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The Telegraph is slightly confused:

Online crime hits 300 per minute

By Ben Farmer
Last Updated: 10:09am BST 06/09/2007

More than 300 internet crimes are being committed every hour...

Hours? Minutes? Which is it?

Ah well. It's only numbers. I don't suppose it's important.

The Telegraph web site was relaunched recently and they are promoting this with an advertising campaign. I've seen many adverts on the escalators in tube stations.

But these adverts have some very strange wording on them. They claim that the Telegraph site is "the UK's most visited quality newspaper web site". And there's a logo which is probably from the organisation who created the statistics that the Telegraph are quoting from. There's a similar claim on the new site ("Britain's No.1 quality newspaper website") together a logo which links to this page on a site owned by a company called Hitwise.

Now these kinds of claims are pretty rigorously tracked by the advertising standards people, so I was interested to hear the Telegraph making them. Everything I've read before says that Guardian Unlimited is the most visited UK newspaper site. For example this report from Alexa has GU at number 29, the Sun at 48, the Times at 50 and the Telegraph at 97. So I wondered how the Telegraph could get away with this claim. Perhaps it has something to do with the word "quality". Is it possible that they are equating a quality newspaper with a broadsheet newpaper? The Telegraph and the Financial Times are the only remaining national broadsheets in the UK - so that would certainly explain how the Telegraph can claim the title. But it's a bit of a stretch to claim that the Times, the Guardian and the Independent all stopped being quality papers when they moved from the broadsheet format.

Perhaps I should just contact the Telegraph, or Hitwise, and find out what their definitions mean. Because currently it's all a bit confusing.

Update: Simon Waldman (who knows a bit about this topic) discusses the Telegraph's claims.

Interesting article from the Telegraph about the rise of RSS and its (potential) impact on news media.

To the consumer, the main benefit of RSS services is that they make receiving news more efficient. Instead of looking at one news website, then another, and then another, each time looking for stories that are interesting, RSS pulls news from the sites for you, and can do so thematically.

If you want business news from Sky, the BBC and the Telegraph websites, but without the fashion or gardening articles, you can have it. Simply choose the relevant feeds, and leave out the others. You can then go straight to stories without having to go to news organisations' home pages. RSS also allows users to pick up news from unconventional sources such as weblogs, or blogs, which are opinions, reports and diaries published by individual internet users.

(via Simon Waldman)