Best. Tabloid. Front. Ever.

Just out of curiosity, why? Regular readers know that on non-local stories, neither paper's heds are usually indicative of what their respective stories (rewritten from the wires) will deliver. I don't believe it has significant effect on buying choices unless you are a tourist. If I've been burned before and I've already seen today's attempt at humor on the newsstand, why would I need to pay to see what's inside? I know from seeing the cover that the newspaper has, well, already shot its wad. I think they are playing to their established niche, not taking readers away from anyone else when they do this stuff.

 

You've got to love terrorists. They don't believe the porn story. Why? Because bin Laden was a sacred warrior. No problem with him killing thousands, but apparently they would draw the line with some skin mags?

 

As I said on the thread in Sports and News, I would have given anything to be in on the meeting with the editors on this one. So many things make this an epic cover.

 

I disagree completely. With exceptions like this, the cover is rarely the best thing in the paper. It's the little one-column heds that I wonder how they come up with anything that blow my mind. It's the spreads. It's the big sports stories. There's nothing about the Post that has "shot its wad."

 

Being able to do "Bx," "Bklyn," "Qns" and "Slay" greatly helps.

 

Oh, undoubtedly. But it still cracks me up to see it sometimes.

 

I'm not sure about that. The beauty of the headline is that "Osama bin (fill in the blank)" has been low-hanging fruit for headline writers ever since he got capped.

But the Post held back and waited for the just the right moment and, voila!, we have hilarity.

 

Like this.

 

That's nice that you like the Post and find it worth reading. However, my point is that a person who buys it because of the front-page hed -- as the post by Versatile suggests -- is likely to be disappointed, especially when the story is just a rewrite of the wires to suit the Post's agenda or pre-written hed. Sometimes the Post's hed even will say the complete opposite of what the Post's story says. In this case, by the time the paper went to press, half the people in NYC already knew there was no proof bin Laden was the porn user because even the two news radio stations managed to work that fact into their 20-second sound bites. So when you saw the Post's hed on the newsstand, you would conclude either A.) The Post has some info that no one else has and buy the paper or B.) The Post again is full of it and not buy the paper if you usually don't. "B" is almost always the correct assumption.

It's extremely unlikely that no one at the Daily News thought of some variation on an Osama-jacking-off hed, at least in jest. No doubt headline writers even in flyover farm country did so for their own amusement. So the people at the Post work at the one daily "newspaper" in America that would actually publish one. Sorry, I see no particular greatness in that.

 

Frank, I think you're really overestimating the intellect of the low-brow folks targeted in the tabloid wars. Or even just human life.