Paper Monitor
10:58 UK time, Tuesday, 13 January 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Forget the fact that it's almost crunch time for Heathrow's third runway, one paper really knows how to serve up eco news with a class war spin. Cue the Guardian: "The campaign against Agas starts here."
Gulp. Don't tell the Daily Telegraph.
At the helm is the Guardian's s environmentalist-in-chief George Monbiot, who explains that any green wannabe aiming their sights at patio heaters is misfiring. A bigger culprit when it comes to warming up the planet is the trend for Agas. "A large Aga running on coal turns out nine tonnes of carbon dioxide per year: five and a half times the total CO2 production of the average UK home."
There's no such hairshirtedness over at Telegraph Towers, which comes out all guns blazing in an editorial applauding the idea of runway number three at Heathrow . "Without a third runway, we will lose out to Europe" is the headline. There's not a squeak about range cookers.
Over at the Times, there's mention of a little-discussed but ever more prevalent fixture of the Newspaperland - picture bylines. David Rowan - editor in waiting of Wired UK (relaunch issue pencilled in for April - Paper Monitor eagerly looking forward to not having to shell out £5 a pop for the US edition) tells us that unlike most of his fellow hacks, he's not much bothered about his appearance in said thumbnail pictures.
"I abhor the mugshot perching smirkingly above this paragraph," he writes.
Why? Because with the advent of face recognition computers, our privacy will be further undermined by the use of such images.
Which seems an entirely reasonable point of view. But if Rowan is that concerned maybe he should take a leaf out of fellow Times commentator William Radice's book. The poet-writer-translator's picture byline is so blurred as to look like something which has been picked up on an ancient CCTV camera and deliberately obscured for reasons of confidentiality. It's an approach that Paper Monitor admires, and has chosen to employ with its own picture byline, revealed for the first time at the top of this entry.
The 
