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.

A quick turnaround for the Times after the first edition last night. Chances are that the change was set up for the tweaks to the puff - a slightly more elegant typeface, smaller underline, tighter cutouts on the left and a move for the weather. But since the page was on, why not improve the splash head.
The second version is better than the first, but was it the best story? Especially as one of the two polls was commissioned by the Evening Standard and so had been running for at least 12 hours before the Times put in an appearance.
The policy initiative to be announced today - which made the splash in the Guardian and i - is given one paragraph halfway down.

The paper says that some in the party are urging Miliband to stop announcing a flurry of new policies to address the party’s difficulties, and takes the view that the polls would overshadow today's speech, which is seen as "an attempt to move on from grumblings over his performance. 
You might think, though, that this was a policy worth investigating. It doesn't sound exactly Red Ed-ish to make young people go back to the classroom before they can claim benefits. The OpEd writers will certainly take a view tomorrow. 
The Guardian also splashed on the story, but it put the same elements in a different order - with the jobseekers' allowance at the top and the polls in the middle. There was still plenty of room for the "he's too geeky" complaints.
So much has been written about the electorate not being engaged in politics, but we aren't helping. As the SubScribe European elections audit found, politicians talk too little about the issues and newspapers aren't challenging them, being happy to write instead what "he" said about "her" and what "they" said about "him".
Opinion polls, and even gossip about what disgruntled party members are saying, have their place - they are important weather vanes - but when they take precedence over proper matters of policy that voters need to know about and debate, there is something wrong. 
When I cast my vote next year I won't care what a thousand or so people told Mori or YouGov, but I will care about how we are going to get poor people with inadequate qualifications into work.

The Sun also did a quick change last night, so quick that I thought the first edition was a spoof to keep the real splash secret, but the timings don't support that theory.
A football splash was essential with the England game tonight, and Suarez was the obvious target,  but the bite-back joke was even worse than the Star's ants-in-my-pants. The paper put a lot of work into it though. There was the photoshopping for the front, a page 5 guide to making a set off "teeth" from an orange, and the biggest challenge: to get Sun man Tom Morgan within photographing distance of the Uruguayan star.
At least the backbench had the wit to tear up the front when the Ian Wright story came in. The biting joke then became just about ok as a puff, but that 4-5 spread is just toe-curling.
That's the trouble with trying to do something original and witty. You whip up enthusiasm in the office, feed off each other and become convinced that it's a great idea. And sometimes it is. That's when the Sun is at its cheeky best.
But then there are the flops. Someone thought it was a great idea to distribute a special "edition" of the paper to 22 million homes. Why did anyone think that would work? The Sun is difficult to avoid and easy to get hold of. A couple of million people buy it every day, sixty odd million don't. Many, many of those have made a conscious decision that they don't want it in their homes. Why antagonise them further by forcing it on them.
I was sitting in a cafe the day after the Great Distribution and heard a couple of men discussing it. "I tore it into little shreds and burnt it," one said. "It wasn't even fit to go into the recycling."  Nothing like a bit of good publicity, is there.
As for the Suarez edition,  the response to Nick Sutton's nightly "tomorrow's papers"  tweet of tomorrow' papers was instnant: