Paper Monitor
13:21 UK time, Monday, 18 June 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
A colleague of Paper Monitor's happened to remark today that the Daily Star is cleaning up its act and going all respectable on the front page, at least.
We were wondering who might test out this hypothesis and realised, ahem, that would be Paper Monitor.
We've got hold of four copies of the paper. This is not a wide enough sample for a quantitative survey, we acknowledge.
But Paper Monitor had to pull these from a giant mound which felt a little bit like a dangerous game of Jenga. There were probably more in there, but we didn't want our death notice to read: "Crushed by pile of tabloid newspapers."
The Daily Star used to strongly favour a scantily clad woman on the front page, preferably displayed full-length down the page.
Today's has no such feature. Instead, there's a giant Greggs promotion, a Rooney story and a headshot of Tulisa.
Back to Friday's edition and again, glamour lady-age is at a minimum. OK, the main story is "Topless babes target England Aces" with a small image of a blonde Ukrainian lady, but mostly covered up. It's pretty chaste stuff by Star standards and again the page is dominated by an offer of four burgers and four beers for every reader.
Setting aside the Daily Star's mission to make the UK fatter, there does seem to have been a sea change.
But, the other two papers extracted from the tabloid monster pile turn out to be from summer 2011. They are also devoid of obvious bikini-age.
Perhaps these are natural outliers and the trend remains the same?
More study is required. Back to the newspaper pyramid...
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