Sunday 15 November 2015

Chilling front pages cover the Paris massacre


It was a sombre night in the newsrooms across the world. Here's a glance at what the mornings newspapers look like.
The Independent on Sunday adopts a simple under-stated design and asks the key question 'what happens next?'. 


I wonder, though, if it was tempted to lead with Peter Shrank's powerful and poignant cartoon.


The People goes for a compelling image - a single rose in a bullet hole with a card asking Au nom de quoi, in whose name?


The French paper Liberation printed a special edition which also goes for an understated, yet powerful floral tribute image.   
The Sunday Herald in Scotland uses the most graphic of images. It carries a justification underneath the picture that reads 'this is a disturbing image but we feel it must be shown to reflect the reality of terrorism'. Editor Neil Mackay also took to Twitter to reiterate the point. 'We thought long and hard about using this disturbing image. But it must be seen. This is the reality of terrorism.'


The American newspapers, including the New York Daily News, also used the image.


The Mail on Sunday also uses a harrowing picture from the scene - people hanging from the ledges outside the Bataclan to escape the killers. It also shows a picture of the covered body of one of the terrorists. I might have been tempted to dispense with the André Rieu CD blurb.


The same image is used by The Sunday Telegraph.



The Sunday Mirror and The Sunday Times choose to go with pictures of the victims - images that bring home the real human cost of the story. The Mirror's main picture is of Briton Nick Alexander who died in the concert hall.


The Mail on Sunday also has stories of some of the young people who were murdered.


The Sunday Post in Scotland tells the story of two Scottish women who hid in the cellar at the Bataclan while the killers slaughtered dozens of people only a few feet away.


Scotland on Sunday uses an image of shocked survivors in the aftermath of the shooting and headlines on the fact they were an act of war.




Sister papers the Sunday Express and Daily Star Sunday also use grieving pictures and bring the story closer to home with a report the SAS is on the streets, ringfencing UK terrorist targets. 



The Observer has a picture of a soldier guarding the Eiffel Tower and some detailed witness accounts.




Wales on Sunday changes its titlepiece colours to those of the French tricolour.



Here's a selection of Australian papers. In Sydney there were tears, French flags and a rendition of the Marseillaise and the Opera house was lit up in the colours of the tricolour. 


The German paper Bild simply goes with the word Krieg - War.


Zaman, a Turkish daily, uses the headline We condemn terror and set it in Turkish, French, English, Spanish, German, Russian and Arabic.





What happened on Friday was one of those rare stories that also leads off the sports pages. Here is a selection from the Mail on Sunday, the Independent on Sunday and The Sunday Telegraph.

There is a different perspective in some of the Arabic newspapers. This one from Iran has a chilling image of the ISIS flag at the top of the Eiffel Tower and a progression of events climbing the tower, starting with genocide in Syria and Iraq, moving on to the Russian airline crash, last week's bomb attacks in Beruit and finishing with Friday's events.


Thanks as always to  and @suttonnick.

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