Tiger Tiger Sex Attack

This could be a best-selling headline, according to Croydon Advertiser editor Ian Carter who has been pissing off his local council by reporting Croydon’s dark and seedy underbelly, and doing well at the newsagents as a result. In fact, if you have a look through his blog, it seems he’s pretty fearless when it comes to outing advertisers’ problems, which is more than can be said for Ireland’s Sunday Tribune.

The gorier the splash story, the better the sales, so he’s banking on the returns from last week’s ‘Tiger Tiger Sex Attack’ story (of a sexual assault by a toilet attendant) being pretty damn good.

And it’s not a lone stand-out headline – for a local paper the Advertiser gets some astonishingly readable stories. Amid the predictable community fare like ‘Honour for tragic tram enthusiast’ (London’s Light Rail ‘Oscars’) and ‘Pupils prove their skipping class’ (story about a skipathon), there are some cracking tales.

‘Crazed jogger ran amok’ is one, or how about the story of a complete reversal of the Bumfights
craze where a homeless man took revenge on two Croydon teenagers on behalf of all homeless people, videoing them fighting using a mobile phone. ‘Sobbing boys forced to fight on film’ reads the headline.

‘Woman hit by train while being sick‘ is another eye-catching tale of woe, and my personal parochial favourite: ‘Lazy Postman Fined’

None of which would make you want to live in Croydon, but it’s proof that A) local news is good news and B) Tiger Tiger Sex sells.

Via: Fleet Street 2.0