Paper Monitor
12:43 UK time, Tuesday, 30 June 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Picture this. You are a columnist on a national newspaper. Your stock in trade is not outrage-on-cue, nor is it carefully nuanced analyses of the geopolitical and historocultural ramifications of, er, the news.
No, you are paid to mine everyday occurrences, and from this mine extract observational nuggets, and buff these nuggets to a high shine, all the better to coax a wry smile - and perhaps a muffled "huh!" of recognition - from that commuter in seat 3B who has reached page 20 and is in need of some light relief.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
And how much would you expect to be paid to produce a weekly column containing perhaps one or two such kernels of conversational goodness?
If you are Michael Gove of the Times - sample nugget: - you earn £5,000 a month.
Five G a month! For what the man himself reveals takes "'an hour or so' a week". One imagines the newsroom worker bees at the Times are collectively spluttering into their lattes as they digest this particular nugget in today's papers. Paper Monitor (in an overly warm train carriage at the time) certainly let out a wry cough.
How did this break with the British convention of salary non-disclosure come about? It's because David Cameron has ordered his Shadow Cabinet to first disclose, and soon give up, their second (and third and fourth and fifth) jobs and Gove is a member of said Cabinet.
That's about £1,250 a column. More than a grand to write 870 words about what one had for supper the other night. More than £1.40 a word. Adding up to about £60,000 a year, notes the Daily Telegraph. Add to that another four journalism jobs and his non-MP earnings run to about £76,000 a year, says the Daily Mail.
This particular column, or blog post, if you will, runs to about 337 words. Add in a few more pars about what one had for tea (350) while watching Andy Murray repeatedly muck up his first serve (360), and Paper Monitor would be in line (367) for a windfall of £535.45 at that sort of rate (377).
Ding and dong (380).
The 
