Paper Monitor
13:32 UK time, Monday, 20 July 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
A collection of today's headlines:
"On the moon after perfect touchdown" - the Guardian.
"Man takes first steps on the moon" - the Times.
"Americans walk on the moon" - the Daily Telegraph.
"Armstrong Tweets moon landing" - Metro.
OK, apologies for the last one - that was an attempt at a joke. The 40th anniversary of the Moon landing has some of the papers delving into their archive to see how they reported the historic event all those years ago.
The Guardian and the Times go the extra mile by actually reproducing their original front pages as souvenir pull-outs. (The Telegraph merely does a cut-out on one of its comment pages, though it's not so small that you can't see the word "lunarnauts".)
Paper Monitor always gets a kick out of this sort of thing - finding its attention distracted by peripheral details. The Guardian comes over like the Halfords catalogue, with the paper's banner book-ended by display ads for a seat belt manufacturer and a type of brush for car washing.
The Times includes in its "Rest of the news" the promise of an "eight-page special report" on decimalisation and, tellingly, it refers to "Gaoled six: MP seeks investigation".
Forty years after the Eagle landed, it's a hard to think just how exciting an event it all was. The Times' write-up of the big story conveys some of the public's fascination.
"The astronauts reported to mission control that their steps tended to sink down about a quarter of an inch."
The Times also notes how Moscow Radio announced the news, while the Guardian tells readers Chinese newspapers and radio "kept silent about the Apollo 11 flight".
Paper Monitor wonders when, if ever, the people of China were officially informed of the event.
The 
