Paper Monitor
10:22 UK time, Monday, 4 June 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily (and, occasionally, Sunday) press.
Are Sunday newspapers too big? It's a question tackled by yesterday's Independent on Sunday which had yet another relaunch, this time as a single newspaper section and a single magazine section.
Paper Monitor can quite see the attraction in a slimmed-down paper. It's not that one doesn't like bulky multi-section Sunday newspapers, it's just that there is *never anything worth reading in any part of any of them*. Speaking as a true lover of newspapers, each week Paper Monitor rather hopes one's neighbours are clocking just how many newspapers are in the recycling box, like a student hoping that their empty lager cans will be seen as proof of real hard partying.
But Sunday newspapers are a miserable experience. So good luck to anyone trying to reinvent matters.
The editor's blurb at the front - a genre always prone to hyperbole - doesn't disappoint: "[W]e have devised a very different reading experience from the traditional Sunday paper and, we hope, a more enjoyable one... The IoS has the news values of a traditional Sunday paper but the production values of a weekly magazine. This allows us to present the news in a far more dynamic way than a traditional Sunday paper." Get the message? It's *not* a traditional Sunday paper.
Except that it mostly is. One effort they have made is to introduce "" into their stories. Well, they *look* like hyperlinks (see picture), *read* like hyperlinks... and yet, despite repeated efforts at prodding the words with one's , there seemed to be one crucial piece of hyperlink-like behaviour missing. Can you guess what it is, dear reader?
The inability, , of paper to offer the kind of linking one has come to expect online is a bit of a challenge for newspapers. The 's efforts aren't bad, though it would have been good to realise for an interview with that was actually on last night.
We'll see how long this latest incarnation of the Independent lasts. Being a faithful Indy reader must feel like living in a state where there is permanent cultural revolution.
In today's paper, the Times offers a pre-wedding diet which promises any bride-to-be that they can lose 5lbs by THIS SATURDAY. That surely can't be healthy.
Well Paper Monitor has been feeling a bit bloated recently (a bit like a traditional Sunday paper), and though it is not getting married this weekend, it will try out this diet on your behalf and report back during the week.
It doesn't look too bad. No porridge, admittedly, but for lunch you can have an open crab sandwich, a turkey and avocado wrap, sweet potato and ricotta cheese, tuna and anchovy salad and crudites with humous. Bring it on. (If you try to give warnings that this list actually comprises lunches for a whole week and not just Monday, unfortunately you won't be heard above the sound of crab being cracked open.)
The 
