CorpComms Magazine

There were 123 mentions of Hester's £963,000 bonus in tabloid articles in the second half of January up from ten mentions in the first half, representing a twelvefold increase.

 

The Sun compared Hester's remuneration to that of a soldier in the British Army in Afghanistan running with the headline: 'RBS banker earns hero's annual pay in three days'. The Daily Mail led with the Hester bonus as its headline story on Friday. 

 

The picture was similar for UK broadsheets. Just one article was written on the Hester bonus in the first week of January. But by the middle of the month, the number of mentions had risen to 52. By the end of the month there had been 215 mentions in UK broadsheets.

 

The Costa Concordia disaster and the London 2012 Olympics were the biggest stories in the tabloids for the whole month both garnering 405 mentions each in broadsheet articles. 

 

The Eurozone crisis continued to dominate the broadsheets with 1,054 mentions in January.