The story centres around apparent special treatment for Ms Dalzell, who has a criminal conviction. She has managed to avoid wearing an unsightly tag around her ankle because, she claims, it might be detrimental to her modelling career on late-night television.
One reader sent a swiftly-penned complaint:
Really? You run with that as your top story? Would you have done it for a builder because the tag rubbed his leg in his work boots?Well, yes, we ran that as our top story. Except we didn't, actually, choose to put it there.
We work out the top media story based on the amount of people who have clicked "read more" on the various news pages on Media UK: and then filtering those for news items posted in the last 24 hours prior to sending it. The most popular becomes the top story that we put in this version of the daily email. (Since you can get it at a time of your choosing, you've probably worked out that the headlines will change throughout the day). Generally speaking, we get the most interesting story, as chosen by humans.
On this day, the Sophie Dalzell story was the eighth most-clicked story, but all the ones above it were first posted over 24 hours ago. Therefore, as the most popular new story within the last 24 hours, it was the top story in our emails. A different version of the Sophie Dalzell story was at #13.
The question "Would you have done it for a builder because the tag rubbed his leg in his work boots?" is an interesting one.
The ever prurient Daily Mail is frothing at the mouth about a convicted criminal being able to avoid part of her punishment based on the fact she's on those late-night television channels (some of which are owned by Richard Desmond who also publishes a rival newspaper). There is some validity in their faux-indignation.
The builder story probably wouldn't have made the Daily Mail; and probably wouldn't have been as interesting to the 250,000 people who come to Media UK every month. So, it wouldn't have appeared in our email at all, let alone lead it: but then, that's a feature of the automated system that we've built.
So: a regrettable story to lead with? Yes. Did we decide to lead with it? No. Is it blatant sexism on our part? No: though given that it's the most popularly-followed news story on the website that day, perhaps all our visitors aren't similarly enlightened.