April 2017 Writer of the Month Competition - week 1
An interesting start to the competition, with Donald Trump's best friends in Russia launching a Dedicated Denial of Service attack on Newsbiscuit in the closing hours of March. At least that's Tech Guy's version, but if you'd pushed the delete website button by mistake, blaming one of the most powerful men in the world is as good as it gets!
Anyway, the tech team, which to be fair is probably just Tech Guy, got the site up and running again in time for the first Front Page of April to be recorded and true to form Wrenfoe kicked off the competition. However he was swiftly followed by YaBasta who has so far managed to glean a Front Page, a NiB and the first Left Alert of the month, pushing him clear into the lead for the first half of the week despite Wren having a second FP within days. YaBasta has been overtaken by Wrenfoe again towards the end of the week, but has written a few strong subs in recent days, so this race is far from over. I've had a raft of subs posted, including one I'd completely forgotten about written over a week earlier and find myself in the lead - just.
The editor(s) this week have given the tickers a right beasting, with an average of six new tickers each day. There has been some criticism around the amount uploaded, especially as at one point there were over twenty cycling around at a time, however I suspect two things have happened - one, the editor(s) like one liners and are happy to give them an airing and two, I think they have been leaving them up to give me a chance to capture them. If so, many thanks. Right now I'm catching them more or less in real time - I leave a Word document open on my desktop at work and scrape the details of all the new posts as I notice them in between actually working for a living. Leaving tickers up for two days would be a help for those times life gets busy, as there isn't a ticker archive to delve into, but I think that's all we need for the purposes of this competition.
The upshot of the ticker burst is that a record amount of names have seen their work posted in the first week of the competition. Whether future editors will keep up the rate of posting (and in a large way that can only happen if enough suitable tickers are submitted first) remains to be seen. I had quite a few tickers selected along with a NiB and a FP from a sub I thought had sunk, and that's what pushed me marginally to the top of the leaderboard, however I suffer from altitude sickness, so don't expect me to climb much higher.
Another notable feature of this week is three hat tips, to Midfield Diamond, Oxbridge and Dick Everyman, which is the first time we've scored for these. Nobody is going to get Unofficial Writer of the Month off the back of hat tips, but it could easily make the difference in a close run competition.
Here's the leaderboard after one week of the competition:
Anyway, the tech team, which to be fair is probably just Tech Guy, got the site up and running again in time for the first Front Page of April to be recorded and true to form Wrenfoe kicked off the competition. However he was swiftly followed by YaBasta who has so far managed to glean a Front Page, a NiB and the first Left Alert of the month, pushing him clear into the lead for the first half of the week despite Wren having a second FP within days. YaBasta has been overtaken by Wrenfoe again towards the end of the week, but has written a few strong subs in recent days, so this race is far from over. I've had a raft of subs posted, including one I'd completely forgotten about written over a week earlier and find myself in the lead - just.
The upshot of the ticker burst is that a record amount of names have seen their work posted in the first week of the competition. Whether future editors will keep up the rate of posting (and in a large way that can only happen if enough suitable tickers are submitted first) remains to be seen. I had quite a few tickers selected along with a NiB and a FP from a sub I thought had sunk, and that's what pushed me marginally to the top of the leaderboard, however I suffer from altitude sickness, so don't expect me to climb much higher.
Another notable feature of this week is three hat tips, to Midfield Diamond, Oxbridge and Dick Everyman, which is the first time we've scored for these. Nobody is going to get Unofficial Writer of the Month off the back of hat tips, but it could easily make the difference in a close run competition.
Here's the leaderboard after one week of the competition:
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