Paper Monitor
10:58 UK time, Wednesday, 20 December 2006
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The-High-Street-in-freefall story has become as much a fixture of a 21st Century Christmas as those piercing LED decorative lights and celebrity chefs causing a run on a certain ingredient according to pushy supermarket PRs.
And just as it looks like new-found Christmas prudence is about to send the economy down the tubes… nothing much happens.
It's not helped by the fact that today's front pages can't seem to agree on whether the High Street really is in crisis, or not.
Compare and contrast the following:
- The Telegraph's front page story, "Worried shoppers rein in spending", speaks of a downturn in shoppers on the High Street and a "lack of consumer confidence and... economic downturn"; with
- Metro's splash: "£6billion shopping spree in two days". Here we're told by the director general of the British Retail Consortium there are "encouraging predictions for the retail sector".
The 
