London paperboys

So I used to be a paperboy. A pretty good one for that matter. I once won Paperboy of the Month which entitled me to throw the first pitch at a minor league baseball game. I was really skinny back then. You should see the pictures. I looked ridiculous.

As good as I was at the job, I never would've been as successful if The Goshen News had been a morning paper. And I'll never live up to the elite paperboy status of my dad, who won Paperboy of the Month for basically an entire year. His reward was a hatchet/knife combo set in a leather pouch, which he promised to give me when I turned 14. But then he never gave it to me. But that's cool because I knew where it was in the garage and I would take it and go into the backyard and hunt groundhogs while he was at work.

London has paperboys and papergirls delivering free papers every morning and afternoon. In the morning you can choose from the titles "Metro" and "City A.M." City A.M. is only distributed in the financial district, and is more business-y in focus. Metro is basically the morning equivalent of the two afternoon papers "The London Lite" and "The London Paper" -- tabloidish format, lots of celebrity and gossip and sport.

The afternoon papers are in some sort of huge competition for the market, with the prevailing thought being that only one can succeed. They both have the same articles and nearly identical pictures. They both excel in posting lots of misleading headlines and badly justapositioned pictures of celebrities next to them (last night there was an article "Police shoot dead woman" next to a picture of Mischa Barton).

(By the way the only celebrities of interest here are: Kate Moss, Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty, Mischa Barton, Elton John, Paris Hilton, and George Michael -- so basically Britons are only interested in famous trainwrecks.)

I was briefly in The London Paper's corner, until I found out that Rupert Murdoch was the money behind it. Now I tend to refuse any paper given to me except for City A.M., and instead pick up discarded copies for my celeb & sport fix.