Paper Monitor
12:14 UK time, Wednesday, 13 August 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The journalists get all the headlines (and bylines), but they don't write them. That's the job of sub-editors, who also correct, chop, check and lay out the copy.
But subs are not the only unsung heroes in the newsroom. Indeed, we regularly highlight some of their best headlines in these pages.
So today Paper Monitor tips its hat (a snappy trilby, if you're asking) to another neglected breed, the graphic designers. They are thinkers and technical artists rolled into one.
Tuesday's story about rising food inflation offered them a rare opportunity to shine. Did they?
Daily Express and Daily Mail - Designers must be on a beach somewhere. 0/10
Daily Mirror - Simple graphs, no pictures. The paper's more concerned with the price of Peaches than eggs. 1/10
Independent - Slightly better. Faded black and white image of a trolley, accompanied by bar charts for each food. 3/10
Sun - Four tiny pictures (meat, bread, gas and electricity) with a graph. 4/10
Daily Telegraph - Images of food, transport and pretty blonde in M&S T-shirt. All with percentage increases. 5/10
Financial Times - Nice colour pics of food, furniture and a BA plane. Accompanied by graphs. But illustrating the 11% rise in vegetable prices with pictures of potatoes misfires slightly. Especially with the knowledge that new potatoes have actually gone up 50% in price. 8/10
Times - Top of the class. A colour picture from above a breakfast table with fry-up, toast, cereal, tea and juice clearly annotated with percentage figures. Give these guys an inflation-busting pay rise. 9/10
Paper Monitor apologises that it was unable to illustrate this battle of the designers with a clever graphical image.
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