Paper Monitor
10:58 UK time, Monday, 1 December 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
It's the first full week of operations at the Independent since it was reported that it would soon be moving out of its Docklands base and into the Kensington offices of the Daily Mail.
Paper Monitor has some experience of living in shared accommodation. It's all smiles and backslapping when you're moving in, then a few days later you realise it's all washing up rotas and whose turn is it to clean the toilet. Pretty soon it becomes apparent that the "senior tenant" rules the roost and defines the character of the house.
So the question on everybody's lips is of course: "Is the Independent going to end its obsession with bedraggled polar bears and get on with the serious business of comparing celebrities' 'knee ages' with their real age?"
Page three of the Daily Mail today is a couple of pap shots of Helen Mirren at the beach, which it compares unfavourably with another recent pap shot of La Mirren in a bikini.
Does the Indy give in and take a bit of the same to please its new landlord? No. Page three is gloriously, unmistakably, incorrigibly Indy - a piece about wind farms.
The Observer cattily reported the mocking use of the term "Endipendent" (err, shouldn't it at least be "Endependent") on Fleet Street, but today's paper shows there is life in the old dog yet.
Over in the Metro, there are seismic changes afoot. The paper's only gone and had its first redesign since its founding in 1999. There's more space for the celebrity news of Guilty Pleasures and there's a new column on the internet called the Ridiculant.
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