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Paper Monitor

12:18 UK time, Friday, 28 December 2007

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

It's not often that photographers give their account of news events, preferring instead to let their images do the talking.

But John Moore, a Pulitzer-winning photographer of Getty Images, snapped Benazir Bhutto waving to supporters through the sunroof of her car moments before her assassination and then of the blast and its aftermath. He is interviewed in the Daily Mirror - with similar accounts in the Guardian and Times - of how he came to capture the dark finale to the Pakistani opposition leader's life.

He was packing up to leave when, seeing her standing up in the car, he ran back to grab a few frames. Then the bomb went off about 30ft from where he stood. "I kept the motordrive on the camera, trying to keep it directed at the explosion as I was pushed back... After a few minutes I looked back at what I'd taken and saw my pictures of Bhutto standing up in the car. The next frame was taken seconds later, maybe just two or three, and all you can see is the yellow of the bomb."

Meanwhile, domestic news has yet more dispatches from the sales. £1,000 a minute. £2,000 a minute. £1,000,000 a minute. Putting a figure on how much is spent in the annual sales frenzy is an inexact science but that doesn't stop the papers trying. Even a single story can have more than one figure, from average sales to the peak at 9.45am as all those who queued in the cold finish browsing and head to the tills.

And the Daily Telegraph also provides an answer to why Next - the Radio 2 of the High St - always makes the headlines with long queues and frenzied melees. Why the excitement over clothes that have "occasionally been labelled boring by fashionistas", as the paper's retail editor delicately puts it.

"Next attracts so many bargain hunters because it is one of the few mass-market retailers that refuses to slash its prices before Christmas," he says. "Pictures of shoppers fighting each other to get into its stores are marketing gold dust and worth a trolley-load of paid-for advertising."

And serve to remind Paper Monitor that popping into town after work to pick up a few bits is probably a bad idea.

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