News, in papers

Reading through the Sunday paper over a couple of slowly savoured pints of beer^[1] and relishing my freedom from rehearsals, I was making notes for stories to follow up in this blog. When I got to the end of these notes I looked back over them and suffered from a moment of introspection. Why was I reading this particular newspaper, it annoys me. Well, I concluded, while it indeed annoys me, it does so less than all the others. I am not a big newspaper reader, I sit in front of a computer day in day out for a living, a popular internet search engine provides me with a list of the top stories in the world to look at, while the UK's favourite aunty gives me its news. When google highlights a story it gives me the choice of which source to read it from, I can decide based on topic, which one is least likely to cause apoplexy; for example avoiding any coverage of science and technology stories in the liberal arts media. So in general a newspaper is full of out of date stories. On occasion this changes, from tomorrow I'll be on holiday for a week in a town with few public internet connections and poor GSM reception let alone 3G signal. I will get up and "nip to the newsagents" most mornings. Now it would be foolish and wasteful to try and replicate my normal news reading habits, I would have to buy all of the broadsheets and when I got to one that I knew would be covered with a bias that would annoy me in paper A, I would need to leaf through paper B until I found it and so on. So you have to pick the paper that in most cases will not cause you to spit your morning drink all over the cottage carpet to often. This is even more of an issue on a Sunday; Sunday papers being far more comment, review and opinion, as they analyse the week, than their daily brethren.

^[1] Two pint's of Wentworth Black Zac and slightly more Sharp's Eden.