The Daily Express has been dying a slow and painful death for almost as long as I can remember. It's as though it's fallen victim to a combination of the ailments and concerns that dominate its front pages - failing mental powers, pension problems and always contemplating the storms ahead.
Richard Desmond has tried withdrawing sustenance, but still the old girl clings on, so now he's thinking of putting her in another home. That could be the best news for half a century - if she can get on with her new housemates.
Are the Trinity Mirror negotiations serious? Is the Star included in the package? What about competition considerations?
If the Star were part of any deal, then Trinity Mirror would own four national dailies and four Sundays (including the Daily Record and Sunday Mail) on top of big-hitting locals such as the Liverpool Echo. That's quite a lot. Even Rupert Murdoch maxed out at three dailies and two Sundays in the old days of Today's brief life and again with the freebie London Paper.
One imagines that should the talks get that far, the key for the CMA would be what Trinity intended to do with the papers and whether there was any prospect of another buyer appearing.
When Murdoch bought Today there was much huffing and puffing, but it came down to a straight choice between sale to him or closure. The general feeling has tended to be we're better off with a newspaper than seeing it fold. The Express and Star newspapers are still in profit - hence the NUJ's horror at last year's cuts - so there is no immediate reason for them to die.
It would probably be best all round if a new player came into the market to take over the papers, but there doesn't seem to have been a rush since Desmond started seeking a buyer at the end of last year.

So, if Trinity did seal the deal, what would - or could - it do with the Express? The first policy decision should be to stop the cuts and stop overloading the remaining staff with extra work. Trinity's regional network gives it an excellent fund of stories that may not be picked up by other nationals. We have seen this occasionally with the Mirror - this case of the Liverpool woman, pictured, who was beaten and held prisoner by her husband  for three days is an example - and this could benefit the Express. If the paper were allowed to recruit smart operators (or encourage existing staff to reach beyond the save-get headlines), there are plenty of good human interest stories out there to give it a different voice from the rest of the Street. 
There is little point in worrying overmuch about what "Express readers" would or wouldn't like. There are still half a million buyers, which is not to be sniffed at, but they are a dwindling band. Instant radical change would be foolhardy, but a long-term transition to a new home on the political spectrum, leaving the strident right-wingery to the Mail, would be great for everyone. 
We could really do with a slightly left-of-centre (dare I say Blairite?) whitetop with the middle-market instincts of the Mail, but with an understanding that most women don't have the luxury of being stay-at-home mothers who spend the day baking cakes for shiny diligent children who call them Mummy. The i almost meets this market, the Mirror is an out-and-out redtop, and the  Independent counts as a broadsheet in this context.
In the short-term, with the expertise of Mirror staff to hand, there is no reason why the Express couldn't be turned into something slicker relatively quickly. It's all about changing the mindset and giving the staff freedom to express themselves. Go cold turkey on the health stories, leave weather forecasting to the Met Office, and soft-pedal the politics. 
For those who think there is no way the Express and Mirror could live side by side, maybe the collage below of the two papers' coverage of one particular subject last year will demonstrate that there is at least some common ground. 

This photograph appeared on the Express front page 24 times last year and on the Mirror 15, but the Mirror was the more enthusiastic Madeleine splasher, leading on the hunt 15 times against seven for the Express papers, three of them in the Sunday paper.
The Mirror has also offered what could be seen as an early sign of solidarity with a big puff yesterday on another of the Express's favourite subjects: the safety or otherwise of statins.
All this said, though, the ideal would still be for an  outside buyer to come forward and take over the Madeleine McCann house journal. There is one organisation that has been vociferous about the failings of the mainstream Press over the past five years, an organisation that has the support of (and is probably influenced by) Kate and Gerry McCann. Maybe it would be the ideal owner for the Express. 
Step forward Hacked Off. Why not put your money where your mouth is?

PS: I hate the insular "British resources for British people" attitude, but
hurrah for the Daily Star, whose splash today asks a question that has been troubled many of us for years. Why has a contingent of London police officers been assigned to an investigation that is entirely outside their jurisdiction? Even without the financial considerations, the notion that British officers are bound to do a better job than those on the scene in Portugal is offensively imperialistic. 
Of course the recovery of Madeleine McCann would be the biggest story of the year, but the McCanns, the Met and the media need to get real. It's unlikely to happen. It's time to call a halt to this pantomime.

Jennifer Lawrence has been househunting in Islington and has told estate agents that she's eager to find a "cosy pad" with Chris Martin. 
She apparently loves England and can't wait to put down roots. She's also cleared all her stuff out of her former boyfriend's flat when she was in London earlier this month "to symbolise the start of her new life with Chris.  Buying a house together in London is the icing on the cake."
Awww, sweet. After the heartbreak of the conscious uncoupling with Gwyneth Paltrow, it's all going to turn out all right for Chris. 
Or so the Star told us in its showbiz lead yesterday.

But the Mail and Sun had different ideas. They spoilt the fun with news that the couple had split after a four-month romance.  Jen dumped Chris "a few days ago", after he had been out to a family dinner with Gwynnie, according to the Sun. They've gone their separate ways, said the Mail, attributing the report to the website E! News.
Today the Mirror's US Editor weighs in with a page 3 lead that adds flesh to yesterday's Mail and Sun stories.
He reports that Jen was fed up with Chris's continued closeness to Paltrow, who was apparently spotted tenderly stroking his face at that dinner, "while a glum Jennifer was pictured elsewhere in Los Angeles having dinner with a friend".
Sources close to the Hunger Games star said: "Jen felt there were three of them in the relationship and didn't feel comfortable..She is one of the most desirable women in Hollywood and quite rightly deserves to be leading lady for any man and not play second fiddle."
So what we'd really like to know now is...
How long had that estate agent story been sitting in the Star reporter's notebook? If only they had got it into print a day or two earlier...

The Mirror and Express made rare common cause yesterday with puffs predicting a Hallowe'en heatwave. 
A couple of days of warm weather and we can't help but start comparing ourselves with Benidorm or Benin. At this time of the year, it also means the arboretums are full of photographers competing for the half-page slots that will doubtless be devoted to trees with light streaming through golden foliage.

Sure enough, here's the Express's effort on page 11: a couple of children climbing a tree at Westonbirt,  sunrise over Tower Bridge and a 14-par weather forecast.
But what's that little single squeezed between the ads? 
A new £97m Met Office computer will be able to do 16,000 trillion calculations a second and give better warning of extreme weather. This will, the Express says, give a £2bn boost to the economy.
Here we have a development that is likely to influence the paper's newslist for years to come and it is written off in three pars.
And three not very meaningful pars. What does that number of calculations mean? It certainly sounds a lot, but how does it compare with other computers? What sort of calculations? Is it that special or so last century?
How will the economy benefit to the tune of £2bn - and will that be an annual boost or a one-off? 

The Telegraph was more enthusiastic about the story - to the extent of making it the splash - and so came up with a little more detail. The new computer would be able to carve the country into 300-metre chunks so that local variations in the weather could be predicted more accurately, a great help when councils need to know which roads to grit or where snow ploughs are going to be needed. 
The Met Office should also be able to predict the weather for the next 24 hours with 90% accuracy. Apparently at the moment it can do so only for the coming 12 hours and to be honest, most of us can do that by looking out of the window.
The Telegraph also tells us about those 16,000 trillion calculations, which seem to suggest that our supercomputer - which has mysteriously not been given an affectionate name yet -  it is going to do a lot of pondering, cross-checking and going through the files, since it is to be fed a mere 106 million observations a day.
The Telegraph also contributes to our collection of pointless comparisons by noting that the computer would weigh as much as 11 double-decker buses. Aren't double-decker buses supposed to be used for height comparison? Have you ever lifted one? No, neither have I. The only person in the country who might have half an idea of what this means is Geoff Capes. So where is he when you need him? Apparently breeding budgies in Lincolnshire.
The Times was also enthused by the October warmth as a source of pretty pictures and it cross-reffed from its Westonbirt picture on 19 to "Met Office supercomputer, page 57". 
Here, on the weather map page, we have a little gem from  Paul Simons. He gets the 16 trillion calculations fact into the first sentence and makes it a little more relevant in the next, saying that this is 13 times as many as the existing computer, making it one of the most powerful in the world. 
I'd still like to know who's at the top of the league. Nasa? Apple? Something in China?
But then comes the hidden treasure: the Met Office got its taste for computer forecasting from the old Lyons Corner House business:

The Met Office showed an interest and Lyons let its forecasters use Leo. They liked it so much that in 1959 they bought their own, which was named Meteor. 
Given our new knowledge about how many trillions of calculations a computer should be expected to do today, we obviously want to know Meteor measured up. According to Simons it could do 30,000 a second.
Five lovely pars and fair play to Simons for keeping this material for his Weather Eye column - but did this story really belong tucked away on page 57?

The Guardian thought not, and gave the story the best show, combining its pretty autumn pictures (including the obligatory snap from Westonbirt) with a page lead that turned the 11 double-deckers into 14 tonnes. There's a nice little panel labelled "Cloud computing" that charts the history of Met Office computers, although it doesn't mention the Lyons Corner House connection. The Guardian also came up with the cutest heading, but it still didn't tell us its name. For that we had to turn to the Independent. 
And the answer is....
Cray@XC40.
I think that needs some work.

The trial, partial conviction and eventual sentencing of Oscar Pistorius have used up a lot of the international supply of newsprint and ink. And the vast majority of it has been expended on Pistorius rather than the woman he killed. 
Would we in Britain have known or cared about Reeva Steenkamp if she had been shot by someone else? Given those front-page photographs immediately after her death, she might have made a candy shot somewhere, but there would never have been this international interest.
But when it came to the court case, shouldn't that have been about Steenkamp? How did we allow Pistorius to make it all about him, his histrionics, his vomiting in court, how he was a broken man? It was theatre.
And now that it's all over, bar the appeals, some commentators are seeking to draw conclusions from a single case about violence against women in South Africa and about the country's justice system.
What nonsense. 
Do we look at our own court cases and make such generalisations? Do we have any real notion of the levels of violence, particularly against women, in this country?
I was struck today by a small single-column photograph of a woman with a bandaged head at the foot of today's Daily Mirror. 
Inside was a first-person account of how a Liverpool taxi driver had attacked his wife with an axe and a Stanley knife last September, imprisoning her for three days before driving her to hospital and torching their family home. He admitted a number of offences, including causing grievous bodily harm, when he appeared in court by video link this week  and will be sentenced in December. The judge has told him that it is almost inevitable that he will go to jail for a long time.
The story, by John Stiggle, is told in detail on pages 6 and 7. It also appears on pages 4 and 5 of today's Liverpool Echo, which is part of the Trinity Mirror stable.

The troubling thing is that June Churchill's ordeal has reached the national press chiefly because of the link between the two newspapers. No other paper picked it up from the court hearing. 
June Churchill is not a frail old lady or a pretty teenager, so she isn't marketable. She doesn't fit the stereotype of a weak, cowed woman: even after the battering she suffered at the hands of her husband she was strong enough to see off raiders who went into her florists' shop and threatened her with a gun last December
The three-day siege may have been unusual, but there is sadly nothing unusual about women suffering this sort of treatment. The Churchills are a middle-aged white couple, but injuries inflicted on Asian women in particular in the name of family honour are equally - and often more -  horrendous.
Individual cases tend not to be reported because they are so common, and when something is common it isn't news - until someone comes along, as Andrew Norfolk of the Times did with the Rotherham sex abuse scandal - and starts joining the dots and produces statistics that appal.
Karen Ingala Smith has been joining dots on women murdered by men over the past three years. On average a woman is killed by a man every three days. 
Smith is a strident feminist who gives no quarter to those who say "what about 
men killed by men, men killed by women or women killed by women". 
Her beef is that male violence is so routine that it needs shouting from the rooftops. SubScribe has noted her work in the past, but the cases of Reeva Steenkamp and June Churchill make it feel timely to point it up again. 
Please look at her blog Counting Dead Women.

Both of these splash headlines are true. Yet neither tells the truth.
Yes, the NHS is to fund a sperm bank for lesbians - and for heterosexuals and bisexuals and transexuals. In fact, for any woman in need of the service. That includes, as the Mail on Sunday's sister paper tells us today, single women.
It will also be open to all ethnicities, so we could just as accurately have had the heading "NHS to fund sperm bank for Muslims" or "NHS to fund sperm bank for gay Jews".
We could even (in much smaller type and probably not on the front page because it's so inoffensive)  have "NHS to fund sperm bank for young white widows of our brave boys serving in Afghanistan".
Except that in that instance, the implied outrage would be that only £77,000 had been set aside from the £100m NHS budget to help such women - and that they would be expected to pay £300 for the privilege of using the service.
It's the way they tell 'em, as Frank Carson would say.

Over at Gatwick airport, a woman arriving on a flight from Sierra Leone collapsed and died after disembarking. There is an ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. There are fears that the virus could find its way into Britain. So yes, there's a scare (terror's a bit extreme) and yes, there was a death.
The woman in question did not, however, die of ebola.
It's the way they tell 'em, as Frank Carson would say.

Why are we lying to our readers like this? Why are we setting out to shock and alarm them? Do we think it will sell more papers?

After all, that's all we care about, isn't it? "You're only in it to sell papers" is the insult routinely thrown at journalists. Proprietors like Murdoch are interested only in profits and power. 

Well no, actually. Journalists have an inherent and insatiable hunger for news. We chase and write stories because we are interested and we think others will be interested. We are compulsive gossips with a capacity for absolute discretion. We always, always want to be the first to relate a snippet of news, yet are often the most impossible people to get to talk.
When we have gathered up our goodies, we want to lay them out on a wonderful table for others to feast on; for our effort and skills to be appreciated and savoured. Newspaper proprietors provide that table and some - including Murdoch - share our delight in setting out the best china, the shiniest cutlery, the ripest fruits. 

Alas, newspapers are not charities run for the public good. They are businesses. They have to make money to survive - and that means attracting paying customers to our restaurants of news. 
So we should always be aware that If we put prime steak on the menu and serve reconstituted mince, we will lose our customers and our reputations and ultimately go out of business.

It's not much of a joke. Perhaps it's the way I tell 'em.

The Daily Mail isn't having a good week. George Clooney has had two pops at the paper in two days and thrown its apology back in its face. Angelina Jolie is reportedly ready to sue over the old video plastered all over yesterday's front page.
The rest of Fleet Street is lapping it up, schadenfreude doesn't come close.
Is this, then, why it has today made such a big deal about a three-par note in the Socialist Worker's Troublemaker column?
Vile, tasteless, inane, disgusting? A page one picture and page 5 lead? It's a bit overblown for a lame joke pointing to the opening of the inquest into the death of 17-year-old Horatio Chapple.
The father of one of Chapple's contemporaries (note, there is nothing to say that they were friends) who says: "That the Socialist Worker thinks the violent death of a child  is a fit subject for humour indicates a level of depravity and insensitivity to the suffering of others which is surprising."
The story is bolstered with a selection of tweets - a retweet by Owen Jones of the Guardian being the cherry on the cake - and the Chapple family history. 

To be fair, the Mail is not alone in hunting this particular fox. The Telegraph was also outraged enough to put the story on page 5 under the heading "Outcry after socialist paper mocks death of Eton boy in bear attack". 
It quotes the same clutch of tweets and then adds this to the mix:

Reportedly? Reported by whom? Either he is or he isn't. If he is, then it is germane to the story. If he isn't, it shouldn't be there. It is a  fact (or rumour) that should have been checked before it got anywhere near appearing in print. The Telegraph is a national newspaper, for heaven's sake, not the Upper Bumbling Weekly Bugle.*

The Mirror, Independent and Huffington Post have all reported the "outcry", even though when you look at Twitter, there were surprisingly few people crying out. Owen Jones single-handedly doubled the number of tweets when a hundred or so people retweeted his retweet.
It has also been the subject of discussion on Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 programme and on Radio5Live.

For heaven's sake. It was a tasteless comment with a crass headline best ignored.
The Socialist Worker sells about 10,000 copies in a "bumper week", according to Ian Burrell, the Independent's media expert in an article after the death of Thatcher last year. 

Ten thousand. In a bumper week.

• The Mail  sells 1.7m copies a day and has 11m readers online
  
• The Telegraph sells 515,000 with a further 3m online readers
  
• The Independent reaches 1.5m online
  
• The Mirror reaches 2.5m online 
  
• The Huffington Post has 84 million users
  
• Jeremy Vine is Britain's most popular radio news programme with more than 7m listeners a week.
  
• Radio5Live has more than 6m listeners a week.
  

Bet the Chapples are thrilled to see that they have such universal sympathy and support. 
For that was, of course, the Mail and Telegraph's intention, wasn't it? They weren't just setting out to show that "socialists are nasty bastards". Were they?

*SubScribe can't be sure, but thinks the Telegraph may have muddled Charlie Kimber with Hugo Charles Kimber, son of  the late Sir Timothy Kimber and brother of Sir Rupert Edward Watkin Kimber, the 5th baronet Kimber. Hugo is seven years younger than the Socialist Worker chief.

The Mirror and Sun share a heart-warming (no pun intended) splash about a woman who "sensed" her dead son's heart beating in another man's chest. It appears in a number of other papers too. But whether it's the "most amazing" story you'll read or even a "miracle" depends on your astonishment threshold. 
Freda Carter had wanted for years to find out who had received her son John's heart, but hospital rules allowed her to be told only that  the recipient was a teenager called Scott. 
Last year she attended a memorial service for transplant donors. A young man called Scott gave a reading. She put two and two together and came up with four. Happy days for everyone.
The meeting took place in November, why it has surfaced only now is unclear. But that's probably beside the point.
The Carters live in Sunderland, Scott lives in North Shields,  the transplant and the service took place in Newcastle. 
Mrs Carter isn't psychic, as the Sun tells us. This isn't an 'of all the churches in all the world' chance-in-a-zillion story. It's one of a determined woman overcoming bureaucracy (in place, incidentally, for good reasons of privacy and emotional stability) to achieve her heart's desire (pun intended).
Let's hope that she can be content with this as her happy ending.

For comedians, timing is everything. For newspapers, timing can mean nothing.
When Marco Rodriguez blew the whistle on Germany's dissection of Brazil at 10.47 on Tuesday night, the presses had already printed tens of thousands of newspapers. Some held back editions, but no sports editor will have felt that their Wednesday paper had done the match justice.
Newsdesks, too, will have wanted to get in on the action - they'll have gone into yesterday's morning conferences with schedules full of ideas for follow-ups.
It's what happens when you're a journalist. "No show without Punch", someone once teased me when I went scuttling into work on a day off when a big story broke. We all want to play, to feel part of the main event. Hands up any Fleet Street journo who waited for the phone to ring before turning up when Diana was killed.
The hardest part is accepting that you aren't needed, that the caravan has rolled on without you.

Fourteen million people are said to have watched the Brazil-Germany game; thirty-five million tweets were posted about it. By the time this morning's papers were delivered, the best part of 36 hours had passed since the match had ended, another semi-final had been decided, we were all looking forward to Germany v Argentina. Would readers want to look back?
The Mail was convinced they would. It put Mick Jagger on the front and said that Brazilians were blaming him for the defeat. He was, we suddenly discovered, known in Brazil as a jinx. There was a spread in the news section - more on Mick, some jokes lifted from the web and a full page of Max Hastings on "the awesome (and chilling) genius of the Germans".
Enough? Not a bit of it, there was a further "superb World Cup pullout" labelled "the match that rocked the world" in the heart of the paper - eight pages of punditry, oversized pictures and more jokes from the internet.

The Mail has never been one to worry about being late with a story if it thinks it's good enough to interest its readers - today it catches up on the Times's tax investigation, for example; the SubScribe pictures and spreads blog predicted that it would come back and beat the rest when it missed the Peter Blake Albert Hall mural. It did. So I would hesitate to say that this was OTT, but it felt it.
To be fair, Mick made an appearance right across the street. The Sun, which got a cute splash with a good head from a chef who bet a fiver on the result and came away with £2,500, quoted Jagger as saying he was prepared to take the blame for the first goal, but not the rout. Good on him and good on the Sun. The Jagger story was the lead on the 4-5 spread, complementing another two pages in sport. Job done, time to move on.
That seemed to be the standard response. The Times ran to six pages in its World Cup supplement, but for most it was a couple of pages in news with a bit of rioting and a bit of cultural commentary,  plus a couple more in sport. The Telegraph offered extra value in its news half-page with a panel on previous examples of the Jagger jinx, plus a delightful Matt cartoon.

But the Mail's rivals had catching up of their own to do, starting with that Angelina Jolie video. The Express and Mirror both took the same approach: celebrating the actress's achievements since the film was made. Neither mentioned the Mail and the Express declined to offer directions to the video online, which meant that for new readers starting here it will all have seemed a bit odd - why were they suddenly running Jolie's life history?
That's where the difficulty lies when the internet is light years ahead of the old inkies. How much should you assume the readers know? If you think they know (chances are they've seen the story on your own website as well as everywhere else),  why tell them again? And if they don't, you owe them some basic background. So those who left the Jolie non-story alone were probably wisest.
There was one Mail story, however, that almost everyone took delight in reporting: that correction and apology to George Clooney.
When a rival has to eat humble pie, there are always those who ready savour that other dish that's best served cold.

'Why are we wasting money on this when we could be spending it on that?' is a favourite argument of the partisan. It's usually spurious. But this collection of front pages does make you wonder how the Press came to be the arch-villains of the unholy trinity of politicians, police, Press. And that in turn prompts further questions about the extent and expense of the phone-hacking inquiry.
First we have two peers (one Labour, one Conservative) under suspicion for rape. Then there is the disappearance of 114 files from a 1983 dossier alleging that a number of public figures were involved in child sex abuse. And finally we have more allegations against Rolf Harris, who was jailed for sexual assault on Friday.
Putting Operation Yewtree and celebrity sex predators aside for a moment, let us remember that we also have the Cyril Smith allegations rumbling along in the background - thanks almost entirely to the Daily Mail - and suspicions about a minister in the Blair government that are being brought to light by the Daily Mirror. 
Those with short memories might also be reminded of the MPs' expenses scandal and the men who drained moats with our money, the women who declined to pay for their own bath plugs, the flipping and flopping of houses to avoid capital gains tax. We know about them thanks to the Daily Telegraph.
These are the people running our country; the people who decided that the law wasn't strong enough to keep the Press in line, that a £5m public inquiry, followed by a royal charter, to set new parameters of behaviour was required.
MPs accepted after the expenses scandal -  without the benefit of a public inquiry - that they couldn't be trusted to police themselves, so an independent parliamentary standards authority was created. It's made a huge difference. In 2009, the year of the scandal, MPs' expenses totalled £95.4m. In the year to last September, the total was £98m.
The police, particularly the Metropolitan force, meanwhile remain mired in corruption allegations that any number of public inquiries and new brooms at the top have been unable to stamp out. They have failed properly to investigate murder, wholesale sexual abuse and assorted other crimes - including phone hacking at the News of the World. Stephen Lawrence's killers were finally brought to justice not through dogged detective work, but  in large part because of the law-breaking bravery of Stuart Steven when editor of the Mail on Sunday
Eight out of ten of today's front pages* are devoted to historic crimes and alleged crimes involving men in high places abusing vulnerable women and children; offences dating back to the 60s, 70s and 80s; crimes and alleged crimes that were widely known about, yet which troubled neither police nor politicians until very recently.
Police operations looking into old  journalistic misdeeds are ongoing, and the Daniel Morgan inquiry is unlikely to do anything other than give sections of the Press an even worse name, but SubScribe has not so far heard any suggestion that journalists were involved in sex abuse rings or systematically defrauding the taxpayer.
Those who believe that the state should play any part in determining how the Press is regulated  might care to show how police behaviour has improved since the establishment of the IPCC in 2004 and how MPs have curbed their excesses since IPSA was set up in 2009.
There are chancers and criminals in every walk of life, but they tend to gravitate mostly towards areas of power, influence and money. So a few police officers are corrupt, a few MPs are criminally greedy, a few celebrities are sex abusers, a few journalists are unethical. It's all a matter of proportion.
If the Press is allowed to do its job, if good people are attracted to public life, and if the law is allowed to function, we'll come out on the right side - eventually. Then we can work together to defeat the financial sharks who rob us all.
*The other two focus on terrorism;  it's Serious Sunday.