Been so busy today, I completely forgot it was April Fool’s Day. The Beeb today posted 10 news stories that sounded like April Fool’s jokes but were true and one that was – a clever promo for iPlayer about flying penguins. Meanwhile, Wikipedia tweaked the truth in its On This Day section and Today”s Featured Article about “storied ostrich jockey” Ima Hogg (a real person, apparently). For more on these, see CNet’s The Social blog. And check out the top 100 legendary April Fool’s hoaxes – including my all-time favourite, The Guardian’s 1977 brilliantly elaborate San Seriffe spoof, an in-joke for type lovers everywhere …. 
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The BBC has given its website a makeover featuring, amongst other things – wider pages with a more open design, bigger pictures and, just for us international readers, more prominent ads. See BBC News website editor Steve Herrmann’s blog for some of the reasons behind the changes. Audio and video is supposed to be embedded in the pages, although on many items it still pops up in that annoying separate player window. Generally, though, I think it’s an improvement on what is already IMHO one of the best sites on the web. The old site was starting to look too packed and busy – this looks much cleaner and is easier to read. However I do miss the handy subject tabs along the top as it means I now have to search down the left hand menu for items like sport and business – or scour the home page for “Sport Headlines”. And if we have to suffer ads, at least get a move on with that international version of the splendid iPlayer service!
Call me a cynic but Government’s announcement that it is cutting print advertising and its $42,000 worth of local newspaper subscriptions wouldn’t have anything to do with the Premier’s plans for a new daily newspaper would it? Sources tell me that Dr. Brown is pressing ahead with previously-stated plans to launch a new daily Government-run newspaper and that interviews have already taken place with some leading local journalists – although none will yet own up to having been approached. [Breezeblog, incidentally, can exclusively confirm he hasn’t been tapped up – and would anyway feel guilty about the truckload of taxpayers’ moola it would take for him to consider such an offer.] I’m not saying The Royal Monopoly couldn’t do without some competition but you can’t help thinking that the Daily Doc is likely to be little more than a propaganda sheet. Still, it will be interesting to see how this pans out because regardless of the politics, many of the Gazette’s long-suffering advertising clients will welcome a new daily vehicle if it treats them like the valuable customers they are and if enough of the reading public are fooled into thinking the Daily Doc is a real newspaper, the Gazette is going to have to considerably up its game.
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