UFOs

I did briefly think about writing about lessons learnt from our coverage of the Croydon tram crash, but I think it's still a bit too soon - both for reasons of taste, and because the story is still very much developing. So I'll come back to it another day.

Instead I'll write about the second biggest story we had on the site this weekend - the Purley Cross UFO:



Now, at the risk of attracting the ire of alien spotters, this story is clearly a load of bollocks. And although these stories always boost your stats, it's a spike made mainly from non-local readers (a significant chunk of our readership started to come from the States after we published this on Saturday).

So it's important to minimise the risk of alienating (sorry, sorry!) your regular readers - but not killing the story entirely, or making your site a target for the global I Believe community, angered by your dismissing their latest spot.

I think the reporter, Maheesha Kottegoda, did a great job at doing this here. It's clearly tongue in cheek, but doesn't jeer at the alien spotter either. And, while trying not to sound too self-congratulatory, it seems to have worked - most of the comments are in the same gentle fun-poking spirit - and from local readers.

It would be interesting to hear of anyone else's experiences of reporting aliens - do you think we should stop doing it altogether, and stick to reporting real news? Or is a bit of harmless fun just that - harmless?