shetty / Jade Goody controversy. They said they pulled out because they couldn’t condone racism. So did this mean that they took the blame for all of the other bad behaviour that went on in the Big Brother house in years gone by?

The same goes for this year’s debates about “trust in TV”. Hypocrisy from top to bottom. When it isn’t feigned horror that premium rate phone-in competitions are indeed in existence merely to fleece viewers, it is the Daily Mail treating some set-up shots in Bargain Hunt or Nigella Lawson’s programme as heinous crimes punishable by hanging. That would be the Daily Mail, a newspaper well known for its rigorous honesty and integrity!

Learndirect knew full well what they were sponsoring before Judge Berg made his comments. As Jonathan Calder says, The Jeremy Kyle Show didn’t suddenly become inappropriate because a District Judge said so.

But I don’t think they should have withdrawn their sponsorship. As I said, this was probably the best way to get their message out. I just wish Learndirect would have the honesty to say so.

I don’t say this often, but I have to hand it to the Daily Mail. And I’m not being sarcastic! Because their website is really rather good.

Last week some journalists got all excited because the latest ABCe figures came out, telling them just how many people are reading their words. Marcus Warren from The Telegraph (or TCUK as it is apparently now known… Christ) said:

As is always the way with statistics, everyone has something to crow about in last week’s ABC Electronic figures for July, most notably the Daily Mail. Theirs was certainly the headline-grabbing performance , one so impressive that it appeared to shock most of the blogging media pudits into silence. All power to the Mail then.

Telegraph link via Martin Stabe.

The Media Guardian report says that the Daily Mail website was visited by 11,865,039 unique users, over three quarters of whom are visiting from outside the UK. (Insert your own “they come to our country stealing our bandwidth” joke here.) This makes it the most popular newspaper website apart from Guardian Unlimited.

It’s astonishing in one way because just a few years ago the Daily Mail did not even have a website. Now it has one of the most popular in the country. You have to admit that their website is pretty slick compared to a lot of newspaper websites.

This is probably helped by the fact that it is relatively new. A lot of newspaper websites were designed several years ago. In the intervening period they have had to shoehorn in features like RSS feeds, blogs, comment systems, social bookmarking and goodness knows what else. These websites are now cluttered full of stuff that they were not originally designed to accommodate. Sometimes jumping from page to page presents you with jarring differences in style (hello, Guardian Unlimited).

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, produced a slick website that had all of these features from the get-go. Maybe a few years down the line the Mail’s website will also begin to creak heavily due to old age. But there is something else that sets the Daily Mail website apart from the others.

The Mail’s website makes heavy use of images. Each article is full of images, and they are not tiny little ones stuck in the corner. In fact, most of them take up the same width as a paragraph. It looks fantastic.

On many other newspaper websites, all too often you could find yourself reading an article that does not have any images in it, even if the original print version did. This is especially irritating when the article actually makes reference to the image. This is not much use if you are using the website where you can’t see it!

Perhaps for this very reason, whenever I follow a link to the Daily Mail’s website, I usually find myself exploring one or two more pages before going away. Its design and approach actually encourages me to read further, even though I am the sort of person who would not touch a hard copy of the Daily Mail with a bargepole!

Holyrood Watcher has recently been complaining about newspaper websites. He seems to have been set off by the website of the Sunday Herald. And who could blame him? It is a truly dire website.

I mean, just look at it. If you read the bit in the top right hand corner that says “Est. 1999″ you might be tempted to think that this was the last time the website was touched. But no. The Sunday Herald must be one of the few MSM websites that has actually become worse over time.

Compare today’s front page with a few from years gone by that I have found on the Wayback Machine. even better in 2002.

Today? It is almost as if they want to turn visitors away. The older versions hint at masses of content to choose from. Check out the navigation links on the left-hand side of the old sites — nowhere to be seen today. Now there is just a list of three stories from each section, with no images like the old websites. Astonishingly stale and not at all enticing.

I have only spoken about the design so far. There are also the technical problems that Holyrood Watcher mentions. I missed what happened last Sunday, but I know the problem with words running into each other. In fact, it seems to happen on practically every article these days. Check out the first few paragraphs of this week’s main story:

SEVEN PEOPLE, including two girls, were last night being heldoverthekillingof 11-year-old Rhys Jones. Five were arrested in raids yesterdayaroundtheCroxteth area of Liverpool, wheretheschoolboy was shot on Wednesday.

Police were granted an extension to detain the sixth, a boy of 15, who was arrested on Friday.

Theyarresteda seventh teenager last night. The 19-year-old man from the local area is being questioned by detectives on suspicion of murder.

This takes the total of people in custodylastnighttoseven.Nine have been arrested in total, with two currently on bail.

I mean, how does this even happen? Is it not easy to fix? It really is as if nobody checks to make sure the website is working properly. I don’t understand why they do not just move the Sunday Herald’s content onto The Herald’s website, which is miles better.

Holyrood Watcher also makes a good point about The Scotsman (which is down at the moment of writing!). In this era of Web 2.0, blogging and all the rest of it, what use is their potentially interesting content doing behind a subscription wall?

I don’t know how much traffic newspaper sites get from blogs, but it must be quite a lot these days. Yet The Scotsman locks away the content that bloggers would be most likely to link to. Newspapers that persist on locking their content away need to look to The Guardian, the most popular newspaper website around. It seems to survive perfectly fine without having to offer any “premium” content.

I have no complaints about the design of The Times website. They recently radically overhauled the design of the website and it looks tip-top now (although a lot of people probably still wonder — why lime green?). And they managed to achieve it all in one go, unlike the uncomfortable bit-by-bit redesign of Guardian Unlimited.

But, as Holyrood Watcher points out, where is Ecosse now? David Farrer complained about it way back in February. He was told that it would come back, but it is still nowhere to be seen.

A couple of weeks ago I spotted Ryan Morrison saying:

BBC News is in need of a major redesign to bring it inline with the web2.0 world. There are so many new concepts, ideas and services surrounding the new web that the old News Template is creaking a bit.

He has a point. As I mentioned before, most of the newspaper websites have been struggling to smoothly integrate Web 2.0 features into their old websites.

But I think the BBC News website is a lot better than its rivals from the press. The pages are not nearly as cluttered and are still pleasant to look at. This is no doubt helped by the fact that they do not contain obtrusive adverts that the other sites have to carry.

Of all of the news sites on the internet, I like BBC News the most by far. At the moment my second port of call is Scotsman.com, but only because the current “under reconstruction” nature of Guardian Unlimited really gets on my nerves.

For more on newspaper websites, check out Martin Belam’s astonishingly in-depth posts at Currybet.

I mentioned recently that I am a huge fan of the radio programme Up All Night. Every night on the programme a newspaper editor discusses what is going to be in the morning’s edition of his particular newspaper. Most of the editors do just that: explain what is going to be in the morning paper. But there is one person who consistently uses his spot on BBC radio as a political platform instead.

Without fail, every Tuesday morning, Hugh Whittow from the Daily Express sounds adamant that civilisation is on the brink of collapse. He always tries his very hardest to sound jaded and fed up with the world, although it doesn’t often sound that sincere. He just sounds like somebody trying very hard to roll their eyes as audibly as possible. Inevitably there will be a sentence somewhere in his diatribe that ends: “…and I’m afraid it’s just another example of political correctness gone mad.”

Hugh Whittow is infact one of my favourite examples of political correctness gone mad gone mad — the phenomenon where everything is blamed on political correctness gone mad to the point where the phrase “political correctness” ceases to mean anything whatsoever. The other day I heard somebody on a phone-in trying to explain that old ladies are searched at airports because of political correctness. And not because of, oh, say, security?!

Whittow takes the concept to extremes. Sure, most of it is the sort of thing you would expect from the paranoid perspective of the Express / Mail axis of bitter middle-aged ladies. The Daily Express seems to permanently be on a “crusade” of some sort or another. You see, our traditional British values of decency, fair play and being slightly suspicious of foreigners are under threat from an army of politically correct Brussels bureaucrats who secretly tried to bump Diana off.

Indeed, traditional family values are being pissed on from a great height. The problem is, we can’t work out what height that is exactly because the EU says it’s got to be measured in metric, and we still don’t know what a metre is in inches.

I have images of a young Whittow rolling around in nappies in front of his television and literally turning inside out with rage when he first heard a weather forecaster give the temperature in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. I imagine he still hasn’t quite recovered from the decimalisation of the pound sterling.

This week the world was officially going to end because the Royal Mail has “ditched” Christian symbols on its annual series of Christmas stamps. What an abomination! Those politically correct do-gooders are getting rid of the true meaning of Christmas and are replacing images of Jesus with secular images like reindeer — all to avoid offending Muslims!

The thing is, non-Christian Christmas stamps are as traditional as Christmas stamps themselves. I thought I would take a look at my collection of Christmas stamps from my stamp collecting days, from before I came to see philately as a cynical money-spinner for the Post Office.

Indeed, the 1996 Christmas stamps consist of religious imagery like three wise men gawping at a UFO and some shepherds standing next to a squint tree. The 1998 images are all of angels, which is kind of Christian (the insert is full of religious guff aswell). The 1999 stamps look kind of abstract, but the series is called “Christians’ Tale”, so I’m guessing they are Christian images.

But what is this I see on the 1997 stamps, entitled “Christmas Crackers”?

Is that a secular image of Father Christmas I see there? Maybe it’s Jesus dressed up as Santa Claus.

Infact, here is an identical story about the secularisation of Christmas stamps in The Daily Telegraph from over two years ago.

See, this isn’t a new story. Killer Whale claims, in the comments at The Daily Mail Watch, that up to and including 2003 the Royal Mail issued 21 sets of ‘Christian’ Christmas stamps and 16 with a more secular theme.

And what is this I see here? The first ever Christmas stamp to be issued back in 1966, according to BBC News. I suppose the good readers of the Daily Express thought that this was a depiction of the fourth, lesser-known wise man.

No, I think the Daily Express is just telling big lies to sell newspapers. Given that the first ever Christmas stamp contained a drawing of a snowman, that would make secular Christmas stamps more traditional than religious ones! Oh, and by this measure the world ended forty years ago.

No it didn’t. Instead we have to suffer the same old whining old bumwarts hijacking the traditional Pagan festival with their tedious religious propaganda. Give it a rest!

Currybet has a series of posts reviewing the search features of newspapers’ websites. This post summarises the results. He rates The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Mail most highly. I would agree with the latter two, although the last time I tried to search TimesOnline it was a complete nightmare.