[press] An Express Year .. a fascinating look at the varieties of Daily Express headlines for a year … ‘Speaking of princesses, Diana remained dead: DIANA INQUEST SAMPLES SWITCHED (May 10), DIANA DEATH FILM COVER-UP (Jul 2), DIANA POLICE FACE ARREST (Jul 22), DIANA’S SECRET ENGAGEMENT (Aug 17), PRINCES BACK IN DIANA’S FLAT (Dec 18)’

[press] Honest Daily Mail Clarifications And Corrections …

[dailyfail] Hear Me Wail … Pictures from the Daily Mail of people looking sad while standing next to or holding the thing that has made them sad.

[notw] Rupert Murdoch – A Portrait Of Satan … great collection of archive material on Rupert Murdoch from Adam Curtis – guest starring Robert Maxwell and Woodrow Wyatt (remember them?)…

Then – in 1995 – Murdoch begins to change. He decides he likes Tony Blair and tells [Woodrow] Wyatt he may support him at the coming election. Wyatt can’t believe it. He had thought that Murdoch would always support the Conservatives.

And then Murdoch does something worse. He tells the editor of the News of the World to cut back on the column that he had allowed Wyatt to write every week.

Wyatt is in despair. There is a wonderful moment in the diaries when Wyatt sleeps all night on the floor of his study next to the phone waiting for Murdoch to ring.

He never does.

[press] Has Rebekah Brooks Been Sacked Yet? … ‘No’

[press] Will The Guardian bring down Rupert Murdoch? … ‘It is, frankly, an amazing story. The indomitable patriarch who will shortly be forced to plead age and infirmity; his headstrong son whose eagerness to do what his father would have done will shortly doom him; the loyalists who will unquestionably fall on their swords; an upending of the moral landscape in which the miscreants once happily functioned; and the virtuous newspaper, perhaps the last great newspaper, with a last great editor, who, long waiting for and never believing it would get such an opportunity, now has the devil in its sights.’

[newspapers] Happy Mothers Day … (With Love, from The Sunday Times Magazine.)

[guardian] Their Questions Answered … a blog that attempts to answer the rhetorical questions posed on the letters page of the Guardian Weekend magazine every week …‘No rhetorical questions were posed in the Letters page of the Guardian Weekend magazine, Saturday 15 January 2011. As a result we are going to spend the next week reassessing our lives and purposes.’

[media] The Death of One Middle Class Woman is Equal to that of Six Prostitutes, Reveals UK Media …

The recent tragedy where two hot air balloonists were killed was quite rightly headline news.” revealed one British reporter.

“But if it had been two prostitutes flying that balloon it wouldn’t have got anywhere near the same coverage, though it might have made page 5 of The Sun, with a headline something like Slag, Bang, Wallop!”

“It would take about twelve prostitutes to die in a balloon crash to make headline news. I’m not sure why twelve prostitutes would be flying a balloon, but I guess if you had enough money and a fetish for that sort of thing then anything is possible.

[press] Overheard in the Newsroom …

Editor to no one in particular: “Can’t we just have a normal murder?”

[news] The News … Charlie Brooker on the news coverage about Raoul Moat …‘The hunt for Raoul Moat got the news so flustered, it shrieked its reports at a pitch several hundred octaves above satire. Beneath a photograph of Britain’s Most Wanted Man as an infant, The Sun ran the caption “Cute baby … but two-month-old Moat clenches his fists”. On the front page, his estranged mother apparently wished him dead.’

[press] News in Briefs … the wit and wisdom of Page 3 girls …

HOLLIE says there is no need to panic over the Chancellor’s spending cuts. She said: “£6.2billion sounds like a colossal figure. But if you imagine public spending as a giant pizza, we’re talking about barely a few anchovies. And I can’t stand the salty little beggars anyway.”

[funny] What have we today? … great collection of green ink letters written to newspapers in the early nineties …‘My eight-year-old boy is a strange lad. He’s bothered about the planet and interested in butterflies and insects as well as other animals. He never watches football. Do you think he’s going to be gay? (Daily Star)’

[people] The Reporter Who Time Forgot … Remembering Cornelius Ryan the author of The Longest Day and A Bridge To Far …

He had sold, he believed, between 25 and 35 million copies of The Longest Day and 400,000 hardcover copies of The Last Battle in the United States alone. Yet each book had cost him some $150,000 to research. “I have no less than 7,000 books on every aspect of World War II. My files contain some 16,000 different interviews with Germans, British, French, etc,” he wrote. “Then there is the chronology of each battle, 5×7 cards, detailing each movement by hour for the particular work I’m engaged in. You may think this is all a kind of madness, an obsession. I suppose it is.”

[dailyfail] Labour MP tells constituent: ‘Life can only get better – if you stop reading the Daily Mail’ …

I remember once I had a woman come in who was really on the edge of a breakdown. She was talking about civil war and chaos, immigrants coming up the lanes of Sunderland with knives between their teeth to murder her. She was really in a terrible state. “I just said to her ‘What paper do you read, love?’ and, of course, it was the Daily Mail. I just said ‘stop reading it and you’ll find life gets better.’ That’s the only advice I could offer.

[tabloids] Page 3 Girls Fears Hung Parliament, Proportional Respresentation …‘Becky is concerned by the prospect of electoral reform in a hung parliament.’

[dailyfail] 100 Essential Phrases To Include In A Letter To The Daily Mail …‘and immigration that is out of control. – Steve Guff (ex-pat), Alicante, Spain’ [via Bad Journalism]

[funny] The Daily Mail Song …‘Ian Huntley gets his own jacuzzi and gym in jail.’ [via Belle de Jour]

[london] Darling At War With “Bully” Brown … apparently this was the last Evening Standard Headline Board produced on December 12 – Can anybody confirm that?

[london] 2009 in Evening Standard headlines … Samizdata.net on the Evening Standard’s 2009 Headline Boards …‘At first the guys giving it away carried on with the billboards, but I knew that this practice would soon fade away. If no money is being made in the street from these newspapers, why go to all the bother of advertising them in the street. So it is that if you click on the last picture of all, you see that where there used to be informatively alarming stories about doom and disaster, now there are only forlorn signs saying that the ES now costs nothing.’ [thanks Phil]

[london] Evening Standard Headline Crisis 2009 … another years worth of the best of the headline boards from the Evening Standard – and probably the last due to it going free …


Click on the images for the full set

[health] Kill or Cure? … a website analysing The Daily Mail’s cancer coverage…‘Help to make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.’

[doom] Doomwatch … calculating what we should be scared of today .. ‘Right now, the Daily Mail thinks you should be quaking in your boots about: murder, swine flu, iran, north korea, thatcher.’

[press] The Daily Mail Dictionary …‘Cancer: a life-threatening disease caused by everything, and cured by everything else.’ [via Moreish]

[press] Michael Wolff:‘Newspapers stopped working a long time ago and a better means of doing their job is readily available. It’s an asinine debate. Who wouldn’t want their news delivered in a form that was searchable, saveable, resendable, which you can talk back to, which is linked to other relevant news, which allows you to read as lightly or as deeply as you wanted to, and which combines text, pictures, and video?’ [via Journalista]

[press] The Evening Standard Says Sorry …‘This poster campaign seeks to signal the changes on the way by apologising for various perceived sins, including complacency, predictability and the afore-mentioned negativity. None of the posters mention the newspaper by name, but simply carry its Eros logo.’

[press] Richard Littlejohn Audit 2008: Year Of The Nazi …‘I have concluded that 2008 for Richard was very much the year of the ‘Nazi’. Littlejohn gave us the: ‘elf ‘n’ safety nazi’, ‘road safety nazi’, ‘anti-smoking nazi’, ‘eco-nazis’, ‘dustbin nazis’, ‘recycling nazis’, ‘diversity nazis’, ‘tinpot nazis’, ‘condiment nazis’, ‘nail-varnish nazis’, ‘noise abatement nazis’ and ‘City of London Corporation safety nazis.’ [via More(ish)]

[health] The Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project …‘A blog following the Daily Mail’s ongoing mission to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into those that cause or cure cancer.’ [via Mondo a-go-go]

[news] Brighton and Hove Argus Headline Boards …‘King Alfred is Dead’ [via Qwghlm]

[funny] The Bile Card …‘In the event of my death I would like my gall bladder to be hurled forcibly at the Editor of the Daily Mail.’

[media] Currybetdotnet: The Daily Star’s unique approach to promoting RSS feeds …‘I so wish I had been in the meeting when someone said, “You know….we could get a topless bird to hold the RSS icon…”‘

[news] Gems from the archive of the New York Times — Kottke finds some interesting articles in the recently opened archives of the New York Times including a report on the Sinking of the Titanic and the first mention of the Internet in the paper during February 1993.

[maddy] Maddy: TV torture for the ADD generation — The Register on the media storm around the McCann Case …

‘Consider the pace at which the story unfolds. Nobody is in control of it, which means it occasionally gets quite dull. We can’t fast forward or time-switch. We’re not invited to phone in and vote for which suspect we would like to see arrested. Key scenes and pieces of information are kept from us in a way that would defeat the point of a show like Big Brother. But we find this all the more compelling. The one nod to conventional broadcasting principles is that the ratings have mattered right from the beginning. When there was a risk that they might slump, David Beckham was drafted in to speak on the matter, thus giving the story a new boost. Most grippingly of all, we have no idea what genre of story we are watching, so have no idea how or when it might end.’

[blogs] Mail Watch — I’ve been reading Mail Watch as the Daily Express dropped the Diana Conspiracies and concentrated on the McCann Case (the chain of front page headlines is currently 8 days!).

[funny] The London Evening Standard Headline Generator — surreal randomly generated headlines taken from the London Evening Standard’s Headline Boards – Thanks Holly! …

[press] The Ten Things Most Likely to be on The Daily Express Front Page — Currybetdotnet analyses the Daily Express so you don’t have to …‘I’ve looked at just over 150 stories which have been published on the front page of The Daily Express during the first three months of 2007, and I think I’ve come up with the definitive list of the ten most important things that have happened so far this year. Well, according to The Daily Express, anyway…’

[news] Ten things I learned by reading the Daily Express — one man reads the Daily Express so you don’t have to …’7: There is insufficient police brutality.’ [via Pete's Linklog]

[f.e.a.r] Reasons to be Fearful — Bloggerheads on what scares Sun Readers:‘You worry more about CRIME, HEALTH and MONEY than you did 15 years ago. But it is the horrors of porn on the INTERNET, chatroom PERVS, VIOLENCE against kids, DRUGS and the hoodie YOB CULTURE which cause you most anxiety.’

[media] From Mail Watch – vote for your favourite Daily Mail or Daily Express Headline of 2005 …‘Death by Suntan’ [via plasticbag.org]

[news] Cardiff Terrifies Me — headline posters from the South Wales Echo …‘CARDIFF – Muslim Pupils in Sausage Roll Blunder’ [via Metafilter]

[newspapers] BBC News: How can papers afford to give away DVDs? …‘The great DVD giveaway is just the latest instalment in Fleet Street’s endless turf war. “It’s digital bingo,” says Greenslade, referring to the period, 20 years ago, when tabloid editors employed prize-winning bingo games to woo new readers.’

[blogs] The Daily Mail Watch — they read the Daily Mail so we don’t have to …‘Jon & I have realised that we might have to actually shell out some more dosh to the Filthy Rag as some of their webcontent is subscription only.’

[iraq] The Reporter Who’s The Talk Of The Town — a profile of Seymour Hersh …‘Thanks to Hersh, what amounts to an alternative history of the “war on terror” has unfolded. He has reported, inter alia, on the bungled efforts to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, on the flaws in the legal case against Zacarias Moussaoui (the alleged “20th hijacker” of 11 September) and on the business dealings of the neo-conservative super-hawk Richard Perle. That report led to Perle’s resignation as chairman of the Pentagon’s influential Defence Policy Board, and to angry mutterings from Perle that he would sue. Nothing happened.’

[humour] Ugandan Discussions — the covers of Private Eye … [via del.icio.us/kevan]

[guardian] Guardian Rejects Tabloid — the Guardian won’t be producting a tabloid edition of the newspaper. Alan Rusbridger:‘We’re still in the phoney war stage, with millions being ploughed into marketing a dual strategy which is, ultimately, unaffordable. No one I know believes that the Independent intends to keep publishing in two sizes. It will drop the broadsheet as soon as it can – and the Times is also trying to push its readers towards the tabloid.’ [via Words of Waldman]

[media] UK Newspaper “The Daily Star” Swipes Content From retroCRUSH …‘ On 1/05/04 I spoke with a the News Editor of “The Daily Star” named Kieran Saunders and what he told me takes the cake. He said, “Well, if it’s on the internet it’s up for grabs. You can’t copyright anything on the internet.” I told him that was untrue and he then refused to speak with me further, and said all future communication needed to be sent to their legal contact, Steven Bacon in London.’ [Related: retroCRUSH's Worst Sex Scenes Ever | via Boing Boing]

[media] Daily Mail Finally Embraces the Internet:‘…over half of all the Mail’s readers had an internet connection, making the launch a viable prospect commercially and editorially. “The question has always been not if but when we would launch. We believe that not only is the market ready but we’re ready in terms of how we build websites and make them profitable. More importantly, I believe the readers are ready,” said Mr Hart, the former Sunday Business managing director and Ask Jeeves chief executive who completed a five-year plan for the business before taking on the new job. The new website will have a strong community element, allowing Mail readers to vent their spleen on a range of message boards and interactive features.’

[blogs] MediaGuardian 100: #94. A Blogger …‘Do bloggers add clarity to a situation, or do they serve only to only confuse it further? And – a subject closer to some hacks’ hearts – why the hell are these people writing for free, anyway?’

[newspapers] Hate Mail — profile of Paul Dacre editor of the Daily Mail …‘One associate says that Dacre reminds more and more of Basil Fawlty — “intemperate and slightly mad” — every time he sees him. “The ideal Dacre story is one that leaves the reader hating somebody or something,” says one former Mail reporter, and what the paper really hates are the liberalism and multiculturalism at the heart of Britain’s changing society. The Mail has worked itself into a lather over asylum-seekers, but accuse it of racism and you come up against Dacre’s brilliantly orchestrated campaign to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice.’