Paper Monitor
09:25 UK time, Thursday, 28 October 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
"Introducing our brilliant new columnist," breathlessly exclaims the banner above the Daily Telegraph's masthead.
The paper has snared Allison Pearson - sometime chick-lit author, formerly of the Daily Mail, where she occupied the page previously inhabited by the redoubtable Lynda Lee-Potter - as the centrepiece of what Fleet Street used to call the "women's pages" and what most papers now refer to as the features section.
If the Telegraph's intention is to bolster its stereotypical readership of spluttering ex-brigadiers with a greater appeal to a female audience, Pearson is an obvious choice.
The author of I Don't Know How She Does It, a best-selling novel about the pressures of modern motherhood, she earned praise from the Mail's traditional admirers and detractors alike for a valedictory column in the paper in which she spoke frankly about her battle with depression.
Her knack for combining a columnists' necessary stridency with an informal openness and vulnerability is one of those qualities that sounds as though it should be easy, but Paper Monitor can't think of any other newspaper pundit who quite manages to pull it off.
While Private Eye see Pearson's return as fuel for its Polly Filler/Mummy For Old Rope parody, there is little doubt that the Telegraph's executives will hope she can reach the parts the rest of the title cannot - namely, the lucrative demographic of well-to-do shires ladies who might once have taken a mid-market tabloid but now find them a little too vulgar.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine the Telegraph's Simon Heffer praising those silent Home Counties Joan of Arcs who, spend days occupied with "driving her three boys to school, back and forth, back and forth, the self-replenishing pong mountain of PE kit (rugby for Matthew and Will, hockey for James) and all those parents' evenings" with nary a thank-you.
If a cynic were to point to this as a shameless pitch to a very narrow, albeit profitable demographic, they might be right.
But as a tactic it is certainly less heavy-handed than the Times' lead T2 feature, in which David Aaronovitch - not a gentleman noted for a snake-hipped, androgynous countenance - spends a week as a woman to better understand the female psyche.
Over a [subscription required] Aaronovitch learns to moisturise, attends a pilates class and has a manicure.
His conclusion? "I was amazed by how time-consuming being a working woman, just in appearance terms, is."
He could have turned to Pearson's column and saved himself the hassle.
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