This has no connection with words, except peripherally.

London has two* free (that is, supported by advertising) evening newspapers, thelondonpaper [sic] and London Lite [sic again]. They are engaged in a circulation war, and when I'm walking towards the station on my way home from work I can't walk twenty yards without being accosted by someone attempting to thrust a copy of their rag into my hands. Usually the street distributors vie with each other to get in my way, but yesterday I saw an unusual sight.

A girl and young man were standing side by side, the girl supposedly pushing one title, the boy its opponent. They were making no effort to impede passers-by, but were instead staring deeply into each other's eyes. A romance in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, forsooth!

* Apparently the war won't go on much longer; I've heard that thelondonpaper will cease publishing in the next month or so.

Surely you must get The Metro as well, that's a free (same deal) national paper, with the advertising pages tailored to local requirements.

quote:

Surely you must get The Metro as well, that's a free (same deal) national paper, with the advertising pages tailored to local requirements.

The Metro is a morning paper; London Lite and The London Paper are both evening publications.

So they are. My mistake.

We have several such rags, one of which actually qualifies as a newspaper.

And one that considers itself a news network.

As newspapers are losing ground in the U.S., I've begun to realize how valuable investigative reporting (when done well) is to the public, particularly in my field.

rags

Some of our local freebie, independent weeklies do some actual journalistic reporting. Quite different from the paid-for dailies which compete with the telly edutainment news programs in reporting cats stuck in trees and fad diets. Also, have newspapers started to shrink size-wise in other parts of the world? I swear I buy one so infrequently but I had started to notice that it seems to be shrinking to the size of a bluebook.