Paper Monitor
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
It takes charm to be a news photographer. You might even call it chutzpah.
You have to ask people to do things. Things they may find slightly ridiculous.
So feel for the photographer who had to go and visit Lesley Dedman. The former mayoress gets into the paper because after having had a shower and still in her towel.
He cycled off so she threw on a jumper and jeans and chased after him in her Jag, before swerving in front of him and recovering the bike.
In the posed photo she's smiling with the bike, but here's the thing, she has a towel wrapped round her head in the way women do after they emerge from the shower.
You also have to take your hat off to the snapper who took the picture of and festooning clothes everywhere at Knowsley Safari Park. The picture is in most of the papers, and on our Quote of the Day.
Of course, the photo is staged. The female staff member in the passenger seat of the car is giving a most unconvincing open-mouthed expression of shock.
But what about the snapper? How did he know the baboons would do what was expected? How did he know the feisty primates wouldn't turn round and rip the windscreen wipers off his car? Or take his camera?
Speaking of staged photos, the Independent appears to have finally nailed the longest fakery saga in the history of news photography. Was Robert Capa's shot of a Spanish militiaman at the moment of death genuine?
Err, . By comparing geographical features on three photos, including the famous one, somebody has found the place it was taken. And the fighting was apparently nowhere near that place on the day in question.
But perhaps the real mystery is how this news, which was in El Periodico on Friday, does not get its outing in the Indie until the following Tuesday.