#illicitencounters.com

Back in August, our shopping habits were under scrutiny:

How to spot a cheating spouse? Check their shopping basket

Bored spouses looking for an extra-marital affair are more likely to shun the bargain bin in favour of more upmarket supermarket brands, according to a new survey.

Although the poultry and vegetable displays may not be the most romantic setting, researchers have found that the weekly food shop is for some a prime opportunity to catch someone's eye while checking out the "deal of the week" at the same time.

Source: Telegraph, 16 August 2013

Infidelity in aisle three: Is shopping at Waitrose a sign a chap is cheating?

Ladies, has your other half taken to shopping solo at Waitrose? Gents, is the woman in your life popping to Sainsbury’s a lot?

Then it seems you may have cause to worry about your relationship.

A survey has examined the shopping habits of those who are considering an extra-marital affair.

It found that the number one supermarket for such men is Waitrose, while for women it is Sainsbury’s. Tesco, Asda and the Co-op also featured prominently.

Source: Daily Mail, 16 August 2013

Who conducted the survey?

Dating website IllicitEncounters.com quizzed their 800,000 members to find out more about their shopping and cheating habits.

IllicitEncounters - an 'extramarital dating' website. It's fair to say their users perhaps don't reflect the habits of your average Waitrose shopper. What we've found, if we actually trust the results (and I wouldn't, personally), is that users of an affairs website also shop at Waitrose.

What we haven't found is that people who shop at Waitrose have affairs - and we especially haven't found that shopping at Waitrose is a sign your spouse is having an affair. Which, universally, was the headline of the coverage.

View the original press release.

A few days ago I highlighted a story, based on a press release from an 'extra-marital dating website', which took two Daily Mail journalists to write - even though 71% of the story was copied exactly from the original press release. You can catch up on the details here if you missed it.

Well, it appears there may be more to this than I first thought - after I tweeted the two journalists involved directly, I had the following exchange with Andrea Childs:

It's the first time I've seen this press release or article. No idea why my name is on it... I do interviews for YOU mag so maybe name left on a template from old feature put online? I am going to check.

This, then, asks an interesting question: did the Daily Mail really attribute a story to a journalist who had seen neither the press release nor the finished article? Simply by neglecting to delete her name from a submission template?

If so, we're in the quite amusing position whereby the Daily Mail are so used to copy/pasting entire articles, they'll even copy whatever name is on the submission form - and their fact-checking skills are so atrophied as to entirely miss the error.

There was bad news for footballers the world over recently, as a fourteen-paragraph news article written by two Daily Mail journalists ranked the sportsmen lowest in the 'sexy profession' charts:

Sorry Becks, women have rated the sexiest professions ... and 'vain and over-confident' footballers come last

Previously it has been assumed that most women would jump at the opportunity to date David Beckham, but not if the latest research is anything to go by.

A new survey asked women what they thought the sexiest profession was for a partner and the top result has been revealed as a musician or artist, while footballers come last with just 1 per cent of voters finding the athletic profession sexy.

Source: Daily Mail, 29 January 2013

There was no appearance in the list, of course, for journalists, but I'm sure the pair at the Daily Mail - Andrea Childs and bad-pr regular Bianca London - fare perfectly well for themselves.

Quite why it took two professional journalists to pen fourteen paragraphs of copy isn't clear - especially when the copy came from a press release by extramarital 'dating' website IllicitEncounters:

How much of the fourteen-paragraph news article came from the press release, and how much from the two professional journalists credited with writing it? Churnalism.com has the answers...

That's just 29% of the news story coming from the professionals at the Daily Mail - or just less than 15% each. The rest was penned by IllicitEncounters' PR guy Mike Taylor, who defended his work to me over Twitter:

"It's not for me to decide what is actual news but as for the research I can assure you of it's (sic) legitimacy"

This, I think, is where the world of Bad PR gets interesting. Let's for a moment leave aside the belief that the research is legitimate (Mike may well believe it is, but very valid issues exist around cherry-picking, leading question wording, self-selected sample groups, poor polling methodology and - in the case of surveys via companies such as OnePoll - the incentivisation of participants to take part in surveys not designed for them, and to spend as little time as possible on their participation). 

Instead, let's take a look at where the responsibility lies here. Who is the bad guy? Is it Mike Taylor, creating opportunistic pseudo-articles ('Isn't it time we had a more progressive Pope?' asks find-and-fuck dating website) in order to get his client into the press? Isn't that just Mike's job, and as he rightly says there ought to be someone out there filtering out the nonsense created by people like him?

How about Bianca London and Andrea Childs - isn't it their responsibility to write better stories, to ignore useless PR puff-pieces such as this nonsense from IllicitEncounters, to use their platform to find real stories and report what's really important? Or is it that, as a primarily fashion journalist, Bianca is instead repeatedly tasked with producing inordinate levels of content for the largest and least discerning online publication in the world, including 13 articles between February 14-15 alone, and in August last year as many as 101 articles in a single month? How would even the best of journalists keep up standards under such conditions?

Perhaps it's the fault of the newspaper - shouldn't the Mail Online put a stop to the damaging 'publish anything' mentality which pressurises journalists into the open arms of PR types from seedy websites and lowers the standards of journalism across the board? Or is it that in a world of free online news and falling revenues, the anything-goes publishing mentality keeps the advertising revenue stream profitable and facilitates the little genuine journalism that remains, as the newspaper survives as a profit-making enterprise?