I’M SHINING LIKE A NEW DIME
I dislike free newspapers because they make punters think it’s OK to be thick, indulge in insidious forms of marketing, encourage sloppy journalism and waste scarce natural resources. I don’t hate people who are not clever enough to read broadsheets, but I do dislike people – and also journalists – who are so lazy and cynical that they stand by clapping as the human race heads rapidly down the pan.
On the train home, I noticed a couple sitting opposite one another. They were each reading their own copy of thelondonpaper. Touchingly, they regularly interrupted their read to draw the other’s attention to a particularly funny or interesting photograph or fictionoid.
The fucking morons. The “newspaper” is only about twenty-four pages long, consists almost exclusively of a series of adverts masquerading as news and is written in large type. Why would you get one each, when each of you can read it in seven minutes? How low must your opinion be of your partner if you assume that they have missed something (for example, a gigantic quarter-page photograph of Sophie Anderton looking vacant) within a newspaper which is barely two hundred words long from cover to cover?