Jersey in the news

As part of my job I often find myself searching for Jersey on Google, Google News or Google Blog Search - I’ll even occasionally look up the island on sites like IMDB, Wikipedia, TV.com and others.

The problem with searching for Jersey is that, unlike other places you get five different results.

1) The right result - general stories or sites about our little island
2) The Cow result - stories or websites about the famous Jersey Cows
3) Financial result - stories about the Jersey finance industry
4) The American result - the obvious stories about New Jersey
5) The Sports result - stories that refer to Yellow or Football Jersey’s

Results 4 and 5 are about ten times more common than results 1,2 and 3 combined. But you learn to live with it and look for stories on the third or fourth page instead.

Well unless it’s a day like today with a major news story that’s been reported around the world that is.

I’m not going to say anything about the story as I don’t know any more than has been reported in the media (I’ll include a few links but that’s it).

When a major story that features Jersey breaks - it goes everywhere. This hasn’t happened many times since I’ve been working for the BBC - in fact it’s happened more in the last year than in the previous four combined (I’ve been here just over five years now).

The first really big story was the football violence between English and Portuguese fans at the last world cup - I say violence but I didn’t actually see any myself - a small number of English fans got a bit riled and shouty and the Portuguese fans just celebrated.

The second was of the Jersey born Skydiver in New Zealand who fell something like 20,000 feet and survived - my article made the front page of DIGG for that one.

Two of the more recent ones have either been financial or political - one being the Wendy Alexander, campaign financing stuff in Scotland and the other being the more recent Granit Products (Northern Rock) story.

Of course the ‘abuse scandal orphanage‘ story as the Daily Mail so um… extremely puts it - eclipses anything thats been before.

But as I don’t really work in news, more featury content, I don’t have a direct involvement in these stories - unless I need to take photos (England v Portugal) or there is a feature angle to it.

That doesn’t exist in this story so I got to spend my weekend at home with my family - didn’t have to go into work.

So here are a few headlines for you:

Sniffer dog hunts for bodies in Jersey children’s home

Secrets behind children’s home

In fact - I’ll leave the headline lists to Google News.

You can also read the thoughts and opinions of the ex-Minister that first brought the abuse allegations and investigation to the publics attention - Senator Stuart Syvret.

But before I finish - back to finding Jersey online. Make the most of advanced search the minus is your friend.

If you go to Google News and search for Jersey - excluding the top item today because of ‘the story’ - here are the first three results (after that one) you’ll get.

New Jersey
The top of the Eastern Conference is awfully crowded, but the New Jersey Devils are hoping to do something about that. The surging Devils seek their seventh …

New Jersey Tech breaks Prairie View’s mark for futility
New Jersey Institute of Technology set a record for losses in a winless season after fallling to Utah Valley State 76-50 on Saturday. …

Dominant third period lifts Devils over Isles
Newark, NJ (Sports Network) - Zach Parise and Brian Gionta tallied in the third period to lift New Jersey over the New York Islanders, 4-2, at Prudential …

As you can see - of NO relevance to us in the original Jersey at all. So we use advanced search to refine things a little.

If you add things like sport, city, new and football to the DO NOT INCLUDE THESE TERMS box under the Advanced News Search window - you’ll get far fewer New Jersey related or Sport related articles returned.

Although it is still pretty ineffectual - what we really need is a new rule that EVERYONE should include GEO-IP data for the place they’re writing about in every post, article or page they put online.

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