It's Sunday. Time for a relaxed morning coffee, a bit of toast, bacon. Actually being unemployed that's pretty much every day for me right now, but Sunday is special in featuring just about the only real newspaper war worth watching in New Zealand: The Sunday Star Times versus the Herald on Sunday.

HoS editor Shayne Currie is a former Star Times man, which adds nice frisson to the clash.

Having just finished Piers Morgan's terrific memoir The Insider, I can't help casting this face-off in that light, especially today in the different blow-by-blow treatments the papers give the Lee Tamahori (pictured) story.

The HoS goes large with it (not online, oddly), speaking to just about anyone who ever met the guy, while the SST makes it Page 3 lead with a puff on the front. Page 3 is generally considered the second most important in any paper, so that's still pretty prominent. However, neither paper manages to speak to Tamahori himself, so the big question now is who will land the exclusive, the HoS, SST or someone else?

The SST leads instead with a real broadsheet story about botched births and the supervision of midwives and a second lead about the Mohammed cartoons. But perhaps most tantalising of all is the prospect of Rodney Hide, taking time out from floating Brash coup rumours, to make an appearance on Dancing with the Stars. We can't wait. The HoS save serious for its second lead, a good story about more 111 system failures.

I understand Fairfax NZ management were pretty sure they had seen the HoS threat off. They haven't, and that could be a serious mistake. As an old boss of mine once said: "What do you do when your competition is drowning? ... Shove a hose down their throat."