So how many DVDs did you pick up this weekend.
I got East Is East in The Guardian, Indochine in The Independent and Rogue Trader from The Mail On Sunday (sorry sorry sorry). I didn’t get Cabaret from The Times because I’ve already had that free from a paper before.
I may have missed the odd TV or kids title. Quite how long all the papers can afford this kind of thing is yet to be determined. Not that long ago it was all CDs, but the music companies eventually realised that however poor the tracks offered were, they were suffering in sales of compilation albums. Even Express newspapers, for whom no stone has been left unturned in search of a 70s track, seem to have stopped giving them out. Still The Mirror managed a pair of CDs this weekend.
One of the more troubling aspects of Sunday’s papers was the complete lack of coverage of the Asian earthquake. I only saw The Observer and the (despised) Mail on Sunday yesterday. And while The Observer had a front page article, inside the coverage was a bit limited. I realise that they probably don’t have dozens of correspondents in Islamabad or the region, but there are plenty of wire services out there.
Still that’s nothing compared to the Mail’s lack of coverage. You had to turn to about page 8 before you found anything where there were a paltry couple of pages of coverage (it sounds a lot, but in tabloid terms it’s nothing). The event certainly wasn’t deemed more important than, say, Gavin Henson’s thoughts on Alistair Campbell, or a full page promoting a new magazine that included Kelly Brook’s review of new digital camcorders (!!!).
Still, it’s not like there’ll be many people in this country with friends or relatives in the affected region. Excepting our massive Pakistani and Indian communities that is.
What planet are these editors on? This will directly affect far more Brits than, say, the recent tragedies in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Listen to Lord Ahmed on the Worricker programme on Five Live yesterday (it’s at about 2:22:45).
They also mention that Hurricane Stan got pretty limited coverage earlier in the week. It swept through Central America killing hundreds including Guatemala.