Paper Monitor
10:26 UK time, Monday, 2 February 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Snow! Not just everywhere in the UK, but in London. And for Fleet St, that means it's proper news.
But as the blanket only well and truly descended as the papers were being put to bed, each will have awoken this morning to blink in wonder at the transformation from grey to white.
Well that's Tuesday's front pages and photo spreads sorted then - or, in the case of the Daily Express, pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9 and 10, not to mention a pull-out souvenir special and a readers' offer of free tickets to see the snow.
But Monday's papers for the most part look properly out of date, prematurely relegated to chip wrappers as the printing presses whirled away in the snowy night.
Well done to the Express for getting on top of the big story early, picturing the Queen sheltering under a brolly as a few flakes fall. Others to be quick off the blocks are the Times (its headline very sensibly warning drivers "Pack food, blankets and spade"), Daily Mirror (snow-covered motorway squeezed into one column on the front page) and a poster front on Metro - equally unsurprising, as its commuting readership is primarily concerned with how to get to and from work. Its headline? "-5C and we're all going snowhere".
Later editions of the Guardian replace the centre page big picture of Chinese New Year to one of a snow-shrouded Millennium Bridge; a lone dark figure hunched with cold, and St Paul's Cathedral barely visible in the background.
The Express takes a more playful approach, balancing the obligatory traffic chaos photo with a Scotty dog leaping to catch a snowball in its mouth.
The Daily Telegraph's thoughts turn to all that is deep and crisp and even in its new regular "Snapshot" panel on page two, which lists the "top five things people want to see return" with little icons to represent each. Squeezed in between "Bobbies on the beat" at number one and "children playing in the street", comes "snow at Christmas". Eh? How does that work? "Dear Met Office, could you see to it that in future we have snow at Christmas".
Is Paper Monitor missing something? Has snow been banned at Christmas by officious local government workers for health and safety reasons? (For those with an eye for detail, the two others on the list are Top of the Pops and Opal Fruits.)
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