The new generation of internet communicators quickly learnt an important lesson: don't deceive your readers or they won't come back. 
The newspaper generation still hasn't grasped this. Not only do the old-timers indulge in clickbait headline writing that fails to deliver, they continue the sleight of hand in print. 
In a few minutes those whose skies are not as grey as those over SubScribe Towers will be out there with their cardboard specs and pinhole cameras. The Telegraph, however, seems to have got ahead of the game - for there on its front page is a picture of people watching the eclipse. Only trouble is, the people are in Australia and that particular eclipse was 13 years ago.

The Mirror, too, is pretending to be ahead of the game with its "Clarkson shown the door" splash. The BBC will announce the results of its inquiry into the cold meat fracas next week; the Mirror's heading suggests that it has inside information on the verdict. But the door Clarkson was shown was that of the producer at the receiving end of the alleged punch. Apparently Clarkson went to his house to apologise, but was denied entry. A good story, an accurate heading - but not quite what the reader expects.
As it happens, the Mirror changed up from that to an account of a charity auction in which the Top Gear presenter sold a passenger-seat ride in his "last ever lap" for £100,000. That in the process of so doing he is reported to have called BBC chiefs f****** bastards seems par for the course and probably what his audience expected to hear.
The original splash now appears on an inside spread with a much better main heading and context for the strapline - although by all accounts to call the producer a "victim" is laying it on a bit thick. 
Victims are murdered or raped. They also have the phones hacked or are mis-sold PPI policies. We need to find a new word to differentiate between levels of suffering.

There's an air of Midsomer about the death of Jagger the Irish setter 26 hours after he competed at Crufts.
To the outsider this is a jolly world of waggy tails and wobbly bottoms, cosy weekend television in the company of the dependable Clare Balding.
But behind the scenes of this British institution rivalries fester. Controversy and Crufts are regular bedfellows.
Now a dog has died.  A vet conducting a post-mortem has apparently found cubes of beef laced with three different types of poison. Two sheepdogs at the show are also reported to have been taken ill.
All this at the most prestigious event on the calendar of an elite and influential society that lays down laws for millions to follow, a society not renowned for its fondness of outside scrutiny.
No wonder that the story made most front pages today, but how to treat it?  It's a serious tale that will provoke a reaction from every reader; it's what everyone will talk about in the pub; it'll be a first-round question in Friday's News Quiz. But getting the tone right is tricky. 
"Murder at Crufts" shout the Mirror and Sun splash heads. But while the Mirror maintains its straight face, the Sun can't resist the subhead "Police are following all leads". For the Guardian and Independent, this was the "curious incident of the dog..." The Telegraph - Fleet Street's supposed expert on "country" matters - asks "Is a mystery poisoner hounding Crufts?" 
The lame pun is misjudged, but then The Times's "Crufts contender poisoned by jealous rivals, owner claims" is so straight that it sounds almost ridiculous. The Mail, always seeking a different angle, suggests that the wrong dog had been poisoned: Jagger's half-brother Pot Noodle is the more successful and the two had switched places on the competitors' benches. 
Wrong dog?  Oh dear, here we are back in the land of mid-evening ITV3 detective shows and their red herrings. The Sun also picked up on this in its inside coverage - under the heading "Murder in the first pedigree". It doesn't matter which dog was the target; what makes this news is the possibility that any dog was deliberately and fatally poisoned at Crufts. 
The owners and breeders haven't helped with their scattergun theories:


"It could have been Jagger was targeted by mistake. Pot Noodle had been achieving more glory and the two look very much alike."
"It could be someone with a vengeance trying to stop our success."
"I don't believe it had anything to do with other competitors."
"Strange things have been happening. At Richmond dog show somebody let Pot Noodle out of his cage and he went missing for an hour."
"There would only have been a tiny window of opportunity. That's when you rely on other competitors to look out for your dog."
"Whoever did this knew what they were doing, trying to get the right poison with a slow release."
"He has clearly been poisoned on purpose. Jagger loved people and he loved food. He would have trusted whoever gave it to him."
"The vet said there were two or three types of poison in his stomach. I think she identified one as a slug killer. I would guess the others would turn out to be a rat poison or industrial poison."
"We think this is the work of some random psychopathic dog hater who decided to visit Crufts with one thing in mind, rather than any sort of targeted attack."
"He could have been targeted for being a foreign dog. There's a lot of ill-feeling from some camps towards them."
"I don't want to believe a fellow competitor would do this. I think Jagger was the wrong dog in the wrong place and I'm hoping it was just some maniac who wanted to poison a dog."
"To think he may have been targeted by a rival at a dog show makes it even harder to take."
"It has been suggested that someone's really got it in for us. We're very proud of our record and maybe some people aren't happy."

Right, a random maniac or a jealous rival. A complete stranger or someone the dog would trust. All very emotional. All very Midsomer. Barnaby will have his work cut out here. 
He could, of course, look to Crufts for assistance. The show organisers have so far said only that they are sorry about the death - and emphasised that the dog died not at the NEC in Birmingham, but at home in Belgium the next day.
One report this morning says that the competitors' benches are open to the public - obvious when you think about it, given the number of pictures of peek-a-boo pooches we see in Crufts week. Perhaps someone might ask the Kennel Club about its security arrangements.
Jagger was reportedly worth £50,000. Breeding and showing is big business, a dog-eats-dog world. I have a niggling feeling about this story and some of the things that have been said. 
And I bet those sheepdogs have nothing to do with it.

Tuesday update: More controversy, this time over the owner of the supreme champion. She lifted it by its tail and neck. The Kennel Club says she's been warned about it before. She says "I didn't mean to. It's a habit." In other words "I do it all the time, but didn't mean to do it when anyone was looking." 
You do wonder about people sometimes.
Now at least two online petitions are demanding that she be stripped of the title; they have already attracted 135,000 signatures.
The Kennel Club says the owner is very caring and that it wouldn't be fair to the dog to take away its title because of something the owner did.
As to Jagger and other suspected poisonings - including a claim that another dog died after competing at the show - the club has posted this statement on its Facebook page:

Odd, isn't it, how television is becoming ever more important to newspapers, just as the internet is diminishing its influence in the real world?
We get our news from the web and social media;  we watch what we want, when we want, with or without ads, thanks to streaming, satellite, cable and clever recording machines.
Some programmes - Coronation Street is certainly one - remain a feature of millions of people's lives. So it's understandable that  tabloids use the shorthand "Corrie Kev, Corrie Ken, Corrie Rita" when writing about events in real life, even though most fans are likely as familiar with the actors' names as with the characters they play.  
It's partly about quick identification and partly about the count, which is why we get "Corrie Kym" (actress), rather than "Corrie Michelle" (character) and why Michael Le Vell was "Le Vell" in a Mirror heading one day last year and "Corrie Kev" the next.*
This habit of regarding real and fictional names as interchangeable does, however, grate when the story is about a court case or even an actor's death. 
Take a look at the first two splash headings below.  Are they appropriate?

The Sun's too-clever take on the death of Roger Lloyd Pack was so awful and so contrived that it even had to explain the joke. The self-referencing on the death of Anne Kirkbride was perhaps more forgiveable - and it is worth noting that almost everyone else used her real name - but the Sun got in a real muddle the next day with the real Bill and Bev in a bedside vigil for "Deirdre".

Tabloids, soaps: does it matter? Not really, though you have to feel sorry for Michelle Dockery, who must wonder if she will ever be free of Lady bloody Mary. No matter what she does in real life, her alter ego is there with her. Sometimes that woman played by Maggie Smith turns up, too, to wag a finger.
The Mail is besotted with her. When she's not on the front, she's in the feature pages:  "We've lost the art of chivalry, says Downton's Lady Mary"; 
"Donwnton's Lady Mary: corsets stop you slacking"
Downton, like Coronation Street, enjoys an audience of some seven or eight million, so let's cut the subs some slack there. 

But look at those two fronts from today at the top of this post. The Sun thinks that the fact Ant and Dec can't imagine Ed Miliband as Prime Minister is significant. It not only splashes on the remark, but also runs a leader to explain itself. This is the dilemma facing Labour voters, it says. There may be the germ of a valid point lurking somewhere, but the political opinions of a couple of cheeky chappie television presenters do not represent an "election bombshell". 
The Telegraph meanwhile has a photograph of the actor Mark Rylance at a film premiere under the headline "What's Thomas Cromwell plotting now?" Very little, I should imagine, since Cromwell was beheaded 475 years ago. 
There comes a point when it's time to grow up and rejoin the real world.

* From glam to glum: By the way, it's interesting to see how the Mirror's approach to this story developed between Barbara Knox's arrest in April last year and sentence after a belated guilty plea last month.

An odd looking pair of Guardian front pages this week to indicate that it has something different and special to offer.
They may not be the most appealing pages, but what a story! The HSBC tax avoidance regime, complete with a boss ennobled by David Cameron provides a delicious combination of nasty bankers and nasty politicians. What's not to like?
The source, perhaps?  As SubScribe has noted before, the rest of the Fleet Street gang don't care much for the Guardian. There is a residual resentment over the hacking fallout, there is disapproval of its links with Assange and Snowden. But rivalry and rancour shouldn't stop serious papers following up proper important stories. And HSBC counts as a proper important story.
Testament to this is the fact that the Mail has its follow-up on the top half of page one today, albeit celebrity-focused. 
Strangely, it makes no other front, but The Times, which has its own tax avoidance agenda, gives it a full page inside and the Independent has a spread on 8-9.
The Guardian has to date run two fronts and six inside pages, so there is no shortage of material.
When the Telegraph was running its MPs' expenses series, every other paper was watching the clock until its latest material went live at 10pm to make sure that the best bits made the main runs. There was limited time for checking; the Telegraph had the documentation and so it was fully credited everywhere.
HSBC may not be as exciting as the expenses saga, but it's a bloody good tale that needs to be brought to people's attention. Well, I think so anyway. But what do I know? The Telegraph thinks differently.
Readers so gripped by the Bath road crash that they turn to page two for more may inadvertently reach this item at the foot of the page:

That's it. The entire coverage. Seven pars at the bottom of page two. 
Wonderful.