Hats off to the Daily Star for getting it exactly right with this morning's coverage of the terrorist attack in Tunisia.
It's been a long time since one story dominated every front page, so SubScribe has risen from its summer slumbers to take a look.
It was an instructive exercise because today's front pages tell us a lot about the mindsets and conventions that prevail - often subconsciously - in tackling stories like this.
The main point, of course, is that the killings took place on a tourist beach popular with Europeans, a new target area for Isis (although Israeli resorts have been attacked in the past). With the start of a promised mini-heatwave at home, it is much easier to relate to families relaxing on sun loungers or playing in the sand than it would be on a rainy April afternoon.
Another key element is that the victims were shot - a far more "personal" form of murder than bombing.
These were enough to make the story the splash in most papers. The clincher for the rest was the fact that the victims included British tourists - and the availability of British witnesses to tell their stories. When the papers went to press last night, most were saying that there were five Britons among the thirty-seven dead. We know today that the figure is likely to be much higher.

The marketing people will have been relieved that the final British death toll had yet to emerge. It sounds cynical, but five dead Britons are not enough to drive the puffs from their home at the top of the front. Especially on a Saturday morning, when the promos are deeper and occupy extra columns in the body of the page. Ten might have been;  "at least fifteen" - the figure announced by Phil Hammond this afternoon -  certainly would.
This is why the Star shines today. Look at last Saturday's front page, look at the one lampooned on this blog in April and look at today's.  Hallelujah! News has reclaimed page one. And not only page one, but pages two, three, four and five. 

The Mirror restricted its puff to a little box beside the titlepiece, the Sun to a single column; the Telegraph and Times abandoned the secondary elements in the outside columns, but only the Star cleared the page in recognition not only of what the story was yesterday (it took a gamble in putting the number of British dead at 13) but of what it would likely turn out to be over the weekend.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but how many will be wishing today that they had taken the same approach? How does that giant Eat! or the offer of £5 off at Lidl sit with the "slaughter" headings? And even worse, a £15 UK holiday promotion with its - hopefully unintentional - subliminal message "Don't risk your life going abroad"?  A closer examination of these pages in the round wouldn't have gone amiss.
Worst of all in this context was the Guardian where the story was sandwiched between a garish puff and a sponsored house ad. Was Kath Viner happy with this? Did she sign it off? Would this have happened under the more experienced eye of Alan Rusbridger? That may be an unfair question, but it's one that Viner should be asking herself in these early days of her editorship.
And so to the purely editorial aspects of the story: first, the choice of picture. 
SubScribe takes the old-school view of publishing photographs of the dead  - basically, don't - but accepts that different standards apply today, especially where the bodies are covered. 

The presence of the sunbed in the picture of the couple used by the Star, Mirror and Times brings home the full circumstances of the murder, but I don't like the fact that the woman's feet are exposed.
The Sun used a picture of the same couple taken from a different angle, the Mail and i had a man standing over another body with a gawping crowd in the background; the Express and Independent opted for the killer being arrested; the Telegraph and Guardian chose a photograph of a victim being stretchered off the beach.
The latter conveyed the sense of place and drama, but you could argue that the person on the stretcher could have been pulled out of the water in a solitary drowning accident. Similarly, the arrest photograph could have been taken anywhere. 
There's no perfect answer, but the Star seems to have done the best by overlaying the splash head on the picture of the bodies (helpfully obscuring the card that reduces the woman to a number), and using the arrest picture separately alongside the text.

On to the headings. It's funny how the slightest difference in wording makes the world of difference in impact . The Star's "Slaughtered on their sunbeds" was spot on. The Mail's "Slaughter on sunbeds" jarred, creating weird mental images of killers riding in on sunbeds, or of the loungers rather than people coming under attack. 
The Times, Guardian, i and Express showed that you can't go wrong by telling it straight. The Telegraph and Independent showed that they hadn't grasped the central point of the story with "Laughing as he fired" and "Bloody Friday". 
The Independent fell into this trap because it linked the Tunisian attack with a suicide bombing in Kuwait and the beheading of a factory manager in France. They may well be connected, but the combination of that heading and the arrest photograph resulted in a front page that could have applied to any Middle Eastern atrocity on any day this century.
The Mirror went for a dramatic quote from a survivor who had been shielded from the gunman by her fiancé. This is a legitimate approach: a great human tale that takes the story on, given that most readers will have heard about the killings. And, just in case they haven't, there's a "Massacre on the beach" strapline in red above the picture - though it gets a bit lost under the titlepiece and puff.

What next? 
There's an art in getting the flow of a paper right. A big chunk of heavy news needs something lighter to follow, but not so light that it looks disrespectful or flippant - or simply out of place. Hitting the right note is particularly important after a story that runs over more than one spread as you don't want to jolt the reader who isn't sure on turning the page whether to expect more of the same or something new. 
The Guardian's choice of Glastonbury picture, above, and the Sun's bikini beauty, below, were examples of how easy it is to slip on this banana skin. 

The Star almost came a cropper at this last hurdle with its heatwave story after two good terror spreads, but just about got away with it. 
Let's hope its readers appreciate the switch from testicle-munching jellyfish. Journalism certainly does.

The Telegraph hasn't covered itself with glory in its reporting of the Mediterranean boat people tragedies. SubScribe has written about that as part of a general review here. This, however, is a blog about visuals and this spread warrants separate consideration from that perspective.
The first horror is that John Travolta watch ad.
In common with most papers, the Telegraph sells advertising on a different grid to that used by editorial. This is all very well with full-width flat ads or with the quarter pagers, as seen on the left-hand side of this spread. 
These 25x4 ads equal 25x3s on the six-column editorial grid, so even if there were only one, it would be easily accommodated without changing the editorial column width.
The Breitling monstrosity is a six-column ad, which leaves two skinny columns for the journalists to play with. If it were set bottom right, as convention dictates, the remaining space could be used as one wider-than-usual column to accommodate briefs, a diary or picture story (inadvisable against such a dominant image). 
But here we have another example of the advertiser managing to dominate the page without paying the space rate for the privilege. The positioning of the ad - it is deeper than the editorial space either above or below - disrupts the flow of the entire spread and makes engaging editorial design virtually impossible.
Peter Oborne alleged in his resignation blog that commercial interests ruled at the Telegraph, but the placing of this ad on page 13 suggests that someone at the paper might have put up a fight. Designer watch ads tend to be on very early right-handers. This is way back for Breitling, so maybe it was exiled to foreign as a punishment for its ugliness.
Then there are the journalistic howlers. How did anyone think it a good idea to have a standalone picture of the Clooneys larking about on the same page as the drowning of 700 people? It's a charming enough photograph, but it has no news value and is certainly not necessary as a text breaker, what with the ferry pictures and Travolta and all. There would have been no shame in having three double-column text-only stories in a row at the foot of the page. (Incidentally, why is the Sarkozy story set ragged right? There is no typographical or editorial reason for it, as there might be were it a piece of commentary or analysis.)

On to the main story of the Mediterranean drownings. My scruffy red line above shows how this meanders across the spread with an unrelated story about an Isil massacre stuck in the middle under the picture complex. Maybe in the Telegraph's eyes, the stories are related since they both emanate from Libya, but even in that case, the beach massacre should be alongside (see the Times's more elegant treatment below) rather than incorporated in the drownings package. 

Back to the Telegraph. 
Another problem with the spread is the choice of photographs. With no live "at sea" pictures available, the main image is a Massimo Sestini picture of refugees packed into an Italian rescue boat off the African coast on June 8 last year - when the Mare Nostrum force was still operating. This is wrongly described in as "Migrants on a vessel attempting to cross the Mediterranean last year." The banality of the remainder of the caption -  "an officer studies a monitor showing the search operation; and a rescue ship and helicopter" - is a demonstration not only of unimaginative subbing but of the lack of value of the two subsidiary pictures. Neither picture adds anything to the package and both should have been dumped.
Below is one interpretation of how the spread might have worked better by dropping the three pictures. There is more room for Isil and space for an extra story at the bottom - which could be used for Greece if there were another text element for the boat people. There are obviously many permutations, and even more if a different main picture were chosen. But the main objective here is to get the story and commentary closer together.

Ideally, though, there should have been some reconfiguration of the flatplan. If Breitling stipulated the first foreign righthander, then editorial's room to maneouvre is limited. Given the "welcome to my world" copyline, that may well have been the case. But if not, then it might have been better to swap it with ads from the final home page to give a more open spread for the Med.

Another solution would be to move or drop the Telegraph investor house ad on the lefthander and go for one clean hit there. The main story could run much longer if the copy were there, or Isil could run in column six, as per my example. That would leave plenty of room for other material on the Travolta page - and the Clooneys wouldn't seem so out of place. All it would need would be a decent hamper page lead (ideally Isil, but I've pasted in Zuma for illustrative purposes) and a column of nibs.

As ever, there is no right or wrong, but there is bad and better. And the key to that is working with the advertising department and thoughtful flat-planning. What was most important was to minimise the jarring effect of running a serious news story about the drowning of hundreds of people who had nothing alongside privileged Hollywood stars with everything.
And in that the Telegraph failed.

And so the incredible shrinking splash has finally disappeared...but it wasn't the Star that delivered the coup de grace. Yesterday's front page clung to a sliver of news with the discovery of oil in the Home Counties.
Today the Express scores a rare first. But is it one to be proud of? A big Grand National puff, an even bigger ad for Lidl and not even the hint of a news story. 
Goodness knows what the pair of them were thinking. Or Lidl for that matter. One imagines it must have paid a pretty penny for such dominant ads and then to squander the space on half a dozen eggs, a bottle of milk, a baguette and some washing-up liquid seems bizarre.
Steeplechasing has a greater ability than anything else - even football - to squeeze tabloid splashes. We see this daily during the Cheltenham Festival with huge puffs at the top and, often, betting ads at the bottom. There's hardly anywhere left to go for the Grand National and the biggest betting day of the year.

Today the Star gives over almost all the front page to the race in a sort of Masterchef "Grand National three ways" confection: puff, splash and advert. You can only admire the way it found room to promote its football section as well.The Sun, without an ad to contend with, can afford an even bigger puff and a police-bashing splash.
Inside, the Sun gives the Aintree meeting the most space with 20 pages, followed by the Times with a 12-page supplement.  The rest of the tabs go for eight to ten pages, while the more serious minded Telegraph, Guardian and Independent restrain themselves to three or four.
Armies of tipsters are required to put their reputations on the line, so how did they do?
Not one identified the winner. Many Clouds is mentioned only by Marlborough in the Telegraph, who thought it would come third, and Matt Chapman in the Sun who predicted it would finish fourth. Two of the Star's team and one each from the Sun, Mail and Times picked two of the top five horses.
Having started this post with the ugliest Grand National front page, let's end it with the most elegant - even if the fairytale ending was not to be.

The Cheltenham Festival is big news for the Daily Star and as the puffs offering free bets get bigger, so the splashes this week have been disappearing. Today's is the shallowest of the week, yet manages to include a main head, subdeck, picture and a few words of text. Some achievement.
The ginger rats on Tuesday occupied even less space, as they had to surrender a column to the FA Cup puff.
Is this devaluation of the main story new? No, we saw a similar phenomenon in Cheltenham week last year - when the bet offer was worth more and spiders, rather than rats, were the pesky distraction.

But festival week was the only time that this happened in 2014, whereas we've already seen the shrunken splash a couple of times this year:

That New Year's Day alliterative altercation holds the record for the smallest Star splash to date, both in height and width. And here below are the top, or bottom, six in size order:

The story was dynamite, but the presentation? Distinctive, certainly, but wasn't it a little grey? Would it attract readers passing a news stand? 
When you look at it like this, you might think not. But looking again at this week's papers as they'd be presented to casual readers, I for one changed my mind.

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about this post - and yes I know I don't post often enough to be considered a serious blogger, but then to be honest I don't often have much to say. This isn't sour grapes or a bitter rant, it is genuine sadness at the decline of part of a once great industry through fear and lack of imagination. 

I have always been passionate about photography, photographers, picture researchers and pretty much anything to with creating images that tell stories, especially in newspapers.

As technology has advanced, photography has become more accessible, every one of us can take a snap on our phone, push it through instagram or snapseed and hey presto we have a small work of art that we share with our friends and if we are lucky enough to have a celebrity in the frame you might find it grabbed off your social media channel and retweeted by a newspaper or even published. You'll receive a little something for your trouble too. Win win all the way to the bank.

With us all taking pictures and sharing them for free many news organisations have decided that USG or user generated content is the way forward in terms of images. Imagine, it is the wet dream of a newspaper accounts department, no need to pay photographers for pictures we can "borrow" and give our reader their five minutes of fame by putting it on their website to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people and then forgotten about by the next morning. 

On the back of this large agencies - with some incredibly talented photographers - have drowned out smaller agencies and freelance photographers by virtually giving away images to secure market domination. 

All this leaves a reader looking at wallpaper that could be any publication with only the opinion writers and columnists giving any difference to a newspaper. 

So where does this leave the picture desks, usually a source of ideas, inspiration, knowledge and contacts or the photographer with an eye for telling a story in a single image powerful enough to bring you to tears over breakfast or reach into your deep pockets to send funds to war torn or disaster stricken areas. 

They are hamstrung by ever shrinking budgets, being forced to agency images rather than send their own photographer on a story and the accounts team asking why they spent £35 on an image of a water melon.

Many photographers and entire picture teams are now being made redundant, in fact only in these last few weeks, the Daily Express and The Times are both making "efficiencies" with their picture operations.

For those not familiar with how a newspaper works these days it goes a bit like this. Each newspaper has a conference in the morning where the respective departments suggest ideas for their publication, an editor or someone senior nods, grunts or swears at each department head and then suggests something that they have seen on the Mail Online. The majority of newspapers then follow the Mail online - even the TV stations do it. I take my hat of to the Mail picture team because they nail their market totally. The afternoon conference follows the same format.

What astounds me is that editors today are so fixated by copying and not missing that image of a dog in a Santa hat that pretty much the entire British press is becoming a poor version of  Mail online, in that they have little or no unique visual identity themselves.

It's all vanilla, boring and unimaginative.

We live in a visual age, people are more visually literate than most news organisations give them credit for, many are high end users of photography, view art and photographic exhibitions regularly. They share and follow websites containing the most beautiful images in the world and what do newspapers do? They get rid of the people that can actually set their publication apart, they rely on a competitor's website to determine their visual style without having the balls to stand up and give the people what they want. Stunning images delivered across the various platforms. 

They - The Editors - refuse to go out on a limb and be the leader, afraid to go first in case it goes wrong or if their friends at "The Club" laugh at them.

If they concentrated on the unique visual look and feel of their product rather than just blindly assume their readers wanted to view the Mail content packaged up as The Daily Blah they might be even be surprised.

I always prided myself on sending a Times photographer to every big story I could afford, but even though expensive it made a difference, it showed we were serious about the news we shared, we didn't want an agency image, we wanted to be unique, different to challenge the reader. It didn't always work but there were days when it worked sublimely. We would bounce around ideas, try different techniques and push ourselves daily. The Editor at that time would say to me "I don't want wallpaper, If I wanted to look like the Mail, that's where I'd be working" 

Being at the front is dangerous, financially scary and fraught with worry but if you actually lead, people remember what you did, they rarely remember those that just follow or simply copy out of fear of being left out.

I'll leave you with this thought; when a big story breaks - think 9/11, Royal wedding, London Bombings, Libya, Famine, OBL being caught, Concorde crashing - what do you remember? Is it the headline or the picture? When stories of this magnitude happen most newspapers rely on the most incredible photography to tell the story, words alone are not enough. Yes, sometimes it will be a shot from a reader. But more often it is a finely crafted piece of photography, produced by a photographer sent to a location with the backing of an experienced and skilled picture desk team. 

Newspaper readers may feel baffled by apparently
conflicting approaches to publishing photographs
of minors, so SubScribe invited Paul Sanders, 
former picture editor of the Times, to put us
in the picture by focusing on three recent cases

The identification of children in the media is, you would have thought, fairly straightforward. 
When I was picture editor at The Times the rule was that we needed the permission of the parent before identitying a child under 16. If we were in doubt we would protect the identity.   The former editor Robert Thomson suggested that I put myself in the place of the parents and consider whether I would want my own child identified in print over an event for which they were not to blame.
There is some collaboration between picture desks on the treatment of images where identity might be an issue, but different publications have different approaches. Some are more daring others more sensitive.

Clause six of the Independent Press Standards Organisation code of practice states: 

1. Young people should be free to complete their time at school without unnecessary intrusion.
   
2.  A child under 16 must not be interviewed or photographed on issues involving their own or another child's welfare unless a custodial parent or similarly responsible adult consents. 
3. Pupils must not be approached or photographed at school without the permission of the school authorities.
4. Minors must not be paid for material involving children's welfare, nor parents or guardians for material about their children or wards, unless it is clearly in the child's interest.
   
5. Editors must not use the fame, notoriety or position of a parent or guardian as sole justification for publishing details of a child's private life.
   

These five points seem fairly clear, but it can get confusing at times and we have recently seen papers pixelate the faces of some children and not others.

Will Cornick, 16, sentenced for the murder of his teacher Ann Maguire in Leeds:
The judge, after sentencing Cornick, lifted the restrictions on his identity, the police issued an image and the media all used it as they should. No stress involved for picture editors at all.
[Editor's note: the judge was criticised in some quarters for allowing Cornick to be identified.]

The more complex issue is that of Stuart Calder, a 52 year-old surgeon from Leeds who was swept to his death trying to save some people who got into difficulties in the sea near Newquay.
Because of the nature of the story an image of the family during happier times appeared from Ross Parry via South West News.
The image was given to the agency by family friends who confirmed the ages and identities. 
Paul Walters, director of South West News and Ross Parry said: "In the case of children under the age of 16 we tend to pixelate the faces or at the very least add a warning to the captions advising picture desks that it is advisable to obscure the identity of children unless we have the permission of their parents to identify them”
The agency will issue a clean image for newspapers to pixelate the image in their own style. At this point it is at the discretion of each publication as to whose identity should be protected and how.

Then last Friday Claudia Winkleman’s eight-year-old daughter was sadly burned during a Hallowe'en event. Winkleman missed an episode of Strictly Come Dancing and released a statement a few days later about the accident and her daughter’s condition. 
The fifth paragraph in the code states that the fame of a parent cannot be the sole justification for publishing images. Some celebrities make a point of protecting their children's privacy and many issue written instructions explaining  why they don’t their children appearing in news articles. 
The case of Claudia Winkleman’s daughter, Matilda, is different. She appeared in the film I Give It a Year and  was on the red carpet for its premiere. There are film stills released by the production company of her as a bridesmaid and agency pictures of her appearing with her parents at several public events. 
The decision here is straightforward: the parents can be regarded as having sanctioned the pictures by appearing with their daughter at a public event in the full knowledge that they are all being photographed. 
It would, however, have been deemed an invasion of privacy to have published images of Matilda on the night of the accident as it wasn’t a public event.
Incidentally, most newspapers put Claudia on the front, confining the images of the child to the inside. Was that out of respect - or  because Claudia was more likely to sell newspapers than her largely unknown daughter?

Paul now specialises in landscape photography and you can see his work on his website here. He also runs workshops and writes an occasional blog.

The Sun's front front today is an ugly typographical mishmash, thanks to a court case that finds its place on page one because of a Breaking Bad line.
It's not uninteresting, but without the Heisenberg anglem this alleged attempted murder would have got no further forward than page 11. 
Having jumped on the concept, the designers were allowed (or instructed) to run amok.
As the whole world knows, the show's title sequence works Scrabble-like periodic table tiles in sans type into serif words  (possibly Ariel + Bundy). The Sun complicates matters further by incorporating the logo into its own splash headline face. And there's a two-line serif caps strap for good measure. 
It might not have looked so bad if they'd gone for the logo from the earlier series (below), which used Cooper instead of Bundy. 
But with the panel of text and drop-in pictures, it's just too much.

Have we become blasé after the Olympics and the Tour de France? Or have we already written off Scotland as a foreign country?
The opening of the Commonwealth Games didn't get much of a look in on the English front pages. The Peaches Geldof inquest obviously dominated the tabloids, but for the rest, maybe the problem wasn't so much a lack of interest in the Games, as that the pictures from Glasgow just weren't that good.
The Mail had a picture of the Queen that could have been taken anywhere, the Guardian offered the ultimate product placement to Tunnock's teacakes and the Telegraph and i offered an inflatable Loch Ness Monster. 
The Scottish editions were clearly obliged to make a fuss of the event, but they're all a bit of a mess, with the exception of The Times, which came up with its usual wraparound plus a "proper" front that was far more appealing than the national edition with its weeping Dutch Queen.
The Scotsman and the Herald both tried the poster front formula, but they both just missed: the Herald's heading gets lost and the Scotsman's elegance is betrayed by that uncomfortable colloquialism. 

Nor did the Scottish regionals seem particularly enthralled. The Courier was more interested in a Falkirk family of four dying in a car crash and the Aberdeen Press and Journal confined its front-page coverage to a puff. It did, however, follow up with five rather good pages inside.

Down south, the Mail gave the Games the most prominence, with a 2-3 spread and the Express put them on 3. But look at those photographs - Rod Stewart, a scottie dog, some girls with a flag and a clutch of royals. Hardly the opening ceremony spectacle described in copy.
The Telegraph, below, fared a little better with its tidy composite, also on pages 2 and 3. But Rod could have been on any stage and the fact that he was surrounded by seven smaller pictures suggests none was good enough to stand alone.

The Independent demonstrated the power of the single big picture on its page 5, and promptly squandered any interest it might have engendered with the dullest heading imaginable. The Guardian subs seemed equally unenthused with their lame alliteration. The  Nessie picture that made the Telegraph and i fronts makes a good centrepiece for the spread - although it came as a shock to SubScribe, which had always imagined her to be green.

Nessie's face is less visible in the Times, but the full height compared with the shot chosen by the others makes her unmistakeable. Did we really need three royal pics on one spread - and isn't it treason to photograph Her Majesty adjusting her lipstick? (I would suggest it was more likely to be lipsalve - she'd have to be seriously bored to start doing her make-up in the middle of an occasion such as this.)
The Times has one of the most appealing pictures of the day in the top righthand corner of its spread, combining the Red Arrows, a golden sunset and colourful crowds in the "Live Zone".

But is the photograph a little too colourful? Compare the image taken from the Times above with a similar shot, below, from the Mail website.

The Times version is certainly more vibrant, even if it does take liberties with nature. And does that matter if the result is a better picture and nobody has been moved or airbrushed out? On an occasion such as this, possibly not. But what about last week with the shooting down of Flight MH17. Compare the Times's front-page photograph last Friday with the same picture in the Telegraph:

This seems to be a bad habit to be getting into...and it certainly alarmed some photographers who commented on one online forum:

SubScribe tends to agree with the photographers here about the plane crash picture, but rather likes the OTT Red Arrows picture, which stood out from a pretty lacklustre collection. 
Any joy in that spread dissipated on turning the page, however. There we found that Cheryl Cole has not only changed her name, but has also dyed her hair. The use of such a pointless photograph for no reason other than to fill space with a pretty woman is a far greater sin than any over-drenching of pictures elsewhere. To give you the full flavour, the caption is reproduced in full.

Oh England, you never fail to disappoint, but at least the picture editors love you. They know exactly what subject the editor wants on the front page, all they have to do is sift through hundreds of shots to find the one that captures the moment perfectly. Last night, as we see, it wasn't as easy as it sounds. 

The i might have cracked it, had the player in the photograph been Steven Gerrard.
The Telegraph went for composition with a sorrowful Rooney in the middle. The Guardian chose Suarez, but without knowing the context it's just any old football picture. 
The Express and Star didn't trouble with Brazil and opted instead for the same picture (and virtually the same headline) of some blokes in a London pub. 
For the Mail, it had to be Coleen, simples.

The Sun seems to have decided that it if can't woo the people of Liverpool it might as well carry on upsetting them by showing Coleen and Wayne's crying son (yes, I know he plays for ManU, but remember they're Liverpudlians). 
Whatever made the paper think that it was in order to build a front page around a four-year-old boy in tears? 

Moving on swiftly, the Independent and Times made absolutely the right choice. The England captain being offered sympathy by the clubmate who destroyed his dreams or, put another way, the two men responsible for the goal that almost certainly knocked England out of the competition.
Whichever way you look at it, the combination of Gerrard and Suarez, especially in a pose like this, is a no-brainer.*