Paper Monitor
14:03 UK time, Tuesday, 4 October 2011
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Obviously, as this is a column that celebrates Fleet Street, it would be wrong to get all catty.
But it would be remiss of us not to notice that a certain mid-market newspaper website is getting a flaming in the Twittersphere for wrongly running a guilty backgrounder... in a notable appeal case.
It's not really the error that is really getting everybody going, but the... well, suffice it to say Paper Monitor assumes that the person responsible will not be feeling the need to attend the University of East Anglia's celebrated creative writing course any time soon.
Moving on, and Paper Monitor must draw attention to something that was in yesterday's papers. Something that rather intrigued Paper Monitor.
The Guardian's Kira Cochrane did So far, so boring, you might say. But you'd be wrong.
Paper Monitor has never liked interviews with celebrities. Usually the bigger the celebrity, the lesser the insight.
These celebs - from A-list down - do "junkets" where the media queues up for interviews in order that said celeb may promote something - book, film, play, album etc.
Obviously, the implication is that said celeb would never agree to meet a grubby journalist and do an interview
Now if you were to go and speak to Lars von Trier you might have a reasonable hope he would say something newsworthy. But most of the celebs - with their PR minders - are buttoned up tighter than a very tightly buttoned thing.
You can only cringe as the feature writer is reduced to describing what the venue was like - usually a central London posh hotel. The carpet is plush, the doorknobs are shiny and the croissants are exceptionally buttery.
It's desperate stuff. And very hard for the newspaper to bill in any way worth billing.
Cochrane's interview does not start well. The sub who's handled it has picked out the following quote:
"I'm not sure people even think of me as an actor at all"
Now that, as one probably doesn't need to point out, is an exceedingly boring quote. As Muhammad Ali once told George Foreman: "Is that all you got?"
But then the interview shapes into something rather good. Cochrane really does a bang up job.
She should have a word with the sub though.
The 
