12 million Turks are not planning on moving to the UK

Part of a series looking at the spin behind a Daily Express article – see this post for details.

Now that we have established that Turkey is not about to join the EU, and even with the visa-free travel scheme which might be implemented for the Schengen Area, Turkish citizens are not allowed to move to the UK, it might seem a little pointless examining the Daily Express’s claims and survey findings.  However, comparing the newspaper article to the actual survey that was commissioned is a useful exercise in showing how statistics can be misleading and how, very often, journalists don’t understand the numbers they are reporting on.

Continue reading “12 million Turks are not planning on moving to the UK”

Turkey isn’t going to join the EU any time soon

Part of a series looking at the spin behind a Daily Express article – see this post for details.

The Daily Express is very sure of the future.  In their masthead, they state:

MORE than 12 million Turkish citizens are planning to move to Britain when the country joins the European Union, an explosive poll for Express.co.uk has revealed.

There are many things wrong with this single sentence, and over the next few posts we’ll look at some of them in depth – the number of Turks involved, what they are planning to do, and what the survey actually shows.  However, this post concerns the single word ‘when’. Continue reading “Turkey isn’t going to join the EU any time soon”

Is it good business sense to reduce your customer base?

The following graph would appear to be bad news.  This shows the reach of timesonline.co.uk – that is, the proportion of daily Internet users who visit the site.  For the first half of 2011, around 0.07% of Internet users visited the site each day; while that seems small, it’s a small proportion of a very large number.  Then, in late 2011, the number of users dropped significantly, and (other than a brief temporary increase in early 2013) the site now has a userbase around a quarter of its old level. Continue reading “Is it good business sense to reduce your customer base?”