Mark Pack

There has been widespread praise for Portsmouth Council after it was discovered that on average its staff only spend 11 seconds a day using Facebook. Despite the huge growth in the number of people using Facebook and the growing number of hours spent on the site by its users, Portsmouth Council staff are barely using the site. It may even be that much of this time is spent outside of work hours.

[Ed.: Stop! That's not how these stories are meant to be written. Rewind. Add all the numbers up to make it sound as big as possible. Rewrite. And here we go again...]

Facebook is going to be banned at Portsmouth Council after new figures outrageously revealed that its 4,500 staff waste an average of 413 hours a month in total on the site. The Taxpayers’ Alliance is outraged: “People are employed to work hard for the taxpayer and this is clearly a waste of public money”.

[Ed.: Much better. That's just how The Telegraph or Daily Mail would write up this sort of story. Think you've got the hang of this now.]

A cynic asks: do you think anyone at the Taxpayers Alliance spends 11 seconds a day on Facebook? Or The Telegraph or the Daily Mail? Just wondering.