How we blamed the Queen for a hold-up in Paris

  • 03/01/2017
Queen Elizabeth II
Contrary to what our article suggested, the Queen did not engage in criminal activity (Reuters file)

By Shaun Davies and Ella Prendergast

You may have noticed that Newshub's redesigned website launched in December.

As part of this, we took the necessary step of moving our entire photo archive across to a new database.

Unfortunately, more than 5000 of these images shared file names with another one (for instance, we had around 20 photos named "police.jpg").

Without getting too technical, only one of these images made it through to the new system in each case.

This resulted in a number of mismatches between article headlines and the photos in them.

Newshub.co.nz's Queen Elizabeth false filename
Original photo file name: UK

Most were inconsequential. But some were so epic. For instance, Queen Elizabeth's photo appeared on a story about a hold-up in Paris.

Golfer Lydia Ko became a button-cute pre-schooler, Richie McCaw appeared to be undertaking some interstellar adventure racing and a goldfish became implicated in a violent ocean attack.

Newshub.co.nz's kiwi false filename
Original photo file name: kiwi
Newshub.co.nz's Richie McCaw false filename
Original photo file name: Richie
Newshub.co.nz's Lydia Ko false filename
Original photo file name: golfer
Newshub.co.nz's Tui false filename
Original photo file name: tui
Newshub.co.nz's Richie McCaw false filename
Original photo file name: McCaw
Newshub.co.nz's wearable arts false filename
Original photo file name: supernova
Newshub.co.nz's kiwi inventors false filename
Original photo file name: tree
Newshub.co.nz's swordfish attack false filename
Original photo file name: fishy

It's an important lesson - pay attention to the detail, because you never know when it will come back to bite you.

Newshub.