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Paper Monitor

09:47 UK time, Friday, 14 December 2007

Dearest Pa(per Monitor readers)

I was so pleased to receive your letters, particularly those which didn't mention getting coats, double deckers or David Brent. I would like you to know just how much I admire you for the marvellous way you keep faith with us.

Enough Diana pastiche. There's bags of the real thing in the papers - though it's not really explained why Diana's handwriting is shown in all its modern-woman style, whereas the Duke of Edinburgh's letters are shown in plain text.

The story which strangely didn't get as much coverage as it might have done was the opening of the first Ikea in Northern Ireland, complete with First Minister (Ian Paisley) and Deputy First Minister (Martin McGuinness) in attendance, and pictured - slightly uncomfortably - on a red leather sofa together. Was it the sofa that was uncomfortable, one wonders?

Anyway, it's a story ripe for colourful telling - the Times slightly over-eggs the pudding, but its first paragraph is a worthy way in: "It is a rite of passage familiar to many couples: the endless wandering around trying to find the sofa beds, the hopeless attempts to master industrial-sized trolleys and the blazing row as you realise that your highly stylish, new Liatorp pedestal dining table is not, as your partner so accurately predicted, going to squeeze inside your Ford Fiesta."

Special mention to the Daily Mail for its headline "Philately will get you everywhere". File under: All you need to know.

But the big event today is a series of three full-page adverts in the formerly-known-as-broadsheet press advertising News Corporation. The ordinary reader might not know who News Corporation is (it's the publisher of the Times and the Sun), but by the end of the three pages you certainly have an idea about how assertive the company is being.

"Confronting the issues, pushing the debate, breaking the story, creating the new format, producing the next blockbuster," it says. "That's what we do."

(Paper Monitor is sure that another big media organisation used that particular phrase. Can't quite remember which one unfortunately.)

The whole venture is about emphasising that Mr Murdoch Sr has succeeded in his long-term ambition to own the Wall Street Journal, and that he has confounded pundits' predictions at every stage.

The tone is treading a fine line between confident and chippy. And strangely it is signed off with the phrase "We're News" (with the word News in massive blue font).