Paper Monitor
11:00 UK time, Monday, 31 March 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
While the fashion in printed daily media has been to downsize from broadsheet to tabloid in recent years, visitors to the front page of the today will have noted a bucking of the trend with a new "go large" look.
Meanwhile, the newspaper which has come to personify the tabloid tag – the Sun - is showing distinctly broadsheet aspirations with a report from one of the world's most secretive countries – North Korea.
There's mention of the communist state's human rights record and your intrepid soaraway correspondent is given cause to have second thoughts about the paper's classic "How do you solve a problem like Korea" headline (Paper Monitor passim) when he is pulled aside by the authorities for questioning.
Over at the Express there's an interview with Britain's molecular gastronomer in chief – the aggressively bespectacled Heston Blumenthal. He's hardly Jamie Oliver, so how to engage the interest of the average Express reader? Simple – he's "THE REAL WILLY WONKA". (Paper Monitor apologies for being unable to convey the full effect of this headline, since it lacks the necessary swirly Wonka typeface.)
Finally, on to the Guardian, which has a very interesting rumination on the nature of letters pages. It exclusively reveals that "the Guardian's letters page, for example, is difficult to find online and poorly laid out". How frank.
The great Matthew Parris says in the article that he often reads the online response to his column, adding: "Some of it is interesting; some of it is fatuous, obsessive or insane. What's needed is an editor to filter out the nonsense and put the exchanges together with a bit of shape. I believe that's called a letters page."
Actually, Matthew, and with the greatest respect, that's called the Magazine Monitor.
But here's a line which feels eerily familiar. The piece says "Private Eye runs spoof letters from a 'Mike Giggler' - the sort of wit, familiar to all letters editors, who aims for the coveted, light-hearted spot with excruciating puns and weak jokes on the day's news."
Some things change, friends, some things stay the same.
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