The Great British Newspaper Experiment - Phase 2/Day 7

Ah, the lost page. I accidentally hit Save instead of Save As on my first revision of the Extra Edition, saving it over my work on this, which proved unrecoverable. As it took three hours of on and off work to write that, I've ended up giving up on trying to rewrite it. But rather than leave nothing at all here, I've decided an abridged version of what was most memorable would be better.

The copy I had cost £2 and was massive (I believe I gave a page count out of ~400 pages in an IRC channel at the time), meaning there's a hell of a lot more content than The Observer, but at the same price. This does make it tough to read through though.

I was expecting it to be quite similar to The Times in terms of content, and it was. The part of my review that still sticks out to me was an opinion piece railing against Labour's "weasel mindset", which actually got me on-side with the author, thinking that Labour had done some real damage to Britain. I contrasted this with another anti-Labour piece from the Daily Express, where I ended up defensive of Labour and dismissive of the author despite his aims clearly not being much different from the Sunday Times writer above. Such a thing is worthy of an autopsy.

The classic quote "Too many police chiefs see their constabularies as the shock troops of New Labour, promoting Marxist orthodoxies rather then fighting crime" sums up the whole thing really. Minette Marrin keeps her cool, never directly insults, and never gets hysterical. Lee McKinstry clearly gets too personal, loses his dignity, and ends up losing the argument through his own stupidity.

The rest of the paper has not stuck in my mind, but I generally liked it. I think someone with greater patience and intelligence than myself would like it more though, because there's far too much for me to effectively handle on a weekly basis here. I commented in the same IRC channel noted above my surprise that I was still alive after writing the original article.

Finally, back when I started this, my dad stated his thought that The Sunday Times was a rather 'London-centric' paper. I promised to take a look myself to see if it it was. Though my memories are slightly fuzzy, I cannot recall it being any more 'London-centric' than anything else I've read in my experiments.

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