What's going on here? This is today's Telegraph, a supposedly serious paper.
The top half of the front is given over to a photograph of Mo Farah not winning the London Marathon - the same space the newspaper dedicated to last year's Boston marathon, which you may recall ended in a bomb attack.
Page 3 is occupied by the Duchess of Cambridge not having a baby; 5 to Mo not winning the marathon again, and 7 to the "cut-throat rivalry" between people who spend £200 on dinner parties, along with other important stories, such as "mansumers" who spend almost as much as women on clothes and restaurants that look you up on Twitter or Facebook so they can "create a wonderful guest experience" for you.
On page 9 Terry Deary, the Horrible Histories author, says that school is useless and the singer Chrissie Hynde that alcohol is a scourge.
Then we reach the candybox at the top of the page. Someone called McCrory is offering advice to "age-obsessed women". Who? Should I know that surname? Is she a renowned psychologist?
No, she's an actor called Helen McCrory (who happens to be married to Damian Lewis). The mythical guilt of working mothers comes from Mumsnet and the skinny mothers-to-be from a survey of Californian women. Why Telegraph readers should be concerned about Peaches Geldof's yearning for a daughter is unclear, but they are told about it courtesy of an interview with Aga Living magazine.Holding this "women's interest" tripe together is a picture of Beyonce performing with her sister Solange at a Californian music festival.
MPs have gone on holiday, we're all winding down for Easter, so it's not the newsiest time of the year and producing a newspaper Sunday for Monday isn't easy. But for heaven's sake. This is just bilge.
If people want the Daily Mail they'll buy the Daily Mail, not an inferior copy. Helen McCrory might be a very nice woman and a top-rate actor, but what she thinks about fellow women is irrelevant; Chrissie Hynde is a good singer, but her views on alcohol are irrelevant. Terry Deary's books are mildly educational so his views on teachers are slightly less irrelevant. They might be relevant if any of these three was involved in some serious initiative to address a recognised failing, but they each just happened to have been talking to some other publication.
The same applies to most of the stories in today's paper. It's as though the Telegraph has gone round hoovering up other people's work and emptied the bag all over its news pages.
The lefthand page leads on GP services, climate change and Tory "penthouse orgies" were all Sunday splashes. Another on schools covering up bad behaviour is the result of a University of East Anglia survey (probably the best new "serious" story of the day), and the fifth is a prelim of tonight's Panorama. There are a couple of fashion opinion pieces on David Cameron and the Duchess of Cambridge, one filler born from a Telegraph FoI request, but beyond those, there is precious little original journalism in the home news pages.
Instead, there are 11 stories lifted from other media organisations, 10 based on vested-interest surveys and 6 from specialist journals.
To be fair, the content is much the same in most of the other papers, but everyone else manages to make at least one story "their own" by giving the presentation some oomph.
The top half of the front is given over to a photograph of Mo Farah not winning the London Marathon - the same space the newspaper dedicated to last year's Boston marathon, which you may recall ended in a bomb attack.
Page 3 is occupied by the Duchess of Cambridge not having a baby; 5 to Mo not winning the marathon again, and 7 to the "cut-throat rivalry" between people who spend £200 on dinner parties, along with other important stories, such as "mansumers" who spend almost as much as women on clothes and restaurants that look you up on Twitter or Facebook so they can "create a wonderful guest experience" for you.
On page 9 Terry Deary, the Horrible Histories author, says that school is useless and the singer Chrissie Hynde that alcohol is a scourge.
Then we reach the candybox at the top of the page. Someone called McCrory is offering advice to "age-obsessed women". Who? Should I know that surname? Is she a renowned psychologist?
No, she's an actor called Helen McCrory (who happens to be married to Damian Lewis). The mythical guilt of working mothers comes from Mumsnet and the skinny mothers-to-be from a survey of Californian women. Why Telegraph readers should be concerned about Peaches Geldof's yearning for a daughter is unclear, but they are told about it courtesy of an interview with Aga Living magazine.Holding this "women's interest" tripe together is a picture of Beyonce performing with her sister Solange at a Californian music festival.
MPs have gone on holiday, we're all winding down for Easter, so it's not the newsiest time of the year and producing a newspaper Sunday for Monday isn't easy. But for heaven's sake. This is just bilge.
If people want the Daily Mail they'll buy the Daily Mail, not an inferior copy. Helen McCrory might be a very nice woman and a top-rate actor, but what she thinks about fellow women is irrelevant; Chrissie Hynde is a good singer, but her views on alcohol are irrelevant. Terry Deary's books are mildly educational so his views on teachers are slightly less irrelevant. They might be relevant if any of these three was involved in some serious initiative to address a recognised failing, but they each just happened to have been talking to some other publication.
The same applies to most of the stories in today's paper. It's as though the Telegraph has gone round hoovering up other people's work and emptied the bag all over its news pages.
The lefthand page leads on GP services, climate change and Tory "penthouse orgies" were all Sunday splashes. Another on schools covering up bad behaviour is the result of a University of East Anglia survey (probably the best new "serious" story of the day), and the fifth is a prelim of tonight's Panorama. There are a couple of fashion opinion pieces on David Cameron and the Duchess of Cambridge, one filler born from a Telegraph FoI request, but beyond those, there is precious little original journalism in the home news pages.
Instead, there are 11 stories lifted from other media organisations, 10 based on vested-interest surveys and 6 from specialist journals.
To be fair, the content is much the same in most of the other papers, but everyone else manages to make at least one story "their own" by giving the presentation some oomph.
The Telegraph looks tidy enough, but there isn't enough variety in the lengths of the stories, so they all seem to have equal weight. The non-pregnancy is the only piece in the home pages to run at more than 500 words. The climate change or the GPs - even though they had been elsewhere yesterday - should have been given more space and prominence with graphics and analysis. Even the nonsense about competitive dinner partying could have been dressed up.
It's almost as though no one was reading and assessing the words; that they had just been poured into predetermined boxes around a succession of pretty, but pretty unimportant, standalone photographs.
In this way, the page lead on pupils' behaviour in schools is tucked away in a corner next to a collection of Palm Sunday pictures of the Pope. It is not only afforded less space and prominence than either the papal photographs or Terry Deary's views on education, but it also misses out the key finding that behaviour in our schools is worse than in other countries.
And finally, there is the story about a hedge fund manager who dodged his train fares for five years and then coughed up £43,000 on demand to avoid prosecution. Didn't anyone think that might be a better page lead than a rehashed magazine interview in which we learn from Helen McCrory's dad that she goes to the White House but "never, ever acts like a star"?
It's almost as though no one was reading and assessing the words; that they had just been poured into predetermined boxes around a succession of pretty, but pretty unimportant, standalone photographs.
In this way, the page lead on pupils' behaviour in schools is tucked away in a corner next to a collection of Palm Sunday pictures of the Pope. It is not only afforded less space and prominence than either the papal photographs or Terry Deary's views on education, but it also misses out the key finding that behaviour in our schools is worse than in other countries.
And finally, there is the story about a hedge fund manager who dodged his train fares for five years and then coughed up £43,000 on demand to avoid prosecution. Didn't anyone think that might be a better page lead than a rehashed magazine interview in which we learn from Helen McCrory's dad that she goes to the White House but "never, ever acts like a star"?
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