Paper Monitor
12:10 UK time, Friday, 5 October 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
It's day three of the Diana inquest, and the job description of picture editors might be summarised as "shooting fish in a barrel", such is the quantity of sensational until-now-unseen images emerging from the inquiry, gratis.
Until now, Metro has demoted the pictures, from paparazzos and CCTV cameras in the Paris Ritz, to its inside pages. So perhaps it is overcompensating today with its front page headline "A kiss before dying" next to picture of Dodi and Diana sharing a tender moment.
A kiss it ain't. The Mail and Telegraph opt for a more modest "embrace", but even that's overdoing it. Paper Monitor would suggest "nuzzle" or "nestle" although it would also concede that such words lack the impact when twinned with the concept of fragile mortality.
The Sun, meanwhile, takes the opportunity of a Dennis the Menace rebranding to imagine, though its cartoonist Tom Johnston, what a "thoroughly modern" Dennis cartoon strip should look like.
Spread across two pages, it's a dystopian scene of young men shooting at each other, allusions to teenage pregnancy and paedophilia, and happy slapping.
Gnasher, the original yob dog, asks who he can set his teeth into now that all the postmen are on strike and Dennis… Dennis has been Asbo'd.
All of which makes Paper Monitor pine for the days when the end of the working week was heralded by David Blunkett's weekly column for the Sun, in which his guide dog would occasionally take the role of author. Oh well, there's always Tracey Emin in the Indy...
The 
