Subs are the forgotten tribe of the newsroom, unloved, blamed for writing in mistakes, blamed for failing to spot mistakes, blamed for rewriting rubbish copy, blamed for not rewriting rubbish copy. 
They toil in the ungodly hours of the night and morning. Where once their sole concern was the words, now they are checkers, typesetters, coders and who knows what else.
They work more Sundays and bank holidays than they have off, while reporters and desk staff expect to turn in for no more than one in three or four.
And they don't get expenses.
Maybe, then, there was a dash of shädenfreude at work last night as they prepared the bank holiday paper. For they served up a crop of punning headlines that hadn't been seen a thousand times before.
I'm not saying they were all box fresh, but they were nowhere near as tired as some of the headlines produced in the mad heat of the modern newsroom.
The Express came in with "dank holiday", the Star "bank brollyday" and the Mail "the sopping hill carnival".
I'm not saying these are examples of genius, but they do show a level of enthusiasm beyond the old "bank holiday washout".

No plaudits, however, for the Mail with its puff and feature head: "Dearest Dickie, so fizzing with passion he even called Mrs T darling!" No. If he did call Thatcher darling it's because he called everyone darling. It was a verbal tick, as meaningful as "like" as in "I was, like, standing at the bar and, like, this bloke came up to me and he said, like..." In other words, it was the very reverse of passion. Apart from that, it was a good read.

Talking of dear Dickie, the Times gave him two full pages of obituary. The Register, however always starts on a right-hander, so it was split into two single pages. Couldn't that travel ad have been pushed back for once, so that Lord A could be afforded a spread that would have looked so much better?

Jonathan Krohn is by any measure an exceptional young man. He published his first political book at the age of 13 and followed it up with a second a year later. In between he made a William Hague-like appearance in front of an American conservatives conference. Now, at the great age of 19, he is reporting from Iraq for the Telegraph and the Economist.

The top of today's Telegraph proclaims in red and black:
Iraq's mountain of death Telegraph reporter is first to witness devastation of trapped families
With such a coup, you might have expected the paper to splash on the report. It is a compelling, but calmly written first-hand account from the top of Mt Sinjar that mostly eschews the first person. There is more than enough meat in the copy to justify the top slot, which is instead given to the Revenue's latest move against wealthy tax avoiders.

The report continues with a number of quotes from people on the mountain and voices of authority. He concludes with the words of an MP who says: "We have one or two days left to help these people, after that they will start dying en masse."

The Guardian also has a first-person account from Iraq. Martin Chulov reports from Duhok that half the people who had been stranded on the mountain had reached safety via Syria. Unfortunately, the paper doesn't tell us where Duhok is in relation to the mountain or even give it a dot on the map on its inside spread. But again, it is a compelling read, calmly told.

The Mail, in common with the Independent, i and Sun, carries a piece on its front about the alleged burial alive of 500 Yazidis and the abduction of 300 women. The paper devotes four inside pages to Iraq, including a first-person piece on page 7.

Hang on, didn't the Telegraph have the first Western journalist on the mountain?
Ah, it's the same reporter. Maybe it's a syndicated piece. But the style here is quite different from that in the Telegraph:

There is a lot more "me" journalism here; perhaps the Mail wanted something a bit more boastful. But looking closely, it becomes apparent that this is a completely different account. This writer must be really special to produce two separate reports for two British newspapers on the same day - and  with numerous people quoted in each.

A quick google reveals Krohn's youthfulness and precocious background - and a link to a Sunday Telegraph article starting "Mount Sinjar stinks of death..."
Sure enough, it is the selfsame piece published in the Mail today.

The strange thing is that it wasn't printed in the Sunday Telegraph. A few paragraphs have been  woven into a wrap splash for which Krohn is given top billing in a joint byline, but much of the best material, including the comments of the people he met on the mountain, is missing. 
Nevertheless, he was pleased enough  to tweet:

Inside the Sunday Telegraph is a spread that includes the splash turn, a graphic, a commentary from Lord Dannatt, and a good colour piece from Richard Spencer on ageing Peshmergas hoping to protect Erbil from IS forces.
But wouldn't you want also to make more of the one available eye-witness account from the mountain where we had been given to understand tens of thousands faced dying of thirst?

Even today, there is no link to that original despatch from Krohn's later account or from any other report of the day's events. Is this deliberate, and if so why?

And as to the Mail, what was the deal that led it to print the whole of Krohn's first effort, but without the front-page "first man up the mountain" fanfare we have come to expect from the paper?
It may not matter much in the grand scheme of things, but it's all very peculiar.

In the meantime, here's a taste of the 13-year-old Krohn in action: 

Did you turn out the lights between 10 and 11 last night? Did you leave a single lamp burning? If so, was this a deliberate act of remembrance or the usual bedtime routine?
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. Today is the 30th anniversary of Richard Burton's death (the actor, not the explorer). Tomorrow is the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Savoy. 

Anniversary mania is a condition that had historically been controlled by keeping the features department in quarantine. But then along came open-plan offices and dodgy air conditioning units and before you knew it, the disease had become endemic in newspaper offices and quickly spread to all areas of public life.
Every decade after every slightly significant advance had to be marked with a book, an interview, a film, a television special (backed up with another book).

The American bicentennial in 1976 was a biggie. So was the Queen's silver jubilee the following year.
You'd expect the golden and diamond celebrations to be clearer in the mind - what with being more recent - but they are much fuzzier. Mugs and sovereigns for the kids, Brian May at the top of Buck House, Brian Wilson control-freaking it over the party at the palace crowd for the gold; a sodden river pageant and its dire television coverage, Gary Barlow, the Madness Our House light show and the Duke in hospital for the diamond.
You can have too many parties and pick up too many stray balloons and damp flags to maintain enthusiasm for another shindig round the corner.

What do you remember about 2005 and the bicentenary of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar? Do you know or care what has been planned for next year to mark the 200th anniversary of Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo? Or  if anything is in the pipeline for October next year to mark the 600th anniversary of our archers' success against the odds at Agincourt ? (One imagines that people were too busy worrying about the Western Front to have concerned themselves with jollities for the 500th.)

Yesterday the country was apparently united in remembrance of the boys sent to their deaths in the high summer of 1914. Boys sacrificed because the whole of Europe had taken up such intransigent positions and mobilised forces to such an extent that the Queen's grandfather and his two cousins had little choice but to wage war with each other, once Gavrilo Princip  obligingly fired the starting gun.

A hundred years on, against the distant clamour of neighbour fighting neighbour and brother fighting brother in Israel, Syria and Ukraine, we heard the sirens of platitude from European leaders, a solemn celebration of peace and lessons learnt.

The Press, too, dutifully fell into line;  backbenches vying to produce the starkest front page, the most evocative headline. 
"The world remembers" proclaimed the Times wraparound - untruthfully, for this was essentially a European weep-in. There were pictures from London, Belfast, Balmoral, Liege, Mons - and  Afghanistan, because we still have troops there.
And against what background was this sombre sentiment set? A picture of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who could  as well have been heading across the grass to a country church wedding as to a  memorial service. 
The tell-tale gravestones were safely at the back of the wrap; the far more evocative picture - Paul Kingston's photograph of a Second World War veteran saluting a statue of a First World War tommy -  kept inside.

The Sun had Prince Harry looking noble above the heading "Harry's hero", and the Mail almost hit the jackpot with Kate and Harry - if only the Archbishop of Canterbury hadn't been in the foreground. 
It wasn't only the royals on  front-page duty: the unknown soldier was pressed into service again, with a lone candle on the tomb at Westminster Abbey, while young men dressed in early 20th century uniforms and a shower of poppies provided the Express and Star with their cover pictures.

There is, of course, no one left who served in the war, no one left who remembers the individuals who died. But we can create the illusion with photographs of old soldiers from other conflicts. Royalty with heads bowed, old men with campaign medals pinned to misshapen blazers, Chelsea pensioners, and Beefeaters among the Tower of London poppies are all brought into play.
[Paul Cummins's installation which will eventually have more than 888,000 ceramic poppies is, incidentally, the most imaginative, moving and spectacular memorial of all. SubScribe has been surprised by the limited space devoted to it in the papers so far, but Wills, Kate and Harry went to see it today, so it will no doubt figure prominently tomorrow.]

Those boys of a hundred years ago who thought they were fighting for King and country, for a great cause, did they want to be remembered like this - as characters in a giant act of enforced national breast-beating; their personal letters to their mums read out to the world?
If they believed they were engaged in the war to end all wars, what would they think of the symbolism of a prince wearing medals celebrating his grandma's longevity on the throne  carrying a lamp around a Belgian field while hundreds of his contemporaries adjust to life without the arms and legs blown off by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan?
What would they think if they knew that far from "learning the lessons" of the Great War,  their country would go on to send nearly half a million more young men and women to die in a score of conflicts all over the world; that not a year would go by in the following century without British troops being involved in combat somewhere?

Of course we should honour the fallen. Of course we should remember and acknowledge the day that set the world on such a bloody path. But these events don't feel real, they don't seem heartfelt and instinctive. This is orchestrated homage and we are in danger of wallowing in this sea of reverence as we did in that ocean of sentimentality after the death of Diana. 

That initial spontaneous show of respect by the people of (now Royal) Wootton Bassett was the real deal, but it turned into a ritual and then a tourist attraction, until the town was finally swamped.
We appear to have an unerring ability to take a pure moment and reduce it to a source of entertainment, an occasion to publish a souvenir supplement, to snipe at a politician over the wording on his wreath or to assess the fashion sense of the lesser royals.

There will be many sad centenaries over the next four years - of  the Easter Rising and the Russian revolution as well as the Great War. We shall also see the 70th anniversaries of VE Day, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of VJ day, the 60th anniversary of Suez, the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.

Would it not be good if these could be marked with restraint and respect, rather than as an opportunity to sell a book, plug a television series or give away a free bone china thimble (plus p&p, collect the whole set for £25).

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.

Here then, is Paul Harris's take on what was behind the Murray meltdown (another one for the underscore collection)...
Kim had she dumped him, announced she was pregnant or let slip the end of a television series?
Amelie seen sprinting up to the players' box - a last-minute change of tactics?
Judy arrived late, having been watching her other son Jamie on an outside court - sibling rivalry?
So much for the women. Harris moves on to other possibilities: could his dog be ill? Was Murray eating too many bananas? Or maybe he just had an off day.

So in spite of the caps in the puff and the underscore in the heading, we still don't know what WAS  behind the Murray meltdown. 
But, thanks to the Times website yesterday afternoon, we do know what was behind the "five ******* minutes before the match". It was the amount of notice the players were given before they were called on court.

It's easy to lump the Mail and Express together. They share many of the same values, they have a similar basic design, they both position themselves in the middle market and are deemed to be a notch above the redtops.
But days like today show that for all their similarities they are worlds apart. Whatever you think of the Mail's journalism, it is supremely professionally executed. The fundamental awareness of what is important is ingrained.
Our whole legal system is built upon the principle that justice must not only be done but that it must be seen to be done. Secret courts are the tools of despots and dictators.
Even the surreal events in the Cairo courtroom where three Al-Jazeera journalists and their colleagues are appearing today are open to public scrutiny. The prosecution and the proceedings may seem farcical, but we can see what's happening. Journalists are taking photographs, filming videos and tweeting constantly. They even talk to the defendants during recesses.
Here in Britain, two people accused of serious terrorist offences will go on trial the week after next. The case will be heard by a jury, but no reporters or members of the public will be allowed into the hearings. Nor will they be able to report the outcome. 
Indeed, until yesterday the media were forbidden even to report the hearing of their appeal against the secrecy order. Without the lifting of that gagging order, we would not know that the trial was to take place at all.

This is all pretty heavy stuff. There are issues of national security and issues of natural justice at the heart of this case. It is unsurprisingly the splash in the Guardian and, as we see above, in the Mail. It is also on the front of the Telegraph, the page 2 lead in the Times and it gets a decent show in the Mirror and Sun.
For the Express, the latest advice on avoiding dementia is more important, coupled with a photograph of the Queen (fair enough) and a headline about "hard-working Britons" that sounds like a party political broadcast (not fair enough).
The secret trial makes 150 words on page 2, with a crosshead that says "significant" - which SubScribe would love to think was put in by
a sub as a rebuke to those who gave it so little space.
The Independent also seems to have tripped up in its news judgment today: the story appears on page 20, the last home news page. The poisoned babies don't fare much better - they are on 19.
This ruling really matters and it should have been given prominence everywhere. The argument here is not the media's right to report the proceedings, it is the public's right  - duty, even - to witness.
It is perfectly possible to impose restrictions on which elements of the trial are reported. For all that the Press is branded irresponsible, uncontrolled, intrusive and accused of general scumbaggery, it obeys court orders. 
If national security requires that only the verdict and any sentence are reported at the end, then so be it. If editors and those attending have to sign confidentiality contracts, then so be it.
There are mechanisms that can be employed. But conducting entire trials in camera is not democratic and every newspaper should be shouting it from the rooftops.

Who puts a world exclusive on page 8? A genuine world exclusive of historical significance? 
The Independent.
The paper reports today that archaeologists are fairly confident that they have discovered the last resting place of Christopher Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria.
To call it a wreck might be overstating the find, since the ship was stripped of its timbers on Columbus's orders to build the fort La Navidad in Haiti. There can hardly be a restoration like the Mary Rose project, but interest in what's left of this little vessel should be enormous.
The timing of the find is unfortunate for the Indy, which has produced probably the best front page of the day in going all-out on the footage of the Nigerian schoolgirls being held captive. But it might have made more of a fuss in the puff.

Earlier this month Felix Salmon told the International Journalism Festival in Italy that scoops didn't matter to anyone, apart from other journalists;  readers didn't care who broke the news.
SubScribe begs to differ. And this is a case in point. We're not talking here about the nonsense "exclusives" about celebrities that appear in three papers simultaneously, but about real stories that matter. 
Who broke the MPs' expenses story, the phone hacking story, the tax evasion story?  Everyone knows the answer because when you break an important story you have ownership of it. Of course everyone else will follow (well...eventually, in the case of phone hacking), so yes you can read a version anywhere. But readers knew where these stories originated and that is where they looked  for more on the subject.
If your story sets the agenda for the Today programme, leads the ten o'clock news or catches the eye on Newsnight or Sky, it should bring you readers. Then it's up to you to convince them to stay tomorrow and the next day...

So how wise was the Independent today to bury its scoop? The paper is now selling barely 63,000 copies a day (47,000 full-price sales). That's way fewer than the Wolverhampton Express & Star. Yet it's a lovely little package, intelligently news edited and well designed, even if pressures on the production side show. If it can't lure people in with stories they won't find elsewhere and convince them to stay it has no hope.
For a start it's too expensive, at £1.40, especially when readers believe they can buy the i for 30p and get the same thing.

Except the i isn't the same thing. It is also a lovely little paper, bouncier and more streetwise than its big sister, but its buoyant circulation - which is 30% higher than the Guardian's - is down to one factor: price. 
The i also carried the Santa Maria story - on its last news spread entitled "Panorama, around the world in ten stories". There was no mention of it on the front, nothing to say "look here, this is special". Nothing is special in the i. It describes itself as the "essential daily briefing" and that's what it is. Concise, easy to read, but with a level of intelligence inherited from the brainier sister.

It may be a more successful product, but what if the  Independent weren't there? Would  Steve Richards, Grace Dent, Robert Fisk or Yasmin Alibhai-Brown - stick around?  Would David Keys, author of today's exclusive, or Steve Connor, who wrote yesterday's exclusive splash about soap-dodging being an aid to fertility, still be there? Owen Jones has already jumped ship, the others would likely follow, and the i would be left without the brains that set it apart from the other tabs.

So to return to Christopher Columbus, whose statue is above.  If the story was ready to go yesterday, it should have been used. If it came in yesterday and was guaranteed not to get out in any other medium, then it should have been held. If it absolutely had to run today, the Indie should at least have produced a better puff.
A few bits of a very old ship aren't going to set the news agenda for weeks to come. But, whatever Felix Salmon thinks, it does matter that readers as well as journalists know that the Independent broke the story, that scientists of repute go to the paper in preference to the Telegraph., Times or Guardian.

In that, the paper has a friend in the Daily Mail. SubScribe looked this morning to see which other papers' online teams had followed up the story. By 10.30 only one had posted it: the Mail.
It's a pretty scruffy rendition, with an ungrammatical headline, errors in text and a chunk of Wikipedia, all of which were noted  in the comment stream. 
But it still told the story, acknowledging the Independent in the sixth par and there were a couple of panels and a map on the discovery of the new world.
At the end there was a hyperlink tagline that looked like this:
Read more:
Exclusive:  Found after 500 years, the wreck of Christopher Columbus's flagship the Santa Maria.

It led to the original article from the Independent. Excellent.