Paper Monitor

12:09 UK time, Thursday, 28 January 2010

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

It is as predictable as getting a random Australian celebrity who, handily, lives in the UK to launch your cafe chain's take on an Antipodean coffee classic (despite his having no known previous attachment to flat whites, see mini-quiz - or caffeine).

Paper Monitor is talking about a) Stephen Fry in San Francisco as Apple's guest and b) the papers quoting him on how much he likes their new supersize iPhone (minus the phone). Well he would, wouldn't he?

Couldn't the iHype team have shown a bit more imagination and flown out, oh, Betty White from Golden Girls or, um, Today's Jim Naughtie whipped into an especially curmudgeonly mood for the occasion? If he'd liked it, Paper Monitor might have paid some attention.

So. Let's play... drum roll please... Fryspotting.

The Times slots in a mention of the excited ubiquitous one in the final paragraph of its review
The Dailies Telegraph and Express resist
So, surprisingly, does the Guardian, perhaps stung by jibes about its fondness for a bit of Fry in articles about gadgets/social networking - a pet hate of even one of its own columnists

(People in glass houses... Fry crops up in a bulletin from this parish too.)

So, a lot less Fry than initially expected. Glad one didn't place any bets, despite being tempted.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mirror's digital content director gets an extra-special mention for plugging the virtues of his own paper while writing in another

"There are certain parts of the UK where it's not best advised to prance about with 500 quids worth of shiny new tech. No one ever mugged anyone for a copy of the Mirror."

As does the Independent's Nicholas Lezard for explaining how his friends without mobile phones communicate:

"I was late for a rendezvous with one of them. He wrote 'in the pub' on the back of an envelope and pushed it through my letterbox. 'I got your text,' I said when I hooked up with him a bit later."

Paper Monitor is rather taken with this method of texting.