Paper Monitor
12:50 UK time, Monday, 1 February 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
In the great news cauldron there are really only a few ingredients.
Hacks have the terms "diary" and "off-diary" for much of the work they do. "Off-diary" is all the stuff generated by reporters ferreting out the news in the time-honoured but now increasingly rare fashion.
But "diary" is manna from heaven for all those hard-pressed news editors dealing with ever-dwindling bands of reporters.
"Diary" is everything you know is going to happen in advance. Court cases, debates in Parliament, product launches, surveys, reports, buildings opening and sporting occasions.
You can write the backgrounders for these pieces well in advance, get them subbed and they are ready to run at a moment's notice. In this era of increased prominence for websites and the speed with which they break news, it's more important than ever.
Of course, if the diary item is the Queen opening a new garden, you can write the piece in advance because you know exactly what is going to happen. But what if the outcome is uncertain?
You may have wondered how a newspaper website can have lengthy backgrounders on a guilty defendant in a court case, excoriating him for all his sins. What would have happened if he had been found not guilty?
The short answer is that news desks prepare two complete sets of backgrounders for guilty and not guilty verdicts. In cases with multiple charges or multiple defendants they may even prepare a slew of partially guilty pieces to cover all bases.
Publishing the wrong backgrounder for the verdict is a moment for wailing, gnashing of teeth, and occasionally even sacking of staff.
The defeat of Andy Murray in the Australian Open final is a classic "diary" scenario. On Friday, news editors will have been asking sports editors about Murray's odds of winning.
They would have been thinking about colour from pubs in Dunblane, with people in blue and white face paint. A picture gallery of Murray stretching back to childhood. An analysis of his game. A news story predicting he will soon be number one. A history of British players not winning grand slams.
Of course, come the day and the defeat there's a quandary, some of this prepared stuff can still be used, but the news editors know that the appetite among readers after a defeat may be limited.
The Independent has ploughed on regardless, a victim to "diary" fundamentalism. It gives pages two and three of the main newspaper to the defeat, with a piece by a psychologist on what Murray needs to do mentally.
The Daily Mirror takes a more reasonable line, offering page 11 to a crying Murray and then relegating the rest of the stuff to sport.
The Daily Telegraph, surely tennis's home newspaper on a purely socioeconomic basis, offers a teeny-weeny front page photo that essentially says "go to sport, this loser doesn't deserve any more space in news".
One thing all the papers are agreed on is that Murray nailed a quote: "I can cry like Roger, it's a shame I can't play like him."
It's also a shame that he left a load of news editors crying over spiked copy too.
The 
