Paper Monitor
10:20 UK time, Friday, 16 October 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
"Six-year-old boy gets the mother of all tellings off"
Hardly the stuff of front page headlines, but that would be the story if Metro were to update its lead.
The tale of six-year-old Falcon Heene had Paper Monitor wanting to walk the aisles of its train into work, disabusing glum commuters of the heart-breaking conclusion to Metro's front page story.
But the carriage was so crammed, it was a challenge just to open the paper itself.
In Metroland, young Falcon, was "feared dead... after drifting 8,000ft into the sky in a giant flying saucer-shaped balloon".
The boy, from Colorado, in the US, was thought to have climbed into a box attached to the balloon which belonged to his father, a weather enthusiast.
This being the US, efforts to rescue Falcon quickly spread to the rolling news channels - a step hardly hindered by the fact that when young Falcon's parents discovered he was missing, they called the local TV station before contacting the cops.
But the prognosis wasn't good, especially when the balloon eventually fell to earth and there was no sign of Falcon when it landed.
There were "some eyewitness reports suggesting the boy had fallen to his probable death", says Metro.
It's hardly the sort of story that gives you the weekend feel-good factor... unless, of course, you go down the old media route of, er, paying for a paper.
"Falcon goes up, up and away - but in a box in the attic, not his dad's flyaway balloon" is the Times' rather protracted take on the story.
Yes, it turns out that young Falcon had actually been hiding upstairs in the family home.
Checking back on the newswires for Thursday night reveals something about Metro's final copy deadline - this happy turn of events was first reported at 11.10pm, by Associated Press.
Events have developed even more since, with - that the whole episode was a publicity stunt. The theory came about after Falcon, interviewed live on CNN, said he had stayed quiet because his parents "said that we did this for a show".
But if Metro feels a tad humbled, then spare a thought for young Falcon who is now, well and truly grounded.
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