The Herald Sun has now apologised for naming Hamish Blake as Gold Logie winner, despite yesterday insisting it had not published his name.
The newspaper has come under fire from all corners, first for publishing the leak, then for denying it ever had.
It tried to turn the blame onto Google and NineMSN.
Journalists were evicted from the Media Room following the leak, around 2 hours before the result aired on Nine.
Here is the apology:
The Herald Sun regrets that, due to an internal error involving publishing protocols, we effectively named the Gold Logie winner ahead of time last night.
We apologise and hope it did not ruin viewers’ overall Logies experience.
The story was not published on the Herald Sun website or m-site or Tweeted by a Herald Sun employee. However, when it was placed into a holding environment to be pushed live after the embargo was lifted, the story inadvertently was able to be indexed by Google and therefore became searchable.
Google is in no way responsible for what happened. We did not intend to imply any error on Google’s behalf.
In effect, a page that was meant to be hidden, that was never intended to see the light of day until after an embargo was lifted at 12 midnight, was inadvertently published to the web and became searchable via Google. A story does not have to appear on our website to be available to search engines.
During the live testing, a link to an embargoed story naming the winner was momentarily created (by the Herald Sun) and (became searchable) by Google.
The error was certainly accidental in that there was no deliberate intention to break the strict Logies embargo.
If the Herald Sun didn’t want Google to index that page, there are many things it could have done to stop that from ever happening.
Now, that is a sincere apology from the Herald Sun
aka Murdoch’s News Limited.
Sgt Schultz – “I know nothing”
Was it also a News Ltd website that reported the wrong contestant as the winner of MasterChef series 1?
And was it a News Ltd website that published the name of the victim of the Packed To The Rafters car crash on its WA newspaper website before it had aired in WA?
They “hope it did not ruin viewers’ overall Logies experience”.
I think that if your on the net during the telecast of the awards then you should expect spoilers.
It wasn’t just a case of them revealing what had happened live before it hit TV screens. They revealed the name of the Gold Logie winner before it was even announced. Some of the nominees for the gold logie already knew they had lost because of the leak which wrecked the anticipation or excitement, as mentioned by Carrie Bickmore on The Project last night.
Well how about they air it Live
This whole saga has been the most interesting part of The Logies.
more importantly – how does someone be on air for 10 hours in a year and 1 – be nominated; 2 win ???
yes – i know the pwer of the net; then this needs to chnage
I don’t know if that’s a backflip so much as an explanation. It doesn’t contradict what they said yesterday, just clarifies it.
mistakes happen.. there are more important things than a gold logie.
I still don’t understand how they are claiming that it wasn’t published on their website…
At 10:02pm – @Ghostwhovotes on twitter published a link with the Logies winner. (twitter.com/#!/GhostWhoVotes/status/191496748064182272)
You can see when you click on the link provided in the tweet – or when you look at the info for the short-link (bit.ly/HL3OM5+) that the winner was published on heraldsun.com.au
It wasn’t on a staging server, it was put on the heraldsun website for all to see…
I don’t understand why the Herald Sun doesn’t just say “Sorry guys, we really screwed up” and stop trying to come up with some random story that it was search enginges that picked up the story.
I personally don’t see anything wrong with if. If the Logies and Nine aired the ceremony live then we wouldn’t have this problem.