A film star shaking hands with a fugitive drugs baron or the blessed Kate venturing out into the January chill? There are few surprises in which paper opted for which this morning. The static picture of Sean Penn with El Chapo would never do for the Times, Telegraph or Express.
Joaquin Guzman, believed to be the world's most powerful drug trafficker, escaped from a maximum security prison last July through a hole in a shower tray that led to a mile-long tunnel. In October, Penn was taken to Guzman's hideout and interviewed him for Rolling Stone. The magazine published the resultant article on Saturday, hours after Guzman's recapture and return to jail. President Obama is not happy.
An interesting tale from all angles - and an interesting picture of its sort. But it's easy to see why only two papers put it on the front. The Princess is always a safe bet, then there is Cheryl and her estranged husband for the Mail, protesting doctors for the i. This is the way of things: it's a rare day that everyone picks the same picture.
So it is intriguing to speculate on what they might be thinking now about tomorrow's offerings. The heavies will surely go for big portraits, but in what guise? As Helen Green's gif, below, shows, there are many to choose from.
Will the Express forsake the weather, the Star its bikini girl, to make Bowie the main image or will he be relegated to the puff or a little single? Surely not.
Bowie's death has come as a jolt, rather as John Lennon's did. The news is hard to process. On Friday he released his latest album Black Star on his 69th birthday. Two days later he was dead. And we didn't even know he was ill.
All of which adds to the poignancy of his death, but will have no impact on the scale of tomorrow's coverage. The album release and New York show contribute a "news" line, but if there had been nothing new from him for five or even ten years, the reaction and response would have been the same.
Last week I was moaning about press coverage of the death of Pierre Boulez, particularly in comparison to that of Lemmy. A former colleague said: "Old man dies. x-ref obit. Nuff said. Anything else belongs on the arts pages - whether its Boulez or Lemmy. I hate the 'tributes poured in' style of news stories."
He won't be thinking that today. He will be marshalling Bowie copy with the proprietorial air of a man who knows his music and knows his news.
Of course it's obvious that Bowie's death is front-page news. But who else makes the cut? Only one celebrity made every front page last year: Cilla Black. The Mirror is most likely to use an obit at the heart of its front, doing so seven times last year, with the Guardian just behind on six; The Times and i are least likely with two each.
In total, 17 noted deaths (as opposed to murders or murderers) made the splash or main page 1 picture in at least one national. Here they are: Cilla Black: everyone
Terry Pratchett: Guardian, Independent, Mirror, i
Cynthia Lennon: Guardian, Mail, Express Anne Kirkbride: Sun, Star, Mirror
Jackie Collins: Mirror, Guardian Leonard Nimoy: Mirror, Telegraph Stuart Baggs: Sun, Star Lemmy: Mirror, Star
George Cole: Mirror Christopher Lee: Mirror Charles Kennedy: Mail Omar Sharif: Times Oliver Sachs: Independent Peter O'Sullevan: Telegraph Gunther Grass: Guardian Henning Mankell: Guardian
And those who believe that newspapers should focus on the living may be pleased to know that the Duchess of Cambridge was the subject of the main image on 52 front pages last year.
For the record:
Here are the front pages from Saturday and Sunday, complete with the triple "exclusives" on Cheryl's divorce.
How can it be that in all the saturation coverage of the migration from Syria, the debates about air strikes and the brutality of Isis, it has taken until now for the plight of the besieged people of Madaya to reach our consciousness?
The Times splash headline seems odd. "Outcry over..." You'd think the mere fact of thousands of people at risk of starving to death would be enough for a splash. But it is needed because that fact was in the paper yesterday - at the foot of the opening world spread.
It was in the Guardian, too. At the bottom of the second foreign spread. The Telegraph picked up on it today and put it on page 12.
This flurry coincides with extensive BBC television news coverage yesterday, including pictures of emaciated children and footage of a man making leaf soup, and a UN announcement that the Assad government was to allow aid through.
The difficulties of getting news from towns such as Madaya might explain our ignorance of this situation apart from one thing: Laura Pitel reported on it for the Independent a week ago. Her story led the paper's world section, accompanied by a photograph of children demonstrating outside the UN building in Beirut a few miles away. The splash that day was British troops facing abuse charges over the war in Iraq.
The UN has many failings and it may be that it hasn't made enough noise about the sieges of Syria (Madaya is not the only stricken town). Or maybe we, as Western journalists, haven't been listening. Maybe we think our readers won't care.
Because that is the big problem with news judgments these days: newspapers tend to give prominence only to stories they think readers care about.
When challenged about the disparity in coverage of terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, papers were quick to say "We covered Beirut, but people didn't care."
There is a lot of fantastic journalism on newspapers' inside pages, but foreign stories tend to break through to the front only on the tails of television coverage. Even the H-bomb tests in North Korea made page one of only the Guardian and Telegraph (where it got five pars) yesterday.
It's a tricky one. What's the point of printing stories no one will read, stories that might actually turn them away from your product? Newspapers are commercial enterprises, they have to sell to survive, and now that there are so many algorithms to tell editors exactly what people are reading on their tablets or mobiles, it is tempting to follow the Mail online model and feed the known appetites.
But isn't that like giving the kids fish fingers because you know they like them and never offering something more challenging, but ultimately more satisfying, such as liver or kippers?
So hurrah for the The Times for looking beyond the direct interests of its readers. People in Syria drinking leaf soup matter more than people in the Home Counties drinking a pint a day.
Postscript Good to see "proper" journalism, too, from the Independent and Mail, whatever your opinion of the politics behind their lead stories.
Was it right for Keogh's letter to the BMA about the junior doctors' strike to be passed up to Jeremy Hunt - who is, after all, his ultimate boss - for approval? Is it really a scandal? After all, he agreed with the changes made and the inserted paragraph was a restatement of something he had actually said. Should we be surprised that politicians try to manipulate situations? That's what they do.
It's an interesting topic, especially in the light of the furore over Laura Kuenssburg and the resignation of foreign affairs spokesman Stephen Doughty from the Shadow Cabinet.
The BBC political editor is being accused of manipulating/manufacturing the news, rather than reporting on it, because she apparently persuaded Doughty to announce his resignation in a live interview just before Prime Minister's Questions. Was this political bias, designed to help Cameron and embarrass Corbyn? Seems unlikely to me, given that the Beeb is supposed to be a hotbed of lefties.
If she had convinced a wavering shadow minister to resign when he wasn't going to, that would be another matter. But there is no suggestion that that is what happened.
I'd have thought that any broadcaster that got wind of such a resignation would have sought to capitalise by trying to get a scoop and then time its release for maximum impact. But critics say that because the BBC is publicly funded, it must be impartial (see above) and not chase ratings.
But if it doesn't compete with rivals to prove its coverage is best, then people will seek out other news sources. And then critics (not necessarily the same ones) will say "Why are we paying for this stuff no one watches?"
